With the Canadian federal election fast approaching, I find myself ruminating on thoughts of refusal
The idea of renouncing of the political process comes very hard to me. My grandparents were founding members of the Manitoba CCF, friends with J.S. Woodsworth himself. My mother has been involved in every federal and Ontario provincial campaign since 1962 either as campaign staff or as an NDP candidate. My parents have counted Tommy Douglas, David and Stephen Lewis, Ed Broadbent and Alexa McDonough — much of the pantheon of Canadian socialism — among their personal friends. I have knocked on doors, scrutineered and done campaign photography for the NDP since my teenage years in the late '60s. My vote can have no other possible home than the NDP. My blood is orange.
I've recently come to understand, however, that at their core the NDP is just as culpable for supporting an unsustainable industrial civilization as the bluest of Tories. They each accept the same fundamental economic paradigms, and are equally committed to placid social order and the sterilizing mediation of experience. In fact, to me the hypocrisy of the NDP is even more egregious than the banal but transparent evil of the Harperite Conservatives. The Tories make very little pretense of where they stand, while the NDP obscures their equivalently bourgeois support of the existing order with a (self-)deceptive veneer of altruism, solidarity and professed sympathy for the underdog.
Under all their fine humane rhetoric, even the NDP believe just as zealously as all the rest in economic and industrial growth (so long as the work force is safely unionized, of course), and can never campaign for the things that just might save our civilization: drastic population reduction, zero-growth economies and voluntary material impoverishment. Their place at the table of the guardian institution of politics, like that of every other party on the Canadian political scene today, is guaranteed by their cultivated inability to recognize, let alone proclaim, the obvious — that civilization is headed down a dead end path, if not over a cliff, and any force like politics that keeps us meekly shuffling along is part of the problem.
I cannot vote for the Harperites or the Dionysians, and I've come to the conclusion that it's not the parties that are the problem, but rather the building the parties are being thrown in – the edifice of politics itself.
* Conservative
* Liberal
* NDP
* Green
* Bloc Quebecois * None of the above
I am a Canadian ecologist with a passionate interest in outside the box responses to the converging crisis of industrial civilization.
The crisis of civilization is not simply a convergence of technical, environmental and organizational problems. These are symptoms that are themselves being driven by a philosophical and perceptual disconnection so deep that it is best understood as a spiritual breakdown. The disconnection goes by the name of Separation.
Our sense of separation is what allows us to see ourselves as different from and superior to the rest of the apparently non-rational universe we live in. In this worldview the complex mutual interdependence of all the elements of the universe is replaced by a simple dualistic categorization: there are human beings, and everything else in the universe—without exception—is a resource for us to use.
The only way to keep this planet, our one and only home in the universe, from being ultimately ravaged and devastated is to change our worldview and heal our sense of separateness. Unless we can manage that breathtaking feat all the careful application of technology, all the well-intentioned regulations, all the unbridled cleverness of which we are so proud will do little to delay the final outcome, and nothing whatever to prevent it.
My desire is to find ways to heal that sense of separation, with the goal of helping us prepare for ecological adulthood.
Fossil Fuel
chefurka
With the Canadian federal election fast approaching, I find myself ruminating on thoughts of refusal
