4 - Wednesday, February 14, 1990 -

North Shore News

Bos
HUNTER

© Eco-Logic ®

AT FIRST glance, I didn’t like the Fraser Institute’s new
book, Economics And The Environment: A Reconciliation.

This reaction was based partially
on editor Walter Block’s choice of
such dubious examples of *‘suc-
cessful’? market-oriented conserva-
tion projects as Ducks Unlimited,
a disastrous scam if there ever was
one.

Moreover, I detected an
ideological bias so strong that it
could not help leading to a bending
of data to fit the fundamental
dogma.

Over the years, as my own polit-
ical and philosophical prejudices
have been smoothed down by the
ceaseless working of the tides of
reality, I have grown increasingly
suspicious of doctrine — any doc-
trine: right, left or centre.

ee

Poltution was definitely
an establishment
prerogative, no one but
multinationals, government
and big corporations being
capable of producing
destructive large-scale
environmental side-effects.

For this reason mainly, the book
seems disappointingly predictable.
The disappointment was all the
greater because I certainly agree
that there has to be a reconciliation:
between economics and ecology,
both of which spring from the an-
cient Greek word meaning the
management of the home.

When you think about it, neither
economics nor ecology makes any
sense if the one does not take into
consideration the other.

Since that initial disappoint-
ment, however, I have gone back
to the book and have been forging
steadily along through it, pen in
hand to underline key points. And
it is meaty reading, indeed; it is not
the sort of book which one can
dismiss with a review and then
merely shelve.

First of all — with a velated bow
in the direction of Mr. Block,
while I pick off his lapels some of
the tomatoes { threw at him — I
think he has produced an impor-
tant work.

It was obvious (even to me),
long before the current epochal
events in the U.S.S.R. and the East

. Bloc began unfolding, that tradi-
tional left-wing centrist solutions
to the environmental crisis could
not possibly be the whole answer,
for the simple reason that the
problem itself is too multi-faceted
to be fixed by any one set of man-
agers.

What we know as environmen-
talism — and what most of our
ancestors understood, however
dimly, as simply not fouling one’s
own nest — has, until very recent-
ly, been broadly perceived as a
left-wing phenomenon. More than
anything, I think that’s just an ac-
cident of history.

When the word ecology surfaced
in the public consciousness during
the late "60s, the People who
grasped its meaning most readily
were those with an anti-establish-
ment (and therefore, in the context
of North America, at least, a

”

ieft-wing) attitude.

Pollution was definitely an
establishment prerogative, no one
but multinationals, government
and big corporations being capable
of producing destructive large-
scale environmental side-effects.

All those deadly chemicals are
costly to manufacture, after all,
and require the highest, most ex-
pensive technology. Ditto for
nukes. Ditto for deforestation.
Ditto for any kind of resource ex-
traction you can name.

Since then many of us have
gtadually come to the realization
that pollution begins at home, and
that, as novelist Margaret Atwood
puts it, al! those little personal
consumer choices we make add up
to life-or-death decisions for the
planet. The enemy is us, and
“they”? — the corporate executives
and government bureaucrats — are
merely the service sector so far as
our thoughtless appetites are con-
cerned.

I remember writing stuff 20
years ago, based on the material |
was reading then, that predicted
imminent eco-catastrophe. All
along, until the Gorbachev Era,
the biggest eco-catastrophe facing
us was nuclear war. It wasn’t until
last week, really, that I felt I could
let out my breath about that one.

But with the dismantling of the
Communist party’s grip on power
in Moscow, we are truly free, for
the first time since the late ’40s,
from the threat of atomic Ar-
mageddon.

If Margaret Thatcher’s adage
that modern democracies do not
go to war with one another holds
true — and so far it has — then
the chances are zero of a
pluralistic, multi-party Soviet
Union attacking a pluralistic,
multi-party NATO alliance, and
vice versa.

With the biggest potential eco-
disaster of them all! no longer
hanging over the event horizon, a
tremendous amount of energy can
now be aimed at the other looming
ecological crises.

And the good news about these
other problems is that, while some
of them, like the greenhouse effect

. and the destruction of the ozone

shield, could ultimately be nearly
or equally as disastrous as nuclear
war, they take a lot longer than a
few nano-seconds to unfold.

Which brings us back to The
Fraser Institute’s ‘‘reconciliation’’
book, the most critical chapters of
which attempt to tackle both the
greenhouse effect and the ozone
shield dilemmas from an an-
ti-interventionist, pro-market,
pro-private property point of view.

There is much in these chapters
that I have to agree with, such as
the declaration that governments
“tend to lurch from one policy to
another,” and that ‘‘no govern-
ment, regardless of its form, has
been able to achieve an analytically
attractive domestic environmental
policy.”’

But there is much in The Fraser
Institute’s thinking that worries me
even more.

To be continued.

Test will continue until spring

From page 1
had to.

McKenzie said that instead of
working on the pilot project, mill
management should instead
decrease the mill’s production.

“They have to look at how they
run the mill, and they don’t want
to do that. This is a 650-tonne-a-
day mill and they've almost run

that mill at 900-tonnes-a-day,”
said McKenzie. ‘‘The harder you
push a mill, the more pollution
you get.’’

Dosenberg said the test project
will continue until April and added
that a full-scale biological treat-
ment facility will be in operation,
by June 1992.

WE STILL BUY
& SELL USED

Now renting
Genesis

New traffic column
to help motorists

ROADWORK is a fact of urban
life, but unexpected roadwork is
invariably a major obstacle to en-
joying that life.

As part of its commitment to
keeping its readership fully in-
formed aboui all aspects of life on
the North Shore, the North Shore
News will launch Roadblocks this
Sunday.

The column, which will run reg-
ularly in the Sunday News, will list
the various road closures, detours
and roadwork taking place in the
three North Shore municipalities.

Roadblocks is designed to in-
form drivers of the extent and
location of major road work so
that it and its accompanying in-
convenience can be avoided with
the least amount of annoyance.

Watch for Roadblocks Sunday
in the News.

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