Beckham is a farmer who writes from Winnipeg.
A few years ago, I listened to several lectures by Conor Cruise O’Brien, participating in the Massey Lectures.
While a good deal of what he said has become somewhat faded in my memory, some of it has remained clear. The central theme of his lectures was the state of the world at the end of the 20th century, with diminishing resources, disparity of income in the western world, disparity between the West and the rest of the world and steadily increasing world population.
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He painted such an apocalyptic view of the future of the human race, as he saw it, that I wonder what his view would now be, some 10 or more years on.
He saw the world as increasingly a place of haves and have-nots, a place where gated communities would have armed guards and walls.
He saw the haves as people in a lifeboat, cutting off the hands of those still in the water lest they overwhelm the boat, causing all to perish. Graphic and terrible imagery!
Yet as we contemplate the developments of the last few months, his view of coming events seems more prophetic.
Every newscast, it seems, has something in it of desperate, hungry people crying out for help. The newspapers, complacent for years in our North American security and plenty, have woken up to the fact of world crisis.
But even yet, commentators speak of the shortage as something that may take five years or so, to “resolve itself.” This, it seems to me, is whistling past the graveyard in a world where the economy is built entirely on cheap fossil fuels, for which prices have escalated beyond anything we could have imagined as little as a couple of years ago. Those who should know promise us nothing but even higher prices ahead.
But somehow, it doesn’t seem as if anyone is listening. Our streets are full of gas-guzzlers. Huge SUVs, half-tons that are almost as bulky as highway tractors were a few years ago, massive advertising of dealerships to sell even more and a complacent attitude toward the idea that China and India are going to want, and are entitled to, a commensurate number of vehicles with the Western world.
It comes down to, as verbalized by one bitter man on last night’s newscast, food or fuel. And both food and fuel are controlled, in the main, by huge transnational corporations whose only motivation is a fatter bottom line.
For much of man’s history, famine has been constant fear and reality. Here in North America, with an abundance of fertile land, a relatively benign climate, a definitely benign political system and a blessed absence of war, a society has evolved that knows little of want, and for over half a century has had continuous economic growth and progress.
When the astonishing growth of technology over the last several decades is taken into account, we have become, in the eyes of many, the very acme of human progress, the “city on a hill” to the less fortunate countries of the world. This, at the very time when all of our comfortable assumptions are being called into question.
There is an enormous irony in the fact that we have achieved a level of progress that has triggered the envy and emulation of the world, but that, as for instance, China and India grow in power and influence, we decline.
The world cannot sustain the kind of growth seen over the last few years. The terrific escalation in the price of fossil fuel tells us that in loud and unmistakable language.
It is not yet imperative that we employ O’Brien’s ghastly lifeboat example. But is it not time that our leaders looked at the reality of the end of fossil fuel and began to take steps to ensure sufficient supplies to grow and transport our food and fibre to our own citizens?
We are polluting the air and water on a grand scale, taking oil from the tar sands. But by far the greater part of it is being consumed, in many cases frivolously, by the Americans, while Eastern Canada still depends on imported oil.
If it be argued that we have agreed to exactly that scenario under the North American Free Trade Agreement, has nothing changed in the years since that agreement was signed?
It may very well be that we are heading into a world of want and chaos beyond anything that we can imagine. And while the people purporting to be our leaders are engaged in little small-minded battles over their relative leadership qualities, our country is leaderless in many areas that matter.
Agriculture is shortly, if not already, going to be the most important industry in Canada. Yet it is so far below the radar in Ottawa that days can pass before it is mentioned on the floor of the House of Commons.
Canada is self sufficient in many ways. Our resources, used wisely, could provide for ourselves and many others in the dark days that almost certainly lie ahead.
To allow their exploitation for the profiting of greedy corporations, without thought for what lies ahead, is the ultimate in a failure of leadership.
