When you have gone as badly off course as we have, moderate actions don’t lead to moderate outcomes. They lead to dangerously radical ones.
SEPTEMBER 2016
LAFONTAINE-BALDWIN LECTURE, TORONTO
MY DIRTY CANADIAN SECRET—AND PLEASE don’t turf me out of this lovely hall for it—is that I’m actually American. I even brought my passport to prove it. I also have a Canadian one. By law, when I travel into the United States, I have to show the one with the eagle on it. And when I travel back home to Toronto, I show the one with the elaborate coat of arms with lots of British things on it (as well as a smattering of maple leaves that you can’t really make out).
Let me explain this duality. My parents are both Americans, born in the United States, which at the time gave their kids de facto US citizenship. I, on the other hand, was born in Montreal, and I have lived in Canada my entire life—except for a handful of years before I was five. In my twenties and thirties, I was always very clear that my Americanness was a technicality, not an identity. I rarely mentioned it, even to good friends. I checked the “Canada” box on forms and stood in the “Canada” line at the airport. And when I gave speeches and interviews in the United States, I said “your government,” not “our government.” And even though my parents told me I was entitled to one, I never applied for a US passport. I sort of liked not having physical proof of my Americanness.
So, what changed? In 2011, I was in Washington, DC, at a protest against the Keystone XL Pipeline, which, if built, would carry tar sands bitumen from Alberta to the Gulf Coast.I The action in Washington included civil disobedience, a decision, by thousands of people over a two-week period, to peacefully trespass in front of the White House and get arrested. No non-Americans were supposed to participate in the civil disobedience part of the action, since getting arrested in the United States can have serious implications for your ability to reenter the country.
But something happened on that day in Washington: a delegation of Indigenous people from Northern Alberta, whose traditional territory has been badly damaged by oil and gas development, decided to risk the repercussions and get arrested anyway. Impulsively, and without warning my husband, Avi (which he always reminds me of), and I decided to join them.
It was a good day. I met some amazing people in the paddy wagon and at the bar afterward. After we were all released, it occurred to me that I might have trouble getting that US passport now. I was fine with it but decided to see what would happen if I tried. Much to my surprise, it worked, and that’s how I finally got a US passport in my forties.
So, that explains the American part, but it doesn’t explain why my American family came to Canada in the first place. That’s a whole other story, also involving jail. It was 1967, my father was finishing up medical school, and both my parents were active against the war in Vietnam. Like many of his peers, my father did everything he could to avoid the draft: he filed for Conscientious Objector status, he tried to find an alternative form of service, you name it. It didn’t work, and he found himself faced with a choice between going to Vietnam, going to jail, or going to Canada. So . . . here we are.
On car trips, my parents would regale us kids with stories of their escape, which to us sounded like a high-octane thriller: the letter from the army, the shotgun wedding, the secrecy to keep others from being implicated in their crime. We heard about how they boarded a late-night flight that landed in Montreal at midnight because they had heard that the Francophone anti-American customs agents worked the graveyard shift. Then—phew—they were waved through. Here’s how my father recalls their arrival: “In twenty minutes we were landed immigrants, on the path to Canadian citizenship!”
Growing up in Canada with American lefty parents gave me a pretty rosy picture of this country. I heard a lot about the reasons they’d left the United States: the militarism, the jingoism, the millions without health insurance. And a lot about the things that drew them to, and kept us in, Canada. Like Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau declaring Canada “a refuge from militarism,” universal public health care, public support for media and the arts. (My mother landed a staff job at the National Film Board where she was paid by the government to make subversive feminist documentaries.) In retrospect, it was a tiny bit like growing up in one of those Michael Moore films that show Canada as a utopian, alter-USA, where no one locks their doors, and no one gets shot, and no one waits to see a doctor, and everyone is super nice to each other all the time.
It wasn’t quite that cartoonish. But there was a lot of stuff missing in the American-filtered stories of Canada that shaped my childhood and my own national pride. I now know, for instance, that while Canadians were feeling righteous about not joining the war in Vietnam and welcoming draft dodgers, Canadian companies were selling weapons and billions in other materials to supply the US war effort, including napalm and Agent Orange. Having it both ways is something of a Canadian military tradition. We did it again in 2003, when Canada very publicly did not participate in the 2003 invasion of Iraq because the attack did not have UN approval—and then, far less publicly, supported the subsequent occupation with exchange officers and warships.
It can be painful to look too closely at the stories that make us feel good, especially when they are part of the intimate narratives that mold our identities. I struggle with this still. I agree with my parents that our health care system and support for public media and the arts are part of what make us different from the United States. But it’s also true that these institutions and traditions are deeply diminished after decades of neglect. These days, my father spends much of his retirement working to defend our public health system against encroaching US-style privatizations.
There is something else about my happy Canadian story that needs some poking. That frictionless experience at the airport—twenty minutes to landed immigrant status. That very likely had a lot to do with the fact that my parents, like many of the draft dodgers, were white, middle class, and college educated. These were not the only people fleeing war that Canada welcomed in this period; we also received sixty thousand Vietnamese refugees.
But this window of openness was relatively brief and a response, in part, to our shameful refusal to accept Jewish refugees during the Second World War. In recent decades, black and brown people on the bombardment end of illegal wars, including the wars we have helped fuel with weapons or soldiers or both, most certainly do not get landed immigrant status in twenty minutes, free to start work on Monday morning. Thousands are thrown in jail for years, charged with absolutely no crime. Many are in maximum-security prisons, with no idea when they will be released, a practice that has been repeatedly criticized by the United Nations.
The stories we tell about who we are as a nation, and the values that define us, are not fixed. They change as facts change. They change as the balance of power in society changes. Which is why regular people, not just governments, need to be active participants in this process of retelling and reimagining our collective stories, symbols, and histories.
And this is happening, too. For instance, all around Toronto, where we gather, the Ogimaa Mikana Project has been replacing official street signs with their Anishinaabe-language versions. They also put up a billboard near where I live reminding passersby that our rapidly gentrifying neighborhood is the subject of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement to peaceably share and care for the land and water. It’s a very public attempt to change the collective story or, more accurately, to lift up older stories that are still alive but are usually drowned out by the barrage of louder, newer messages we receive day in and day out.
Interrogating the stories we have long taken for granted is healthy, especially the comforting ones. When the narratives and mythologies still feel helpful and true, resolving to do more to live up to them is also healthy. But when they no longer serve us, when they stand in the way of where we need to go, then we need to be willing to let them rest and tell some different stories.
With that in mind, I want to share with you some reflections on one attempt at collective retelling—and how it clashed with some very powerful national narratives at the heart of the global ecological crisis. It’s a project that I have been involved with called the Leap Manifesto. Many of you are aware of it. I know some of you have signed it. But the story behind the Leap is not very well known.II
The Leap came out of a meeting that was held in Toronto in May of 2015, attended by sixty organizers and theorists, from across the country, representing a cross section of movements: labor, climate, faith, Indigenous, migrant, women, antipoverty, anti-incarceration, food justice, housing rights, transit, and green tech. The catalyst for the gathering was a sudden drop in the price of oil, which had sent shock waves through our economy because of its reliance on revenues from the export of high-priced oil. The focus of our meeting was how we could harness that economic shock, which vividly showed the danger of hanging your fortunes on volatile raw resources, to kick-start a rapid shift to a renewables-based economy. For a long time, we had been told that we had to choose between a healthy environment and a strong economy; when the price of oil collapsed, we ended up with neither. It seemed like a good moment to propose a radically different model.
At the time that we met, a federal election campaign was just gearing up, and it was already clear that none of the major parties was going to run on a platform of a rapid shift to a post-carbon economy. Both the Liberals and the New Democratic Party (NDP), then vying to unseat the governing Conservatives, were following the playbook that you needed to signal your “seriousness” and pragmatism by picking at least one major new oil pipeline and cheering for it. There were vague promises being offered on climate action but nothing guided by science, and nothing that presented a transition to a green economy as a chance to create hundreds of thousands of good jobs for the people who need them most.
So, we decided to intervene in the debate and write a kind of people’s platform, the sort of thing we wished we could vote for but that wasn’t yet on offer. And as we sat in a circle for two days and looked each other in the eye, we realized that this was new territory for contemporary social movements. We had all, or most of us, been part of broad coalitions before, opposing a particularly unpopular politician’s austerity agenda, or coming together to fight against an unwanted trade deal or an illegal war.
But those were “no” coalitions, and we wanted to try something different: a “yes” coalition. And that meant we needed to create a space to do something we never do, which is dream together about the world that we actually want.
I am sometimes described as the author of the Leap Manifesto, but that’s not true. My role was to listen, and notice the common themes. One of the clearest themes was the need to move from the national narrative that many of us had grown up with, that was based on a supposedly divine right to endlessly extract from the natural world as if there were no limit and no such thing as a breaking point. What we needed to do, it seemed to us, was set that story aside and tell a different one based on a duty to care: to care for the land, water, air—and to care for one another.
Largely because of the diversity in the room, we were also conscious that if we wanted a genuinely broad “yes” coalition, we couldn’t fall back on a vision that was nostalgic or backward looking—a prelapsarian yearning for a seventies-era nation that never respected Indigenous sovereignty and that excluded the voices of so many communities of color, that often put too much faith in a centralized state and never actually reckoned with ecological limits.
So, rather than looking back, we started our platform with where we wanted to end up:
“We could live in a country powered entirely by renewable energy, woven together by accessible public transit, in which the jobs and opportunities of this transition are designed to systematically eliminate racial and gender inequality. Caring for one another and caring for the planet could be the economy’s fastest growing sectors. Many more people could have higher wage jobs with fewer work hours, leaving us ample time to enjoy our loved ones and flourish in our communities.”
The idea was to first paint a clear picture of where we wanted to go, and then get into the nitty-gritty of what it would take to get to that place. But before I get into those details, I want to return to the challenge of official stories.
You can tell from the name, the Leap, that it is about big and rapid change. That’s why we chose it as our title: Because we know that when it comes to climate change, we have procrastinated for so long and made the problem so much worse that small steps, even if they are in the right direction, are still going to land us in a very deep hole. However, by framing our project as one of transformation, not incrementalism, we also put ourselves in a head-on collision with a story cherished by a lot of powerful interests in this country: that we are a moderate people, steady-as-she-goes kind of folks. In a world of hotheads, we like to tell ourselves that we split the difference, choose the middle path. No sudden movement for us, and certainly no leaping.
Now, it’s a very nice story, and moderation is an asset in all sorts of circumstances. It’s a good approach to alcohol consumption, for instance, and hot fudge sundaes. The problem, and the reason we chose this very un-moderate title quite consciously, is that when it comes to climate change, incrementalism and moderation are actually a huge problem. Because they will lead us, ironically, to a very extreme, hot, and cruel future. When you have gone as badly off course as we have, moderate actions don’t lead to moderate outcomes. They lead to dangerously radical ones.
This was not always the case. The first intergovernmental meeting to talk about the climate crisis and the need for industrialized nations to lower emissions was held in 1988. Canada hosted it. It took place in this very city, and it came up with some fantastic recommendations. If we had listened to them, if we had all started cutting our emissions three decades ago, we could have taken it nice and slow: chipped away at our carbon footprint, knocked it down a couple of percentage points a year. A very moderate, gradual, centrist type of phaseout.
We didn’t do that. We—not just our country but virtually every wealthy and fast-developing nation—did not do that. In fact, as governments met year after year to talk about lowering emissions, emissions went up by more than 40 percent. Here in Canada, we opened up huge new fossil fuel frontiers, and developed technology to dig up some of the highest-carbon oil on the planet. We didn’t back off on the drivers of climate disruption; we doubled down. That was not very moderate—it was actually quite extreme.
So, now the problem is much worse. Worse because emissions have exploded, so we have to cut them far more deeply to bring them to safe levels. And worse because we have no time left, so we need to start these cuts immediately. That’s what happens when you kick the can down the road enough times. You run out of road.
So, now we really do have to take radical action. Sudden and sweeping action, never mind how profoundly it conflicts with those comforting stories we tell ourselves about our centrist souls. Call it what you want: a Green New Deal, the Great Transition, a Marshall Plan for Planet Earth. But make no mistake: This is not an add-on, one more item on a governmental to-do list; nor is the planet some special interest to satisfy. The kind of transformation that is now required will happen only if it is treated as a civilizational mission, in our country and in every major economy on earth.
One thing we were very conscious of when we drafted the Leap Manifesto is that emergencies are vulnerable to abuses of power, and progressives are not immune to this by any means. There is a long and painful history of environmentalists, whether implicitly or explicitly, sending the message that “Our cause is so big, and so urgent, and since it encompasses everyone and everything, it should take precedence over everything and everyone else.” Between the lines: “First we’ll save the planet and then we will worry about poverty, police violence, gender discrimination, and racism.”
In fact, that is a great way to build a very small, weak, and homogenous movement. Because poverty, war, racism, and sexual violence are all existential threats if you and your community are in the crosshairs. So, inspired by the climate justice movement growing around the world, we tried something else. We resolved that if we were going to radically change our economy, to make it a lot cleaner in the face of climate catastrophe, then we had to seize this opportunity to make it a lot fairer at the same time, on all these different fronts. That way nobody was being asked to choose between which existential threat mattered most to them. I’ll give you a few quick examples.
Unsurprisingly, for a climate-focused document, we called for big investments in green infrastructure: renewables, efficiency, transit, high-speed rail. All of it to get to a 100 percent renewable economy by mid-century and 100 percent renewable energy well before that. We knew that all this would be a huge job creator—investing in these sectors creates six to eight times more jobs than putting that money in oil and gas. So, we called for public money to retrain those workers who face losing their jobs in extractive sectors, so that they are ready to work in the next economy, and the unions around the table told us that it was crucial for workers to be democratically involved in designing those retraining programs. So, that’s all in the platform: basic principles of a justice-based transition.
But we also wanted something more. When we talk about “green jobs”—and we talk about them a lot—most of us picture a guy in a hard hat putting up a solar array. Sure, that is one kind of green job, and we need lots of them. But there are plenty of other jobs that are already low-carbon. For instance, looking after elderly and sick people doesn’t burn a lot of carbon. Making art doesn’t burn a lot of carbon. Teaching kids is low-carbon. Day care is low-carbon. And yet this work, overwhelmingly done by women, tends to be undervalued, underpaid, and is frequently the target of government cutbacks. So, we decided to deliberately extend the usual definition of a green job to anything useful and enriching to our communities that doesn’t burn a lot of fossil fuels. As one participant said, “Nursing is renewable energy. Education is renewable energy.” Moreover, this kind of work makes our communities stronger, more humane, and, therefore, better able to navigate the shocks that are headed our way in a climate-disrupted future.
Another key plank in the Leap Manifesto is what is known as “energy democracy,” the idea that renewable energy, whenever possible, should be public- or community-owned and controlled so that the profits and benefits of new industries are far less concentrated than they are with fossil fuels. We were inspired by Germany’s energy transition, which has seen hundreds of cities and towns taking back control over their energy grids from private companies, as well as an explosion of green energy cooperatives, where the profits from power generation stay in the community to pay for essential services.
But we decided that we need more than energy democracy, that we also need energy justice, even energy reparations. Because the way energy generation and other dirty industries have developed over the past couple of centuries has forced the poorest communities to bear a vastly disproportionate share of the environmental burdens while deriving far too little of the economic benefits. Which is why the Leap states that “Indigenous Peoples and others on the front lines of polluting industrial activity should be first to receive public support for their own clean energy projects.”
Some find these kinds of connections daunting. Lowering emissions is hard enough, we are told—why weigh it down by trying to fix so much else at the same time? Our response is that if we are going to repair our relationship to the land by shifting away from endless resource extraction, why wouldn’t we begin to repair our relationships with one another in the process? For a very long time, we have been offered policies that amputate the ecological crises from the economic and social systems that are driving them. That is precisely the model that has failed to yield results. Holistic transformation, on the other hand, has never been tried on a national scale.
Another example. The Leap explicitly acknowledges the role that our government’s foreign policies have played, and continue to play, in pushing people to leave their homes and seek asylum in other countries. Some are pushed by the dire economic impacts of trade deals that our government supported, some by mines that our companies have built. Some are pushed by wars that our government helped wage or fund.
All these—the trade deals, the wars, the mines—are major contributors to the increase in global greenhouse gas emissions, and now climate change itself is also forcing people to leave their homes. Which is why we decided to reframe migrant rights as a climate justice issue. We clearly stated that we need to open our borders to many more migrants and refugees, and that all workers, regardless of immigration status, should have full labor rights and protections. We need to do this not out of charity or as an expression of the goodness in our hearts, but because climate change, in its global complexity, teaches us that our fates are, and always have been, interconnected. Underneath it all, this is about what kind of people we want to be as the impacts of our collective action become undeniable. It’s a moral and spiritual question as much as an economic and political one.
We knew that the greatest obstacle our platform would face was the force of austerity logic—the message we have all received, over decades, that governments are perpetually broke, so why even bother dreaming of a genuinely equitable society? With this in mind, we worked closely with a team of economists to come up with a parallel document that showed exactly how we would raise the revenues to pay for our plan.
Before releasing the platform to the public, we approached many organizations and high-profile individuals. Again and again, we heard: Yes. This is who we want to be. Let’s push our politicians. Canadian caution be damned. National icons stood with us without hesitation: Neil Young. Leonard Cohen. The novelist Yann Martel wrote back that it should be “shouted from the rooftops.” This was a rare document that could be signed by Greenpeace, the head of the Canadian Labour Congress, and Indigenous elders like the famed Haida spokesperson and master carver Gujaaw. More than two hundred organizations in all.
Given this initial enthusiasm, we were frankly a little surprised by what happened when we launched the platform into the wider world. “Shit storm” would be an understatement.
First, our former prime minister Brian Mulroney came out of retirement to declare the Leap “a new philosophy of economic nihilism” that “must be resisted and defeated.” Then, after the NDP voted to endorse its spirit and debate its specifics, the sitting premiers of three provinces, from three different political parties, came out to denounce it. “Hundreds of towns would be wiped off the map. Tomorrow. And turned into ghost towns,” one said. “An existential threat,” said another. And finally, from the (now former) NDP Premier of Alberta: “A betrayal.”
Interestingly, none of this seems to have had much of an impact at the grassroots. People keep adding their names to the platform. They keep starting local Leap chapters. And a poll conducted at the peak of the backlash found that a majority of Green, NDP, and Liberal voters supported the core ideas in the Leap Manifesto. Even 20 percent of Conservatives. I think this reveals a pretty interesting divide: A whole lot of people of different political persuasions read the Leap and thought it sounded eminently sensible, inspiring even. But our elites across party lines agreed that it sounded like the end of the world.
So, what can we make of that chasm? It was really just one line in the Leap that caused most of the uproar, the one that said that we can’t build any more fossil fuel “infrastructure that locks us into increased extraction decades into the future.” The “no pipelines” line.
Let’s unpack that a little. From a scientific perspective, it’s not at all controversial. In Paris, governments negotiated a climate treaty that pledged to keep warming below 2°C while pursuing “efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C.” (It was Justin Trudeau’s team that fought to get that more ambitious language in there.)
To put that in perspective, we have already warmed the planet by roughly 1°C from where we were before humans starting burning coal on an industrial scale. So, if 1.5–2°C is our goal, then that puts us on a very constrained carbon budget. Staying within it—and scientists have been very clear on this—requires that we leave a whole lot of our current carbon reserves in the ground. For particularly dirty forms of fossil fuel, like Alberta’s bitumen, it means about 85–90 percent of it has to stay in the ground. This is peer-reviewed research that has been published in the journal Nature and elsewhere; it’s not contested.
Same goes for opening up new fossil fuel frontiers with technologies like fracking. And our politicians don’t dispute it. They admit that their current emission-reduction targets—and this is true not just for Canada—take us way beyond the temperature goals they set in Paris. They do not add up to a carbon budget of 1.5–2°C. They add up to warming of 3–4°C—and that’s if we manage to meet those targets. A big if.
We can have a debate about whether it is worth doing the very difficult things necessary to keep from warming the planet by 3–4°C (which, by the way, climate scientists have said is incompatible with anything you could describe as organized civilization). It would be an interesting debate to have. But that is not the debate we are having. Instead, when people argue for climate policies that are guided by science and by our own government’s very publicly stated goals, they are basically told to shut up and stop destroying the country.
This is not true everywhere. Other countries are moving ahead with some of the policies that actually reflect scientific realities. Germany and France have both banned fracking, for instance. They both have a long way to go to bring their emissions in line with Paris Agreement temperature targets, but the aversion to talking about leaving carbon in the ground is not nearly as powerful in Europe as it is here. And we can’t just blame this on the fact that we have a big oil and gas sector with lots of jobs on the line. Other countries do as well, and they are much farther along than us. Even the United Arab Emirates, a straight-up petrostate, is preparing for the end of oil, funneling tens of billions in oil wealth into new investments in renewables.
It’s not just Canada that can’t seem to have a rational debate about ecological limits. The debate is equally unhinged in Australia and the United States, with large segments of the political and pundit class denying the science outright—and the more this happens, the more the rest of the world is held back. I’ve been puzzling over what accounts for these geographic discrepancies. And I think it comes back to where we started: those official national narratives that tell countries what values define them, and the kind of power structures that these narratives nurture and maintain.
When we launched the Leap, we hit up against a narrative that runs extremely deep, one that predates the founding of young countries like ours. It begins with the arrival of European explorers, at a time when their home nations had slammed into hard ecological limits: great forests gone, big game hunted to extinction.
It was in this context that the so-called New World was imagined as a sort of spare continent, to use for parts. (They didn’t call it New France and New England by accident.)
And what parts! Here seemed to be a bottomless treasure trove—of fish, fowl, fur, giant trees, and, later, metals and fossil fuels. In North America and, later, in Australia, these riches covered territories so vast that it was impossible to fathom their boundaries. We were the place of endlessness—and whenever we began to run low, our governments just moved the frontier west.
The very existence of these lands appeared to come as a divine sign: Forget ecological boundaries. Thanks to this body-double continent, there seemed to be no way to exhaust nature’s bounty. Looking back at early European accounts of what would become Canada, it becomes clear that explorers and early settlers truly believed that their scarcity fears were gone for good. The waters off the coast of Newfoundland were so full of fish that they “stayed the passage” of John Cabot’s ships. For Quebec’s Father Charlevoix in 1720, “The number of [cod] seems equal to that of the grains of sand that cover the bank.” And then there were the great auks. The feathers of the penguin-like bird were coveted for mattresses, and on rocky islands, particularly off Newfoundland, they were found in huge numbers. As Jacques Cartier put it in 1534, there were islands “as full of birds as any field or meadow is of grasse.”
Again and again, the words inexhaustible and infinite were used to describe the Eastern forests of great pines, the giant cedars of the Pacific Northwest, all manner of fish. Another common refrain is that the natural bounty is so great, there is really no point in worrying about managing this treasure trove to prevent depletion. There was so much that there was a glorious freedom to be careless. Thomas Huxley (the English biologist known as “Darwin’s bulldog”) told the 1883 International Fisheries Exhibition that “the cod fishery . . . are inexhaustible; that is to say nothing we do seriously affects the number of fish. Any attempt to regulate these fisheries seems consequently . . . to be useless.”
That’s a lot of famous last words, given what we now know. Given that by 1800 the great auks were completely wiped out. Given that beaver stocks began to crash in Eastern Canada soon after. Given that Newfoundland’s supposedly inexhaustible cod was declared “commercially extinct” in 1992. As for our inexhaustible old-growth forests: virtually wiped out here in Southern Ontario. More than 91 percent of the biggest and best stands on Vancouver Island, gone.
Of course, a great deal of this is not unique to Canada. The early US economy was brutally extractive, too.III But there were some key differences. The southern slave economy was based on the extraction of forced human labor, used to clear and cultivate land to feed the rapidly industrializing North. Though slavery did exist in Canada, our primary role in the transatlantic slave trade was as a supplier: Much of that supposedly endless cod was salted and shipped to the British West Indies (Jamaica, Barbados, British Guiana, Trinidad, Grenada, Dominica, Saint Vincent, and Saint Lucia). For wealthy plantation owners, cod was an invaluable source of cheap protein for enslaved Africans.
Our economic niche was always voraciously devouring wilderness—both animals and plants. Canada was an extractive company, the Hudson’s Bay fur trading company, before it was a country. And that has shaped us in ways we have yet to begin to confront. But it does go some way toward explaining why it caused such an uproar when a group of us got together and said: Actually, we have hit the hard limits of what the earth can take; we have to leave resources in the ground, even when they are still profitable. The time for a new story, and a new economic model, is now.
Because such enormous fortunes have been built in North America purely on the extraction of wild animals, intact forest, interred metals, and fossil fuels, our economic elites have grown accustomed to seeing the natural world as their God-given larder. What we discovered with the Leap is that when someone or something (like climate science) comes along and challenges that claim, it doesn’t feel like a difficult truth. It feels, as we learned, like an existential attack.
The economic historian Harold Innis (who never reckoned with Canada’s crucial role in the slave trade) warned of this almost a century ago. Canada’s extreme dependence on exporting raw natural resources, he argued, stunted our country’s development at “the staples phase.” This is true for large parts of the US economy as well—Louisiana and Texas for oil, West Virginia for coal. This reliance on raw resources makes economies intensely vulnerable to monopolies and to outside economic shocks. It’s why the term banana republic is not considered a compliment.
Though Canada doesn’t think of itself like that, and some regions have diversified, our economic history tells another story. Over the centuries, we have careened from bonanzas to busts. In the late 1800s, the beaver trade collapsed when European elites suddenly lost their taste for top hats made of pelts and moved on to smoother silk. Last year, the economy of Alberta went into free fall because of a sudden drop in the price of oil. We used to get yanked around by the whims of British aristocrats; now it’s Saudi princes. I’m not sure that counts as progress.
The trouble isn’t just the commodity roller coaster. It’s that the stakes grow larger with each boom-bust cycle. The frenzy for cod crashed a species; the frenzy for tar sands oil and fracked gas is helping to crash the planet.
And yet despite these enormous stakes, we can’t seem to stop. The dependence on commodities continues to shape the body politic of settler-colonial states like Canada, the United States, and Australia. And in all three countries, it will continue to confound attempts to heal relations with First Nations. That’s because the basic power dynamic—our countries relying on the wealth embedded in their land—remains unchanged. For instance, when the fur trade was the backbone of wealth production in the northern parts of this continent, Indigenous culture and relationships to the land became a profound threat to the lust for extraction. (Never mind that there would have been no trade without Indigenous hunting and trapping skills.) Which is why attempts to sever those relationships to the land were so systematic. Residential schools were one part of that system. So were the missionaries who traveled with fur traders, preaching a religion that cast Indigenous cosmologies as sinful forms of animism—never mind, once again, that the worldviews they attempted to exterminate have a huge amount to teach us about how to regenerate the natural world, rather than endlessly deplete it.
Today in Canada, we have federal and provincial governments that talk a lot about “truth and reconciliation” for those crimes. But this will remain a cruel joke if nonindigenous Canadians do not confront the “why” behind those human rights abuses. And the why, as the official Truth and Reconciliation Commission report states, is simple enough: “The Canadian government pursued this policy of cultural genocide because it wished to divest itself of its legal and financial obligations to Aboriginal people and gain control over their land and resources.”
The goal, in other words, was always to remove all barriers to unrestrained resource extraction. This is not ancient history. Across the country, Indigenous land rights remain the single greatest barrier to planet-destabilizing resource extraction, from pipelines to clear-cut logging. We’re still trying to get the land, and what’s underneath. We see it south of the border as well, in the Standing Rock Sioux’s pitched struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline. This was true two hundred years ago, and it is true today.
When governments talk of truth and reconciliation, and then push unwanted infrastructure projects, please remember this: There can be no truth unless we admit to the “why” behind centuries of abuse and land theft. And there can be no reconciliation when the crime is still in progress.
Only when we have the courage to tell the truth about our old stories will the new stories arrive to guide us. Stories that recognize that the natural world and all its inhabitants have limits. Stories that teach us how to care for each other and regenerate life within those limits. Stories that put an end to the myth of endlessness once and for all.
I. Despite Donald Trump’s multiple attempts to push through the $8 billion pipeline via executive order, it remained tied up in court challenges as this book went to press.
II. The Leap was, in many ways, a kind of proto-Green New Deal plan, an attempt to link ambitious climate action with a transition to a much fairer and more inclusive economy. The strengths and weaknesses of our experiment may be useful as the Green New Deal model is attempted in different countries.
III. As historian Greg Grandin recently argued in The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, the promise of advancing through an ever-expanding open frontier has been the primary way that US politicians have resolved social and ecological conflicts. Whenever the soil was depleted by careless farming, or one group of poor (white) immigrants demanded greater equality, the response was to violently seize yet more land from Native Americans and expand the sphere. But now the figurative wall has been reached, and there is no more frontier available, whether geographic, financial, or atmospheric. Grandin argues that Donald Trump and his border wall should be understood as a reaction to the crashing of the frontier myth: with no frontier left to conquer, Trump turns his full attention to hoarding US wealth for his chosen group, while locking out everyone else. This is why outmoded national narratives cannot be left to die quietly. They need to be challenged with new stories that reflect how our knowledge has evolved and who we want to be—or else they’ll turn septic and even more dangerous.