History will see climate inaction as baffling

Saskatchewan needs to get serious about this crisis, writes Jim Handy.

I have taught history at the University of Saskatchewan for close to four decades.

Frequently, we explore environmental devastation created by inappropriate practices or policies, devastation that often took hundreds of years to be fully felt: from ancient Maya removing too much of the rainforest on which complex agricultural societies depended, helping lead to the collapse of societies that had lasted a millennium; to the slow desiccation of once productive agricultural regions under misguided Spanish colonial rule, over the course of a century turning a remarkable garden landscape into a barren valley; to contemporary destruction of the Amazon rainforest for short-sighted gain when sustainable uses of the forest can lead to both higher immediate economic returns and better equity.

Students' questions usually revolve around some variation of the following: “Couldn't they see what was happening? Why didn't they just stop doing that? Why didn't enough people simply say no more?”

Tentative answers to such questions usually include understanding the competing short-term interests of political or economic elites; a deliberate myopia as people, especially elites, refused to see what was happening around them; and inertia.

I wonder what future generations of history students, assuming there will be history students in the future, will make of current political debates and policies in Canada, especially in Saskatchewan.

We live at a moment of impending environment crisis — not dissimilar to those societies have faced in the past, though more widespread and undoubtedly in many ways more widely catastrophic.

The evidence for such an impending crisis surrounds us: from more than 70 forest fires already burning in Western Canada and the near north (and it is barely April), to continual and increasingly dangerous heat waves, to an agricultural industry on some of the best land in the world that cannot survive without more than a billion dollars in government subsidies, all exacerbated if not caused by climate change driven primarily by burning fossil fuels.

Yet, the government of this province — and apparently according to some polls a majority of people in Canada — refuse to come to grips with this impending crisis and act accordingly. Canada has one of the highest rates of carbon emissions per capita in the world (four times the world average).

Saskatchewan competes with Alberta in having the highest emissions per capita among provinces in Canada (three times the Canadian average). We have an immense hole in our budget caused by the need to rescue agriculture from a continuing drought.

Still, the government refuses to talk seriously about reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, actively discourages the pursuit of renewable energy, fights measures to reduce the burning of fossil fuels, and continues to subsidize the expansion of the oil and gas industry.

I expect in future history classes, as students discuss the environmental catastrophe we have failed to address, students will ask about this moment and this government: ”Couldn't they see what was happening? Why didn't they just stop doing that? Why didn't enough people simply say no more?”

I suspect we will have no good answers.