quinton

Hollus, not quite because he did not once mention stopping population growth. Some recognize urban sprawl as a problem and propose "smart growth" as the solution which means "building up" instead of "building out". But this does not solve the problem. "smart growth" is an oxy moron. Canada is on the path towards becoming like Netherlands. Netherlands now spends double the Europe average to clean up historical pollution, but still has more toxins. I just watched "Nature Of Things Journey to the Source" tonight. Highly recommend it.

Hollus, I don't think geoffrey will ever make sense. This statement takes a new prize for stupidity: Who cares about the oil spills? Nevermind the government subsidies to get gas as cheap as it is today. Oh and you say gasoline was more expensive in 1960 than today? Seems hard to believe when oil adjusted for inflation was $20/barrel in 1960 and $50/barrel in 2006. http://www.fintrend.com/ftf/images/charts/...ation_chart.htm Could it be that oil was cheaper in 1960 than 2006, but gasoline wasn't? Nope sorry Geoffrey, you're still wrong. They follow each other in a tight correlation: http://www.fin.gc.ca/toce/2005/gas_tax-e.html Next time do your research before you cite your rubbish and include a reference to your information. Hollus, thanks for putting Geoffrey in his place again.

Geoffrey once again you make a bunch of vague incoherent statements. I lived and am living in SW Ontario for the purpose of making and saving money that can be used to support my future plans. I am now retired. I will be looking for a place to move that supports my values this Spring. Yes that includes a place with unpolluted air and opportunities to explore untouched landscapes without owning a car. Your attempts to portray me as a hypocrite have failed. Yes I am critical of Alberta and will continue to be. I have watched many documentaries about that province and read many magazine articles and books and Internet sites about it. The way they built hiways through their National Parks that were supposed to be protected and the way they over used the Bow river for irrigation and the way they mine the tarsands and lie about restoring them to a natural state.... These are just a few of the reasons I think they are not wise or acting responsibly or sustainably. I know there are many Albertans who oppose the actions of multinationals and government, but they are in the minority.

Hicksey, what are you so afraid of? A ban on pesticides? Not having cable tv with multi-million dollar superbowl commercials? Why do you keep emphasizing that we need to strike a balance between economic agendas and environmental agendas? So far it's been pretty one-sided in our culture favouring economic agendas thanks to people like Geoffrey. Hollus, I agree with all of your points in your last statement. But do we have a chance at getting Geoffrey and the general public to realize this and change their priorities? Geoffrey, I sort of figured you'd paint a rosy picture for economic growth. You are the epitome of ignorance. Your statement that old growth forests are man's creation only confirms this. You elude to the idea that forests will burn every 20-25 years from forest fires anyway, so why not cut them first? You say that if man doesn't cut the forests, they'll all go up in a blaze. I don't think you realize how complicated ecology is. You also don't realize that no human will ever understand ecology because it is far too complex. Suppressing forest fires destroys wild forests and turns them into humanized tame forests under experimentation. Trees like white pine and burr oak develop a thick fire resistant bark when they reach well beyond 100 years, which is why they usually survive natural surface fires. I realize that I do not understand the complete picture of forest ecology (and no human or group of humans ever will), which is why I see the need for large wilderness forests to be unmanaged by humans. I do not insure my car over the winter. I only insure my car over the summer to get out of the city. To reach the closest thing to wilderness (Algonquin Park which allows clearcut logging still and is increasing the cut allowance each year cleverly leaving strips along visible areas and doing large clearcuts where people don't frequent) is over a 5 hour drive away. Sure I could go to Point Pelee, Rondeau, Pinery (super tiny) but they aren't close to being wilderness and are at least an hour away by car. The pinery which is closest to me seems to have more miles of paved roads winding through it than the perimiter of the park's boundaries. Geoffrey, ever heard of the Niagara Falls area? They grow enough peaches there to send surplus all the way to the Maritimes. The Annapolis Valley can grow peaches too but they are much later and not nearly as plentiful due to insufficient heat units. Geoffrey, you fit the stereotypical Albertan (which is why I don't live there) Ever realize the only reason you have wilderness close by is because it is mountainous and unsuited for development? You like other Albertans seem to care most about a quick buck. You are even more stereotypical of a Christian, who denies evolution and seems to be pro-growth and anti-conservation. Geoffrey I go on multi-day backpacking trips to get off the corridors. I walk miles to lakes and still find they are often fished-out because ATV trails can also reach them. If not being happy about having to drive a minimum of 5 hours on highspeed hiways (and even having to pass through the disgusting tangled mess of the GTA first) just to get to a pseudo wilderness makes me lazy than I think you are irrational (which I've noticed very early on with you) since I long to be outdoors in pristine settings a minimum of once a week, and I'm not willing to drive that far every week. This is partially why I will be moving. In closing, you say you choose to work long hours for the economic engine. What would happen if you stopped? Could you keep up with your car insurance, mountain climbing hobby, rent or property taxes, other bills, cellphone expense? Thankfully, I've only worked the minimum for the system and have done without most luxuries. I have savings and will not need to work again. I am glad I'm not paying for Dalton McGuinty's corporate handouts to GM and for welfare people to breed like flies. I would sooner live in a cabin in the woods than work 9-5. Even if it were a job I believed in, I would still be paying 30% tax to a corrupt government that I despise.

Here's one of the most annoying similarities between Harper and Bush. They both encourage fanatic religious propagation of irrational thought. For example, at the end of their speech, Bush says: "God bless America" Harper says: "God bless Canada" Maybe this is why they only care about economic growth and not protecting the environment because after all, nothing can go wrong when you have a supernatural power watching over us in the sky. If only that were true. I just hope North Americans will wake up before it's too late... If there was a big daddy in the sky who could protect us from our sins then why would have he let us destroy so much natural habitat and extinct so many species? I think it is hard to encourage saving the world when religion is still spreading like a pandemic virus. This is because religious people and rational thought are like pigs that can fly.

Since I was born in 1980, Canada has grown by about 10 million, which is the same amount as the entire population of Canada in 1931. This is such a short period in history of life on earth, and yet we've already threatened, endangered, extirpated and even extincted some of the oldest creatures to walk the land, swim the waters and fly the sky right here in Canada. WORLD facts: http://www.npg.org/facts/world_pop_year.htm CANADA facts: http://www40.statcan.ca/l01/cst01/demo62a.htm?sdi=population Even if you don't care about the downfalls of an impoverished earth low in biodiversity... Ask yourself, how has life in Canada improved since 1980? Do you have more leisure time as an employee in 2006 than 1980? Are there more acres of virgin old growth forest? Are you able to afford more lobster dinners? Is your boss telling you to work later nights and weekends? Is the average Canadian better off or just you? Is it ethical to grow human numbers in Canada to a density like Bangladesh at the expense of our natural environment? Even if we are wealthy enough to import the food we need to survive, is it ethical to import our food from across the world when we reach the point where we can no longer feed ourselves? Where will our food come from if we get to be grossly overpopulated to the point where we cannot feed ourselves (eg: Netherlands)? Is it as easy to get a license to hunt a moose? Is it as easy to catch fish and do you have to drive further to catch them where they won't be full of PCBs and mercury? How far do you have to drive to find solitude in a place where you can camp and fish where the wolves still howl and where the lakes aren't polluted by septic beds of cottages occupied for 10% of the year? Can you get to that place without seeing massive clearcuts, recreational ATVers, hunters, industrial mining cut lines, oil and gas developments or new highways with expanding lanes? How far to drive to see dark sky without light pollution filled with stars and free of airline jet trails?

speaker, I think geoffrey is a lost cause who will forever remain oblivious to those clues. He believes that a supernatural power will look after us anyway so he thinks there is no point in conserving or stopping growth. He reads the propaganda statements of oil companies like "We take the environment very seriously". I've heard that before from the Irving family who has clearcut a huge percentage of NS and NB. Do you know how much these oil giants and forest multinationals spend on PR? They even hire private consulting companies to pump out rhetoric and websites disguised to showcase their bogus award winning environmental stewardship. Much the way Dalton McGuinty puts on TV commercials in Ontario trying to tell us all of the sudden that Nuclear power is clean. It says something stupid like "Some people are unclear about nuclear. Well let me tell you its clear that nuclear is clean" which is a complete lie. They should tell that to the people of Port Hope who have polluted soil and what about the radioactive waste that has to be stored for at least 250,000 years. Oh wait, the cost of storing it counts as our GDP so I guess we are making "progress". Bottom line is that unless Ontarians and Canadians say no to more immigrants (migration of people from high to low density places supports a global population explosion), and unless they say no to more natural resource exportation (which we don't presently need to survive since we still have enough resources domestically), then the environment here at home will never be protected. Designating protected areas is just a smoke screen. That "protection" policy (i.e. national parks, provincial parks, etc) can always be thrown out or eroded with new legislation to meet the needs of a growing population with a growing consumption. I think the wise first step is to speak openly against more population growth in Ontario and Canada. Most of that growth is coming from immigration so that's an easy first place to start to curtail environmental damage.

geoffrey, suffice it to say that when it comes to environmental integrity your definition of good enough is a lot different than mine.

Geoffrey says: For Canada the only way would be for a good number of us to unite and say that we are having too many immigrants arriving in Canada and we don't care about economic growth anymore, and therefore, we'd force the politicians to deliver negative net migration (immigrants < emigrants) or lose their jobs. For this to happen, there'd need to be a lot more people with views like my own and a lot less people like Geoffrey who seem to think that we'd all be better off with more people in Canada. Economic growth is an illusion of "progress" for dozens of reasons that I could explain in great detail over hundreds of pages with thousands of examples. My opinion is that per capita, life will be poorer for each Canadian the more people we have. For the southern part of Ontario alone (a true biodiversity hot spot because of the mild winters and long growing season)... just look at all the species we will lose if we don't stop population, consumption and economic growth: Look at how many species are of Special Concern: http://www.rom.on.ca/ontario/risk.php?doc_...gion=5&status=7 Look at how many species are Threatened: http://www.rom.on.ca/ontario/risk.php?doc_...gion=5&status=4 Look at how many species are Endangered: http://www.rom.on.ca/ontario/risk.php?doc_...gion=5&status=3 Look at how many species are Extirpated: http://www.rom.on.ca/ontario/risk.php?doc_...gion=5&status=2 Look at how many species are Extinct: http://www.rom.on.ca/ontario/risk.php?doc_...gion=5&status=1 And that's only for the southern deciduous forest region. This doesn't look much like a deciduous forest to me anymore: http://maps.google.ca/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=cha...06,0.862427&t=h And the growth in the southern region affects the northern regions too. New natural gas pipelines, mineral and timber exploitations, etc. For you to say we can have growth and prevent further environmental erosion is nonsense.

geoffrey, you may think Canada can slowly triple its population "just fine". But I reckon that if these guys could talk, they would disagree with you: http://www.rom.on.ca/ontario/risk.php?doc_...gion=5&status=3 On behalf of the Barn Owl, Northern Cricket Frog, Lake Erie Watersnake, Spotted Wintergreen and other endangered species of Ontario, I respectfully disagree with your statement. In fact, I think that if we don't reduce our population and consumption soon, many of these critters and plants will be extinct within our lifetimes. You saying that we can triple our population is pure ignorance and unscientific. Maybe according to your vision of casinos, malls and multilane hiways and importing more food and slaughtering more boreal forest this is acceptable... But not according to my vision of a world that I'd want to live in where nature is plentiful and where you don't have to compete with hoards of people just to enjoy it.

I watched an episode of 60 minutes recently with some Governor of Montana who is called "The Coal Cowboy". He was strongly advocating to not burn coal, but convert it into a diesel equivalent fuel and burn it in diesel vehicles. This was done before by Germans and South Africans during their wars apparently and uses the Fischer-Tropsch process which would produce twice as much C02 (green house gases) as normal gas or diesel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch_process Anyway he said that as long as oil is over $30/barrell that this economically is a no-brainer. He says the valleys of Montanna rivers (I think in the NE part of the state -could be wrong) are loaded with coal. Harvesting the coal would have detrimental environmental impacts, but he brushes them off as benign and says that all the mines would be restored to their original condition (Sounds absurd when you think about the Alberta tar sands and what a wasteland they are now). Anyway my point is that originally I thought we'd be much further ahead when oil ran out. I think although oil and gas could be gone within 30 years, coal won't be and neither will the prospect of nuclear power or burning wood to generate electricity even to power cars. So unfortunately people may very well try to keep up their "growth" until the planet is even more degraded and more species will become extinct. Geoffrey I should have known you were a Christian. They are typically the ones who don't care about the damage to the earth and don't see any problems with our ways. After all, they have a big daddy in the sky to look after them. Most religions are not based on respect for the land. Christianity is a good example of a religion that not only fosters irrational thought (as all religions do) but also exudes a complete disrespect for the earth and nature.

margrace, I agree that our throw away society is a problem. Our throw away mentality is a product of economic growth. We are taught that what we have is not good enough as a newer car or stereo or tv comes out. We then toss what we have even though it still does everything it did when we bought it. Same with the planned obsolescence of a computer.

August1991... you think there is no truth to the idea that all 6.5 billion of us can't eat lobster buffets daily but if the world's population was 10 people, then we could eat lobster buffets sustainably daily? Well, I'm sorry but that's the reality. The more people, the less you get and the more you have to work for what you get and the less your money is worth and the more money you need to get the same thing. For you to think that services do not contribute to environmental damage just shows your inability to think a problem through and recognize the interconnectedness of everything on the planet. What service do you want to use as an example? Banking? Universities? Regardless of what example you choose, they need to construct office buildings (usually on prime agricultural land), they need to expand those buildings to support growth, they need to heat those buildings, they need to burn fuel to travel to those buildings daily, etc.

CamTheCat, thanks for bringing sanity back to this thread. Hicksey... a better thread topic would have been "Is the media measuring our well-being via Canada's GDP a new type of pro-growth propaganda?" ... but I couldn't fit that all in the title. Here's an example: http://www.cbc.ca/nl/story/nf-gdp-statscan-050428.html If there isn't rapid growth, the media uses words with negative connotations like saying that the CUPE strikes in Newfoundland "dogged" the economy and that "The province's GDP fell by 0.7 per cent last year, marking the only provincial decline in the country". Why do we care how much the economy grows if it means we have no forests left and it means we have toxic chemicals in the air and water? CamTheCat, I think you did a good job in summing up why the GDP needs to stop being used as a measure of success. I'm glad you'd like to see per capita consumption reduced and population reduced also. So I'm not the only one It's not too hard to figure out that our quality of life worsens when the earth's integrity worsens from having so many people. One analogy that has a lot of truth is: The earth is a big pie of resources... how small do you want your piece to be, and how many people do you want to out-compete to get your piece of pie?

geoffery, the Netherlands does not have the option of producing enough food to feed its own people. With over 385 people per square kilometer, common sense will tell you that you cannot feed that many people on a square kilometer which is about 200 acres. Once you've subtracted the land for Netherlanders dwellings, cities, and roads, you can see that they could never be self sufficient. geoffery, do you want to import so many immigrants into Canada that we can no longer feed our own people?

Geoffery says: Oh really, ever heard of corporate controlled media? I guess you aren't familiar with how the Irving Corporation who does industrial clear-cut logging in the Atlantic Canada Maritimes also owns most of the newspapers. Wake up Geoffery!

Spike22, because Canada is a land of harsh climate and predominately shield rock and is not suited towards sustaining more people than it already has at the expense of its biodiversity and ecological integrity. Canada could never sustain all of the foreigners who would love to live here. Do you know why they come here? In many cases, simply to earn money, but in other cases, they come here because of the wealth of natural resources. Eg: There are more Netherlands born farmers in Canada than Nova Scotian born farmers. In Netherlands they are too overpopulated to have their own affordable farm land, so here in Canada we let them have our farm land. If we go the same way as the Netherlands, no one will want to immigrate here because the cost of living will be sky high and there'll be no resources left.

geoffery, you missed the whole point. I believe using GDP to measure the wellbeing of a nation is corporatist propaganda. The higher the economic growth, the higher the GDP. Economic growth = population growth * consumption per capita growth Don't you see a need for a different way of measuring our well-being? When's the last time you heard a politician planning for a reduction in population so that there would be more resources preserved for the living? Instead all politicians and therefore all citizens plan for more population, consumption and ultimately economic growth, which just means we can afford less land in a worse area. We turn over food production to large corporations while we nest away in our highrises and work at superficial bureaucratic jobs. The percentage of urban dwellers keeps increasing and rural dwellers keeps decreasing. I worry that if people lose their connection with nature, they won't do anything to stop the growth, which is the only way of protecting nature and wilderness. All these issues are interrelated.

The GDP continues to ignore the ill-affects of population growth and consumption per capita growth. According to this philospher and author Dave Pollard, our well-being should be measured with GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator). GPI apparently takes into account resource depletion, crime, household and leisure time, pollution, wealth distribution, lifepsan of consumer goods, dependence on foreign imports, etc... which are all ignored by GDP. Definitions of GPI: http://www.cyberus.ca/%7Esustain1/Question/GPI.html http://www.rprogress.org/projects/gpi/ Author Dave Pollard's idealistic blog on his ideas of how to save the world: http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2004/11/29.html#a969 I personally, think there is probably something that the GPI is missing because it does not show a substantial drop from 1950 to today. I would expect to see a huge drop since there are much less resources per capita. I think that life on earth is overall worse than 1950 by far. The GDP suggests our wellbeing has more than doubled since 1950, which is absurd. For one, we have lost millions of hectares of pristine old growth forest since 1950. The GDP counts the $ of the economic activity that caused the pollution and then it counts the $ spent attempting a clean-up, and the sum of these dollars is supposed to contribute to our well being??? What are your opinions?

I guess all we can do is not watch the Olympics to protest what they stand for (commercial money grab, ignorance of environmental sustainability, nationalistic pride and superiority complexes, waste of resources and non-renewable energy, etc) We can also criticize our friends, and family who watch the Olympics, and hopefully enlighten them on why we should not support the Olympics.

Speaker, so your solution is to import everyone into one of the last places with wilderness left to protect, which will ultimately destroy it? Canada has 25% of world's remaining wilderness forests.

Yes I believe that even wind turbines cause undesirable affects on climate and birds and many other things we don't understand. Hicksey, why would we want to fund the growth of infrastructure? Is that just so we can have more population growth? What for? Isn't there enough lanes on the 401 already? What about preserving our natural heritage? The Lake Ontario Salmon was a unique species that is already extinct. How much further shall we impoverish our local environment in the name of "growth"? I really hate that word "growth". The amount of sun and rain is not growing. The amount of cod and turbot on the Atlantic Coast is not growing. If we create huge monocultures of genetically modified crops to grow more livestock, we will definitely put ourselves at risk to bad health, loss of biodiversity, and pollution. It's time we questioned Dalton McGuinty's and every other politicians plans to grow the population. I don't remember being asked if I wanted more immigrants. I like this Country the way it is. In fact I would have liked it more 50 years ago and more still 100 years ago.

If we didn't keep growing our population with so many immigrants, there wouldn't be so much pressure to consume less. Ultimately its a matter of scale. With so many new immigrants planned, we apparently have to sacrifice our lands and waters for more nuclear power plants. They are now targetting the north shore of lake Huron in a pristine area.

Montgomery Burns sounds like you made up some numbers there relating to global warming. I think habitat and biodiversity loss are bigger problems than global warming personally, but global warming, ozone depletion, and the large scale changes are hard to fully understand and could always turn out much worse than we expect. Montgomery Burns, would you mind giving us a URL link to David Suzuki's endorsement of the NDP? The NDP supports exponential population growth in Canada of 1% per year via immigration in order to support their status quo plans for economic growth. If David Suzuki supports them, he may just consider them the lesser of 3 evils, or he may actually be unaware that the NDP is not really environmentally progressive. The NDP also wants cheaper electricity for forestry corporations to operate more efficiently up north where their clearcutting is ransacking the boreal forest. Howard Hampton has spoke publicly that he wants to subsidize their electricity. I was disgusted when I heard that. Furthermore, Jack Layton publicly states how he will get back the softwood lumber tarrifs that Canada shouldn't have had to pay under NAFTA, but he never speaks publicly on the rate of deforestation in the north. After all, his goal is economic growth. Suzuki's website says he supports the idea of "smart growth" which is building cities up and not out. In otherwords, cramming people (new immigrants) into highrise apartments. To me, "smart growth" is an oxymoron. Canada is already overpopulated and the only "smart" growth is none at all.

newbie, then why does his "Sustainability within a Generation" plan on http://www.davidsuzuki.org/WOL/Sustainability/ not address the specific need to stop population growth, stop resource exportation, and stop economic growth in Canada? He merely suggests ways how people can reduce their footprint. Doesn't he realize that consumption per capita will never go down so long as there is money to be made? Canada's people and government still measure their success and wellbeing via its GDP. Think about how stupid that is. We base our goals on economic growth. That means the more logs of Douglas Fir or Sitka Spruce we send to the USA, the more successful we are in a given year. To me, that just means that we are successfully destroying Canada's natural landscapes, watersheds and biodiversity. To the general public, they don't seem to care as long as Canadian forestry corporations get their softwood lumber refund from the duties they shouldn't have had to pay to the USA.