Population growth, consumers and our ecological ruin

How could environmentalists ignore the Elephant in the Room? How could they ignore the obvious ecological impact of immigrant-driven population growth in Canada? Why didn’t they take the release of the Census report of March 2007, which revealed that Canada had the fastest growing population of all G8 countries, as an opportunity to attack government policy on this issue, and to educate people that population growth is a key variable of environmental degradation? That reducing per capita consumption without containing population is a futile enterprise.

The answer was not to be found primarily in their ideological myopia, but in the examination of their carefully guarded donor base, which should, but isn’t, made easily available for public scrutiny. A look at the accounts of the David Suzuki Foundation reveals that the Royal Bank of Canada not only gave an award to the good doctor, but is a significant contributor to his foundation. No wonder that Dr Suzuki will not publicly say what he says privately. That the importation of people from low consuming third world countries to Canada so as to convert them to “hyper-consumers” is, in his words, “nuts”, and that industrialised countries are already overpopulated.

The Sierra Club is equally gripped with demographic lockjaw. The 2005 Report of the British Columbia Sierra Club, the country’s largest, showed that the Toronto Dominion Bank and the Van City Credit Union empire, both big real estate lenders, were prominent contributors to their “environmental” organisation. Given these contributions, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it is retrospectively clear why it has been difficult to make Sierra Club directors understand the environmental significance of mass immigration “if their salary depends on not understanding it.”

Or is it that they understand it, but they tell “the silent lie”. The lie of knowing that something of vital importance is true and needs to be told, but deciding not to tell it. In this case, to protect a donor base at the cost of the environment itself. And here we were, thinking that protecting the environment was their raison d’etre. Bureaucratic self-preservation seems to take on a life of its own. Truth, integrity and courage are its casualties.

We knew that the environmental NGOs were myopic, hypocritical, soft, politically correct and cowardly, but how many of us thought that they were so fundamentally corrupt? I suppose after the David Gelbaum affair, we should not have been surprised, when the Sierra Club of America can accept a $100 million bribe to keep its longstanding support of restricted immigration off the policy books we should not expect that money-grubbing green NGOs north of the 49th should not fall prey to the same temptations. The difference is, at least a third of the Sierra Club in the US couldn’t stomach corruption, including three time Nobel Peace Prize nominee and co-founder of Earth Day, David Brower, a standard bearer of the organisation for so many years, who quit because he knew that immigration was an environmental issue that had to be confronted. It was as if the Pope had resigned from the Vatican in protest. Alas there are no David Browers in Canada, only David Gelbaums on Bay Street with their hush money for green groups who will tow the corporate line and decoy sincere dupes at the grassroots level with inconsequential feel-good volunteer work which is akin to polishing the furniture in a burning house, to borrow a phrase from Albert Bartlett.

Arguably then, homebuilding is not the key to ecological ruin after all. Nor is it the greed of developers or the banks that finance them, or the dreams of the people that flood in to buy houses. It is, in my judgment, the “green” watchdogs who haven’t barked because Big money has thrown them a bone.