CIRCUS ACTS DON’T HELP
It was only a matter of time before the circus arrived. Last week, several members of Greenpeace Canada rappelled down from Vancouver’s Ironworkers Memorial Bridge in an attempt to disrupt oil tanker traffic at the Kinder Morgan terminal in Burnaby.
“The blockade is an act of peaceful resistance to the Trans Mountain pipeline and tanker project,” said a Greenpeace statement. “It comes on the heels of months of escalating resistance led by Indigenous communities and supporters across Canada and around the world.”
Meanwhile, the pipeline company said it was business as usual. No ship was scheduled to leave port during the protest.
That’s par for the course for this type of protest: Make a big splash (figuratively not literally, one hopes) by dangling from bridges, towers and buildings, unfurling banners and try to spark a revolution. Greenpeace has been doing it for years, all over the world. In fact, earlier in the day Greenpeace crashed drones into a nuclear power plant in France.
It must work for improving their rappelling or drone skills, but it doesn’t work for making a difference. Change must come the old-fashioned way, through research, education and persuasion — at all levels of society. It doesn’t come from the end of a rappel rope.
Greenpeace, like some hardcore advocacy groups, misses that point, in order to raise funds, increase memberships and vent their frustration with society. However, the complexities of mitigating climate change cannot be reduced to a high-wire act, dressing up like orcas or chaining yourselves to bulldozers.
On the contrary, it does cause harm by polarizing the debate into Us and Them. The conversation should be about all of us. But that’s a hard conversation that doesn’t sell memberships — or earn votes, for that matter.
If we, as a society, are truly worried about our environment, we must lose our current fixation with pipelines. It’s merely a convenient deflection from the real truth: Pipelines don’t cause climate change, people do. It’s the same with the new fixation with plastic straws. Of all the millions of tonnes of garbage and pollution we create, we now think the answer is to ban plastic straws? Now that’s a pipe dream. If we truly want to do something useful, then we should attempt to reduce our own individual footprints on the planet. Blame ourselves, not the Other Guy or Big Oil or Big Banks or Justin Trudeau.
One hopes that eventually reason and compassion for our only planet will succeed where the circus acts trivializing the issue have failed.