Return to Magazine Features BETRAYED BY THE PROPHET Disillusioned by David Suzuki's latest pronouncements, Shawn Blore senses an eco-generation gap widening. It's the doers vs. the doomsayers. by Shawn Blore David Suzuki hates my neighbourhood. Not my current one, but the one I want to move to, a community I and others of my generation intend to design and build on a little piece of poisoned industrial land on the southeast shore of False Creek. Suzuki hates this plan, so much so that he's written an open letter condemning the concept, and had his words enlarged and posted two metres high just inside the doors of the Mountain Equipment Co-op. Below his letter there's a petition calling for my new home to be eliminated in favour of a park. We had planned to make this land into a community, one reflecting many of our values: a walkable, dense, mixed neighbourhood of modest dwellings, a neighbourhood that generates its own energy so far as possible, and deals with the mucky business of waste-water treatment on site. The short form label given this kind of neighbourhood is "sustainable." David Suzuki, environmentalist sans pareil, sees no value inany of this. "Vancouver's population of people and cars," he writes in his letter, "already exceeds anything that is sustainable. Our ecological footprint is huge. To talk about 'sustainable housing' for 5,000 more people is an oxymoron. It fails to recognize what sustainable means. I support you in your efforts to make an urban forest in that area." The wound would be deep and bitter, had not the disillusionment been scabbing over for so long. Suzuki was an early idol of mine, as he was to many of my contemporaries, born as we were in the '60s and raised in the early environmental flowering of the 1970s. He was not the first Canadian environmentalist by any means, but he was the first to embrace electronic media - television in particular - and for that he became the prophet of an entire generation. Suzuki's great failing was that he never knew what to do with his converts. In the mid-'80s, in my first or second year of university, I and some 2,000 other undergraduates attended a Suzuki lecture on the campus of Carleton University. As always he was eloquent, tracing the exploitive nature of Western culture back to its original Judeo-Christian sin - the passage in Genesis where Man is told to 'fill the world and subdue it.' Holding up a jar of imaginary' bacteria, Suzuki then warned of the dangers of unchecked exponential growth on a resource-limited ecosystem. The little bacteria might be having the time of their lives now, he warned, but with another two doublings of population, their entire world-jar would be choked with waste and pollution. The crisis for Earth, he said, will come in our lifetime. I, we, all of us Gen X-ers ate it up. When the applause finally quieted, I was one of the first to make my way to the microphone stand for a question. What can we young people do, I asked, the tremour of revelation in my voice, to avoid this great calamity? A preacher at an oldtime revival would have whisked me into the back and shown me how to make religion a part of my every waking moment. Suzuki had a different answer. By the time someone has reached university age, he said, they've been so corrupted, they've got so much invested in the system, that there's really not much hope they can change. That's why, he said, I'm focusing most of my efforts now on children. For them I think there's hope. For us, went the obvious corollary, the only thing waiting was the Pit. Had I been smarter I might have asked just what he was doing there, then, besides padding his bank account with speaking fees. Had I possessed more of the cynicism my generation is said to own in spades, I might have noted other discrepancies in Suzuki's message: the Ontario-born resident of Kitsilano, calling on people to live in one place for life; the jet-setting conference-goer, bemoaning the rise of airplane travel. But I was then neither sharp nor particularly wise; for a time I took his message to heart. The Pit it was, until a purer generation could be raised. Others in my age-group were wiser. They heeded the Suzuki who said change was essential, and ignored the Suzuki who said change was impossible. They educated themselves in the rigorous new disciplines of environmental management systems, energy efficiency, waste water treatment, green building design and environmental economics. By the early 1990s, whether by chance or some grander design, many of these new young technocrats had come to make their homes in Vancouver. These Gen-Xers were Incrementalists: distrustful of grand revolutions, putting their faith instead in small, achievable reforms. In 1996, their eye was drawn to a small piece of city-owned property on the southeast shore of False Creek. More than four years earlier, Simon Fraser University geographer Mark Roseland had come up with the idea of redeveloping the patch of former industrial land as a model energy-efficient community, and planted the notion in the dry-as-dust pages of a GVRD air-pollution paper. To everyone's surprise, this little seed bore fruit. Vancouver city council in 1994 resolved that the 17.5-hectare patch of former industrial land should be redeveloped as a "model sustainable community." It was a bold and visionary move, particularly considering no one on city council or among the city staff knew what sustainable really meant. Fortunately, the Gen-Xers did. Acting on their own, they forged a design committee called the Southeast False Creek Working Group, held a public outreach event called Spring Fest to solicit ideas from the public, and began to formulate their concepts. Slowly, painfully, a plan began to emerge from these discussions. Physically, the development would be dense. That would save on energy and land and building materials, make walking possible and transit cost-effective. Offices and light industrial and retail space would be mixed together with residential areas so inhabitants could live their lives as much as possible in the neighbourhood Sewage would be treated on site, so that the neighbourhood put nothing more into the biosphere than clean water and compost. Passive and active solar heating would be designed into the buildings, making the community largely energy self-sufficient. For the socially minded there would he rooftop and community gardens, nourished by water collected in rain barrels. The gardens would provide a hedge against food security, and a place for folks to gather and gossip. There would also be a community centers, day-care spaces close to people's home, a restored habitat along the shoreline, and countless spots to meet and greet on the street. Most importantly, the success of the development would be evaluated using a new full-cost accounting framework, one that finally internalized many of the costs conventional development now sloughs off onto mother nature, or the rest of us taxpayers at large. The city - and interested onlookers would be able to judge in the cold light of economics whether sustainable development was financially feasible. It was a bold yet coherent vision, as yet unrealized anywhere on the globe. Not surprisingly, quite a few boulders stood in its path: a cautious city council, suspicious of anything even vaguely flaky; powerful city bureaucrats who wanted the land sold off to the highest bidder; an influential city developer, intent on his own vision of a ring of highrises encircling False Creek. Some compromises were necessary, but the project looked set to move forward with most elements intact. That is, until a patrician family of Mount Pleasant homeowners decided, three years into the process, they'd much rather see the land below their doorsteps as a park. They began lobbying the Vancouver park board, and sought the support of local luminaries for their petition. Suzuki's letter was one result: a four line dismissal of years of effort, and the vision of a generation. The casual ignorance of Suzuki's missive is astonishing. Take only his misuse of the term "ecological footprint." The very concept - an analytical tool for measuring human impact on the environment in terms of land area was invented by a Gen-X technocrat, Swiss-born engineer Mathis Wackernagel, while he was completing his PhD at the University of British Columbia. As Wackernagel wrote in the book he co-authored with his thesis supervisor William Rees, "The Ecological Footprint acknowledges that humanity is facing difficult challenges, makes them apparent and directs action towards sustainable living." It's a tool then, for measuring and improving human behaviour. "The Ecological footprint is not," Wackernagel emphasized, "about 'how bad things are.'" Yet here was Suzuki, abusing the term for that very purpose. As for Suzuki's hypocrisy, that was simply breathtaking, particularly in light of the fund-raising letter he recently sent me. "Dear Friend," he begins. "Over the past few years I've read more than 20,000 letters from people all over the world responding to my television and radio programs. Most agree strongly with my message that the life-support systems of the planet are being radically disrupted. "But most people ask: What can I DO?..." Suzuki goes on to identify a four-step program for achieving sustainability: defining the biological necessities of life, developing visions of sustainable societies, outlining a range of choices for making the transition to those societies "without a total upheaval in our lives," and communicating those strategies to a wide audience. Not much different from the False Creek process. So why then is Suzuki campaigning against something he says he needs my money to accomplish? Partly, I believe, for the simple reason that it's not Arcadia, that classical Greco-Roman idyll of pastoral purity Like so many environmentalists of his generation, Suzuki seems to envision a sustainable world made up of small towns and tiny villages only, with the vast majority of humanity eking out a living with hand-made tools on self-supporting peasant farms. But like so many of those who articulate this vision, Suzuki has never actually ever tried it. Two of the champions of the highly urban False Creek vision have. Mark Roseland, the SFU academic who got things going, and junior planner Mark Holland, who daily does battle for the False Creek vision within the confines of city hall, are both Arcadian refugees. As the son of '60s back-to-the-landers, Holland spent years subjected to grubby reality of bush-peasant Utopia. Sticking with such a life, he says, requires the forbearance of a saint, and an ascetic's appetite for suffering. And it doesn't even do much for the Earth. Roseland abandoned his commune in the bush when he realized it was a paradise for fools. "The worst p05sible thing for the world from an environmental perspective," he once told me over coffee at Granville Island, "would be for every-one to head out to live on their own five-acre spread." The other reason Suzuki hates the False Creek vision, I believe, is because deep in his heart he's a Maximalist. His vision is of a grand and glorious broom sweeping the polluted stables clean in a single Herculean stroke. As with all Maximalists, he has nothing but impatience for those who - seeing no such instrument in sight - set to work with the tools at hand to clean up the mess, one scoop at a time if necessary. Tragically, what he's missing is the potential for Southeast False Creek to help some with the sweeping. Vancouverites forget, quite often, our city's reputation in the rest of North America. When American essayist Robert Kaplan - only the latest writer of many - used our city as a shining example of the shape of things to come in his book An Empire Wilderness, it was a cause of some surprise among Vancouverites. But to Americans, the concept of Vancouver as avatar of the.2lst century seemed only right and proper. If Vancouver does go ahead and build a model sustainable community in such a high-profile location, its influence might even match that of the 1893 White City exposition in Chicago, which resulted in little neo-classical buildings going up all over North America. Planners, engineers, designers and tourists from around the world might come to Vancouver to see what we have done. If we do it well the template will be copied across this, continent, and carried over the Pacific to Asia and Oceania. The effect will be tremendous. And measurable. Estimating conservatively, it's likely that a Southeast False Creek dweller's ecological footprint would be at least 25-per-cent smaller than the standard Suburban-driving suburbanite's. Now consider that the vast majority of the world resources are consumed in the first world. If the False Creek model were to catch on and spread to the point that, say, 10 per cent of new housing in the North America incorporated substantial elements of the False Creek model, the result might be as much as single percentage point drop in world resource consumption. Not enough. Far from it. But not bad for one little project. It certainly beats waving a little jar over your head and wailing about the coming apocalypse. Barring further interventions, the False Creek plan is scheduled to go before Vancouver city council in July. And so, may I post a six-foot-high sign of my own? Dear Dr. Suzuki, your performance with regards to the proposed sustainable community in southeast False Creek has confused and discouraged a group of politicians who were bravely following the proper course. You've damaged - perhaps fatally - efforts to create a better kind of city. To improve things, butt out. Let another, quieter, more practical generation take up the hard job of making real improvements to the world. There is no better place to begin, we believe, than the little strip of poisoned industrial land, on the southeast shore of False Creek. Shawn Blore writes frequently about sustainability issues    << Back to Magazine Pieces