DA VE BIDINI
‘You can feel urbane and rural at the same time, knowing that change came to you and that the 21st century is a wonderful time to be alive.’
Ilive in a big city, and yet small cities are more like big cities than ever before. In Guelph or Grande Prairie or Swift Current, say, goods and services are as available to you as they would be in Toronto, Calgary or Regina. You can get a nice coffee, eat a decent sandwich and see a strange band (even Massett, Haida Gwai has a groovy new café. With wifi!). An international newspaper is sold somewhere and there’s a place named after a European art figure that has fancy shoes or sunglasses. If big cities have seven — or 17 — futon shops, small cities have one. Usually, one is all you need.
In small cities, you don’t have to buy the one thing everyone else buys. You can stand in front of the meat or egg rack of the local supermarket and choose free range, grain-fed, antibiotic-free. You can buy designer mustards and organic tomato sauce and gluten-free syrup, and you can sigh contentedly knowing that you didn’t have to conquer the ridiculous big city’s housing market or weather its deep pollution or own a car just for the sake of owning a car. You can feel urbane and rural at the same time, knowing that change came to you, and that, in many ways, the 21st century is a wonderful time to be alive.
Then again. Because we are defined — in large numbers and in cities big and small — by our consumer choices (as well as the freedom to make these choices) this need and lust and eagerness to have things has led us down a garden path increasingly choked with bad air and searing temperatures and razed rainforest. The same want of clean, socially and environmentally conscious products was caused by the inherent need for things, whatever their nature, and if we hadn’t been putting so much quasi-plastic, sugar-rich, transfatted dreck into our bodies, there never would have been the need to try to get straight. We’re bad food junkies in recovery, and if we’re ever going to grasp or understand or control the demons of climate change, the same kind of realization must occur. And it has to come through that which dominates so much of our privileged Western life: the need to own stuff; horrible, beautiful, ugly and great stuff. Lots and lots of it.
Still, as much as weaning off Pop Tarts and tubed meat products was one thing, kicking the buying and browsing habit will be another. At least there’s a precedent. Forget me and forget you and forget your ponytailed neighbour who listens to Mogwai: The truth is that when your mother-in-law or suburban law clerk or city auto mechanic decides to buy, say, carrots or apples or olive oil, they are more likely than ever to examine the label — the wheres, hows and whats, as well as the price tag. More often than before, they will decide that if something is good for them — if something will, ostensibly, help sustain their life and the lives of others — they will buy that product as long as it doesn’t cost them twice the amount; and, sometimes, they’ll buy it anyway. In many cases, this enlightened consumer-producer system exists, in all of is imperfections, to better our bodies and our world, a movement born from a sudden conscious-shifting in terms of what we buy and how we buy it. This has to happen to the production of goods tied to climate change for there to be any impact moving forward. We have to hold a set of products in our hands knowing that one manufacturer has made a moral choice, while one has not. The buying of food in the 21st century has proven that, given the opportunity, most of us will make the right decision.
Climate change is a chimera, a snipe, a ghost, an apparition. It’s a dirty cloud, and hard to see because of its ethereality. In as much as images from a melting ice floe are meant to cause awareness, when people see a view to the north they are, mostly, struck by the continued openness and the beauty of the land rather than the impending peril caused by a warming planet. Hollywood has thunked us so many times over the head with visions of the apocalypse that we are numb to dire, prophetic warnings and our Twitter feed or nightly news is, typically, a reel of bad shit happening. We need an awareness that connects to us in a mundane, pedestrian and everyday way. And nothing is as mundane or pedestrian as shopping for stuff.
Somehow goods and services have to be tied to a producer’s efforts to affect climate change, and branded as such, whether it’s a seal or ribbon or crest afforded companies that have taken measures to reduce their carbon footprint by committing to clean air or water; something that tells us they are making an effort; something that gives us a choice. Maybe it’s a rating system branded on product labels, maybe it’s a colour code, or maybe it’s a climate-approved status ranking. But beyond big picture clean up and responsible industry, the idea of consumerism tied to climate change must become part of our consciousness as citizens if that consciousness will ever change. We have to feel as if the fate of the world is in our hands every Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, and because we, generally, think we’re pretty awesome and heroic (at least when we’re not thinking how awful we are), we’ll make the better choice; the choice to help the planet, rather than hurt it. We’ll choose the company that works for change rather than the lumbering dinosaur that continues to foul the earth. As least I hope we will. Either that or we’ll all die a horrible sun-scorched death, with only ourselves to blame.