Green Grows Up

Now that auto-body shops and zinc miners advertise themselves as “green,” let’s get serious. It’s time for Vancouver 2.0

By James Glave

Just under a year ago, the city woke to find Stanley Park torn up and thrown about like a freakish game of pick-up-sticks. Those who slept through what some greens dubbed the “Stanley Park Alarm Clock” received a follow-up memo a month later, when Mother Nature dragged a jagged fingernail across the crest of B.C. Place, turning it into a flaccid Teflon blob. It may have been a coincidence, but soon afterwards the lieutenant governor stood up in Victoria and pulled a policy 180. “The science is clear,” Iona Campagnolo said. “It leaves no room for procrastination. Global warming is real. What each of us does matters,” she added, speaking on behalf of Premier Gordon Campbell. “What everyone does matters.”

Campbell’s ambitious new targets—a 33 percent reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions by 2020—and “Let’s pull together” tone proved exactly the signal many of us were looking for. A year and a half ago, a McCallister Opinion Research poll found that Canadians were holding back from making greener choices because of a perceived lack of government leadership on the one hand, and a fear that they were acting alone on the other. The same poll today, taken in this neck of the woods, would probably produce a very different result. That’s because, explains Gordon Price, director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University, the “onus of proof” changed at some point in 2007. “Up until this year, those who were arguing that climate change was real and significant had to prove their case. Now the onus of proof is on the ‘deny and delay’ camp.”

More and more of us are turning awareness into action, on the ground and at the cash register—even if it just means spending an extra few bucks for that local Pinot Gris. “Our hearts are shifting,” says Mark Holland, partner with Holland Barrs Planning Group. “I’m just hoping the impulse can sustain itself long enough to allow the market to catch up.”

It’s a tall order. One problem is that local wine isn’t actually expensive; the imported stuff is artificially cheap, and the reason is simple: subsidized oil. According to a recent Pembina Institute study commissioned by Climate Action Network Canada, in 2002 Ottawa wrote oil and gas companies a cheque to the tune of $1.4 billion, mostly in the form of industry-specific tax breaks. Such hydrocarbon handouts essentially finance globalism; they invisibly skew the market to create a situation where it’s cheaper to bring in goods from overseas—at great cost to the atmosphere—than it is to make them at home. Indeed, cut-rate petroleum does more than just underwrite your basket of groceries. It has shaped the built form of this city, the region, the entire developed world. It created big-box stores, suburbs, and the taxpayer-financed road networks that support them both. That said, we may be gradually losing our appetite for asphalt. Vancouverites first said no to freeways more than three decades ago, and are very much the better for it. A new generation is gearing up for an epic battle to stop the Gateway Project—the brown lapel stain on our premier’s new green suit.

We have much to be proud of: our city leads North America in dense, walkable, mixed-use neighbourhoods. But the time has come to turn it up a notch. “We’re out of the era of baby steps and into the era of already feeling the consequences,” says Brent Toderian, the city’s director of planning and the face of Mayor Sam Sullivan’s EcoDensity program. “The speed of change now has to increase substantially.”

Green is growing up, in other words, but it needs to grow up faster. Ironic, then, that Toderian and Sullivan recently found themselves reluctantly stomping on the brakes in Southeast False Creek, where earlier this year residents—fearing a Sudbury-style smokestack—said no way to a biomass-based district heating plant. “We didn’t have the time to do the correct education process to get past the fear and rhetoric,” says Toderian. “This is one situation where we might have taken more time. And we didn’t have time.”

Toderian is alluding to the Olympics, but planners think in terms of decades, not years, and his telescope looks far beyond 2010, all the way out past the “petroleum peak.” Nobody really wants to hear it yet, but the fossil fuels we’ve built our world around are expected to grow scarce and unaffordable just as we begin to grapple seriously with their grim atmospheric legacy. The United States Department of Energy estimates we have about 40 years left in the oil game.

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