Back in 1988, very few people in the activist world were working on the climate crisis or, as we called it back then, the Greenhouse Effect. But I had the good fortune to encounter a group of political visionaries who were working hard, not just to touch the conscience of government but to do something that was even harder back then: convince mainstream environmental groups and their leaders that climate would be the defining environmental issue of our age.
Chief among these individuals was David Lewis, my political mentor, the firewood collector, giant and car repairman, not the retired NDP leader. With the publication of Our Common Future by the United Nations, the results of a two-year commission conducted by the prime minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland, the profile of global environmental issues, ozone depletion, migration, chemical drift and climate, temporarily eclipsed the parochial issues and locality-specific concerns.
The scientific community was quick to make that switch in emphasis because its members could see that ocean acidification, ocean hypoxia, global heating and ozone depletion could wipe out ecosystems and species without there being any direct encounter with human beings. Or, as David put it, “if we fail to arrest the destabilization of planetary life support systems, these trees will die, whether they are cut down or not.”
But David and his group, the FOOLS (Friends of the Ozone Layer), were outliers in the environmental movement, especially in British Columbia. There were, of course, exceptions, such as the future English King Charles, Greenpeace International and its founder, Jim Bohlen, along with a handful of others but, especially in British Columbia, where he and I organized, the hostility with which our message was greeted by the mainline environmental groups nearly matched that of the fossil fuel, disposable aerosol and foam packaging industries. And ultimately, Jim, David’s and my insistence on prioritizing global environmental issues over parochial issues in our analysis, during the periods we exerted substantive control over the BC Green Party (1989-91, 1993-2000) helped to provoke the take-over and purge conducted by the eco-courtiers in 2000.
While I have already written another essay on the institutional hostility we faced from the emerging eco-courtier class, and their corruption and collusion with the fossil fuel industry, I want to re-examine the politics of BC Wild (the name of the Sunoco-funded coalition of environmental groups tasked with suppressing the climate debate in BC) through the lens not of petty corruption, but of class and culture.
The Other David Lewis
David Lewis was not a rich man. A university dropout, he lived in a small, modest home in Krestova, a remote rural community that was once the centre of the Doukhobor Sons of Freedom movement. He took odd jobs fixing cars and chopping wood and, when there was a big construction contract in the region, he could get temporary construction work. The first time the consort of the patrician Swedish Green Party leader, Per Gahrton, Ulla Lemberg, met Lewis during an official visit, she was transfixed by the hardness of his palms, their deep callouses and the dirt and congealed engine oil under his fingernails that he hadn’t managed to scrub away for the press conference. She could not stop talking about David’s hands for the rest of their official visit, noting that there was no one so genuinely working class in her party, even in the Far North.
Within a year, with only me and Jim to defend him, David was pushed out of his spokesperson position in the BC Greens, with Jim forlornly remarking, “I think David Lewis is the only person who has ever truly spoken for this party.” David’s charismatic style had made him a darling of Vancouver live radio and decision to attend Globe 90, the UN conference in Vancouver, selling bottles of “sustainable development” as a nineteenth-century vaudevillian huckster, complete with an antique portable sales counter with telescoping legs, had landed him on the national news as a spokesperson for the party. But his willingness to incorporate Marxian ideas of class struggle into his media statements and emotional style of sharing his fear that humanity would not rise to the occasion were frightening to many in the party and even more in the larger environmental movement.
Pressure began to mount from environmentalists outside the party to give David the proverbial hook. This pressure came largely from environmentalists already in the tank for Mike Harcourt’s New Democratic Party, the obvious government-in-waiting as the forty-year Social Credit political dynasty entered its terminal phase.
In the late 1980s and early 90s, BC’s environmental movement was dominated by wilderness “preservation” groups, comprising local volunteer-run, subscription-based civil society organizations like Friends of Clayoquot Sound and the West Arm Watershed Alliance, as well as organizations that, while technically working on a single area, had gained an international funding base and professionalized leadership, such as Friends of the Stein Valley and the Valhalla Wilderness Society.
These latter groups, along with the branch offices of international environmental groups like the Sierra Club and World Wildlife Fund, dominated the stage and were, largely, staffed by members of the incipient commissar class who were also functioning, at this point, as eco-courtiers within the (since 1987) Third Way government in waiting, the New Democrats.
These groups channeled money from all over the world into fighting to preserve the last of BC’s old growth forest from logging. While groups like WWF and Greenpeace had many irons in the fire, their global temperate rainforest preservation campaigns were invariably headquartered in Vancouver or Victoria and the delivery of “results” in BC affected the finances of the entire organizations and all their campaigns around the world.
Return of the Seekers
While David did not oppose the efforts to fence-off ecosystems from mining, logging and other industrial development—after all, these ecosystems functioned to protect biodiversity and absorb atmospheric carbon, mitigating and slowing the collapse of planetary life support systems—he did object the discourse the Big Green groups were popularizing on multiple fronts.
First, these groups did not merely use terms like “save” and “preserve” when they talked about the stretches of forest and alpine they were seeking to have declared parks; they often amplified these claims by suggesting ecosystems would be held in their present state “forever” by an act of the state. David felt that this was both dishonest, given that his models showed that forests ecosystems would need to move nine times faster than the fastest forests had previously moved in the past to adapt to rapid climate change, and because this discourse of permanence directly undermined our movement’s warnings of impending catastrophe.
Second, the sales pitch for these new parks contained much that ran counter to the idea that areas were being preserved due to an ecological imperative. Organizations like Western Canada Wilderness Committee (WC2) went beyond marketing calendars, posters and other forms of low-end merchandise depicting the threatened ecosystems as aesthetically pleasing. They produced lavish coffee table books, featuring the art of photorealist wildlife artists like Robert Bateman and my father, Ron Parker.
Movement leaders, like Joe Foy, would juxtapose the idea that a place like the Walbran Valley merited preservation because it was “untouched” while at the same time exhorting supporters to “get out there” and camp and hike in the regions. Indeed, Foy’s WC2 went beyond encouraging eco-tourism. They use the illicit building of eco-tourist infrastructure as a means of strengthening their hand in government negotiations. The building campsites, trails, bridges and moorages became key activities of big environmental groups, especially those based on Vancouver Island.
In this way, David argued, environmentalists were speaking out of both sides of their mouths: touting the pristine, unchanged and allegedly unchangeable character of these areas that situated them outside the economy, while concurrently seeking to build an industry built around the recreational gratification of a particular class.
In later years, during David’s extended break from political activity (1991-97) I supplemented this criticism with the additional observations that rather than focusing on working class jobs being threatened by the logging industry ecosystem damage, such as the commercial fishery and canneries, and working class recreation, such as hunting and trapping, the economic activity that was touted by Big Green groups was eco-tourism, a passtime mainly of wealthy, educated urbanites that tended to provide low wage, non-union hospitality industry employment in rural areas.
In other words, the environmental movement’s focus on wilderness “preservation” had two pernicious aspects that interacted synergistically. First, it minimized the sense of urgency and impact concerning the Greenhouse Effect.
Second, it caused a reversion in the class politics of the movement to a pre-Cold War state. Prior to the Cold War, the environmental movement, as epitomized in the Sierra Club, was a quasi-religious bourgeois movement focused on the spiritual and aesthetic experiences wealthy urban elites could have in landscapes cleared of their human populations. Its international board of directors included leading lights of the Yankee patrician Republican Party elite of the time, like Teddy Roosevelt and Prescott Bush (scion of the Bush dynasty).
During the Cold War, following the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the movement had taken a working class turn, focusing on the health of workers and of low-income communities. It championed farm workers with its calls for pesticide bans and working class neighbourhoods disproportionately affected by industrial disasters and waste. It gained major working class allies in farmworker union leaders like Cesar Chavez and Charan Gill.
But now it called not just for industrial workers to accept less work and lower-paying work but also more socially servile and submissive work as is axiomatic in the hospitality industry.
And when environmentalists faced accusations and criticisms from the industrial working class of the North American periphery, their response was typically not one of acknowledgement or compensation but of denial and obfuscation. Environmentalists denied that there would be any economic cost to what they proposed and instead baselessly asserted that in a green economy, everyone would become more prosperous, a delusion that finally reached its crescendo in the LEAP Manifesto of 2015.
The Rationality and Decency of the Proletariat
David, being a member of the peripheral industrial working class, himself, understood exactly how such assertions would play. Industrial workers would reasonably assume that when the costs of something were being downplayed or denied, it meant that they and not the urban bourgeoisie and commissar classes would be the ones to shoulder those costs on their own.
And so he proposed a radical departure in discourse, one that I am ashamed to say I did not have the courage to follow him on. His master term in the interviews he gave in 1989-91 was “share the losses.” Both climate change and the economic transition necessary to limit it would undoubtedly produce losses. And he felt that the only way to gain the support of the industrial working class was to stop trying to bamboozle them and present them with the cold, hard facts of the high cost of transition and a plan for sharing that cost fairly.
That’s because David believed in a politics that I did not yet understand, the politics that Bernie Sanders brought to the coal towns of West Virginia and for which coal miners voted in large numbers. You see: what liberals call “people voting against their own interests” is nothing of the kind. Working class voters are more altruistic than the bourgeoisie and the commissars. Even though they have less, they are more willing to make material sacrifices to bring about a moral order in which they believe. White working class voters demeaned and denigrated as stupid and ignorant are no more stupid than low-income Woke urban progressives working as baristas. The difference is that their culture contains a greater respect for, and ethos of, personal and collective sacrifice.
The Twenty-first Century Degradation of Climate Discourse
But, as it stands, the environmental movement did not listen to David Lewis and things have only worsened. When environmental organizations decided to become “climate champions,” in the late 1990s, they retired “the Greenhouse Effect” and replaced it with “climate change.” Whereas the former term was one that, by its very structure, educated people about the mechanism by which the climate was destabilizing, the one that replaced it severed the term from any theory of causation, making it easier for climate denialist ideas to creep in.
Whereas disputing the Greenhouse Effect entailed explaining why heavier molecules were not trapping heat in the atmosphere, disputing “climate change” simply entailed offering some half-baked theory offering some other cause of the change, or baldfaced denial that change was taking place.
And because the environmental movement’s leadership now deemed regular folks too stupid to understand how their atmosphere was changing, an appeal to reason was replaced with an appeal to authority, “trust The Science!” And indeed those touting this new approach began to suggest that it was problematic for regular people to educate themselves, examine evidence, etc. and that uppity proles who did that were risible figures, fools seduced by low production value youtube videos into a fantasy world. Best to advise the proles to not even try to understand!
And, as the first decade of the twenty-first century closed, environmentalists hit upon an even more disastrous term in which to encapsulate their discourse: “climate justice.” “Climate justice” packaged belief that carbon emissions were causing the climate to worsen with a set of unpopular, punitive government policies that targeted the working class of the Global North’s extractive periphery for special punishment through increased transportation costs, destruction of the used vehicle market, increased costs for basic heating and refrigeration and the singling-out of agriculture for special financial penalties.
It is no wonder, in our present moment that, even as extreme weather events also disproportionately ravage the property and livelihoods of the rural working class, “climate denial” increases, not just because of reaction formation but because “climate science” has been conflated with a set of punitive taxation measures targeting that class.
We Must Share the Losses
But it does not have to be this way. There is still time. As David would say if he were here, “we cannot lose faith that humanity will rise to the occasion.” And that is why I exhort us all to find a just and equitable plan to share the losses and save the planet.
