Where I Stand and What I Stand For - By Elizabeth May 

[Note by the author: I write this having been Leader of the Green Party of Canada for less than a week.  I welcome the opportunity to work with U.S. Greens to advance a Green agenda across borders. This is less an article than an expression of the vision. I hope the Green Party of Canada will win over millions of Canadians.]

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“Without vision, the people perish,” Proverbs 29:18

I hold a vision of this blue green planet, safe and in balance.  I see a peaceful world in which our species, homo sapiens, finally comes to terms with the reality that all of our survival depends on abandoning conflict, working for peace, sharing what we have, and living within our ecological means.  In other words, I believe humanity is on the verge of growing up.

Only the Green Party grasps the future. The Green Party is the only party capable of avoiding the phony short-term issues that dominate our politics to focus on the long term.

The Green Party of Canada is committed to nurturing families and communities.  As leader, I am very committed to integrated policies that focus on the welfare of the child, starting with pre-natal nutrition all the way to safe play grounds and neighbourhoods, to affordable and accessible university education.  We must stop designing our cities around the car and design them around the child.

We will press for economic policies that ensure our prosperity and security in real terms.  Ecological fiscal reform (tax shifting) is key, reducing taxes on things we want, like jobs and income, while taxing things we don’t want, like cancer-causing chemicals, greenhouse gases (GHG) and air pollution.  Our policies are fiscally responsible involving new taxes off-set by reductions elsewhere.

We will press for the protection of the universal Canadian health care system, while addressing the “other side” of health care – prevention. We will work to reduce and, where possible, eliminate exposure to substances that cause cancer, infertility, learning disabilities and reduced immune function.  And we will challenge the trade rules that have made the Canadian government hesitate to ban such chemicals – Chapter 11 of NAFTA.

We will advance workable solutions that demonstrate that Kyoto targets can and must be met.  We will work toward reductions of GHG by 6% below 1990 by 2012 (the first phase Kyoto target), by 30% below 1990 levels by 2020, by 50% below by 2030, and 80% below 1990 by 2050.  These are the reductions that must be made to avoid “tipping points” in the atmosphere from which civilization might not recover.  We will remind other political leaders that the greatest threat to our security is not from foreign terror cells and criminal elements, serious as they may be, but from our addiction to fossil fuels and the clear and present danger presented by the climate crisis.

We will press for anticipatory strategies and planning for those climate impacts that are no longer avoidable.  We must help farmers, ranchers, fishermen, tourism operators, the forest industry—all Canadian economic sectors dependent on a climate system that is under stress—to adapt and avoid loss.

As new leader of the Green Party of Canada, I look forward to working with the global Green Party movement, with parties in over 90 countries and elected members of parliament in Europe, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand.  Together we work to press the nuclear super-powers to meet their obligations for disarmament, to reduce and eliminate the nuclear threat.  We work to shift military budgets to peace-making and peace keeping.  We work to ensure the education, health protection and economic autonomy of women and girls around the world to reverse the dangerous trend of increasing human numbers.

We must have and share a vision of a better world. We must express that a better world is possible.  Some speak of politics as the “art of the possible.” For us as Greens we must embrace the art of the impossible.

Petra Kelly, founder of the German Green Party said:  “We, the generation that faces the next century, can add the solemn injunction ‘’If we don’t do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.’’

What our Species has been through already

We have evolved before.  We were once hairless apes on a vast savannah. No remarkable teeth or claws; no scaly armour; humanity survived through cooperation and sharing.

We have been through much as a species.  200 million of us inhabited the planet when Jesus Christ was born. It took 1200 years to double to 400 million. The doubling time from 3 billion to six was within my lifetime.  We have despoiled the earth.  We have slaughtered our fellows by the millions.  We have been through the Black Death. Through Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

We have painted the Sistine Chapel, written the works of Shakespeare, built Ankor Wat and the mountain city of Machu Pichu.  We are capable of great achievement – music, art, poetry, as well as medical breakthroughs, technological innovation and our greatest expression of what it is to be human – love.

We have evolved and learned.  It was less then two centuries ago that we abolished slavery in North America. A century ago that child labour was banned.  It was less than a century ago that women got the vote. Admittedly appalling practices still persist elsewhere, but humanity evolves.

Now, we, at the end of the Fossil Fuel Era, are emerging to a new reality. The Fossil Fuel Era has been our adolescence – years of partying like there was no tomorrow.  The party’s over. We are ready to make the next leap – as momentous as abolishing slavery or giving women the vote.  We are ready to make the fundamental shifts that allow us to live in balance with our life support systems, respecting each other, achieving social and economic justice, peace and democracy. (See the Earth Charter).

I once asked Maurice Strong how “sustainable development” could escape being an oxymoron.  Like Herman Daly and John Cobb (in “For the Common Good”) Strong agreed that “sustainable growth” was, without question, an oxymoron. Strong, the Canadian who served as Secretary General to both the Stockholm 1972 U.N. Conference on the Human Environment and the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio (the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development, provided a wonderful analogy.  He compared our economies to a growing human.  We all grow as infants and children. Growth is natural and healthy until we reach about 18 years old.  At that point, continued physical growth would be abnormal, even life threatening.  Our physical growth stops, but our development is just beginning – emotionally, intellectually and spiritually.

So too must economic growth stop as we have reached (more accurately exceeded) the carrying capacity of our only home, Planet Earth.  We must now shift from getting more, and more, to doing more with less. As the Earth Charter puts it, we must recognize that once basic physical needs are met, life is primarily about being more, not having more.

Consider our place in Earth history. This metaphor comes from my friend and former CEO of Interface Flooring, Ray Anderson.  If the 3.8 billion years of the history of life on Earth were placed on a time line 1 kilometre long. Humanity enters 2 centimetres from the end.  The Industrial Revolution begins 1/8000ths of a centimetre from now.

In a breathtakingly short period of time, less than the blink of a cosmic eye, a once unexceptional species, we have become the dominant force for change on the face of the earth.

We have taken the life-giving, life-creating, life-nurturing systems of Planet Earth and pushed them into reverse.

We are polluting our life support system with toxic chemicals with generational health impacts. We have caused the largest episode of species extinction since the one that took out the dinosaurs. We have weakened and thinned the ozone layer that protects us from the sun’s most harmful rays.

And, by burning fossil fuels and destroying forests, we have changed the very chemistry of our atmosphere.

We do stand at a precipice in human history.  As noted in the Earth Charter, this is a moment of great peril, but also of enormous promise. Trend lines are not predictions.  Trends can be shifted.  Catastrophe can be averted.  We can beat swords into ploughshares.  We can shift from life-destroying to life-nourishing technologies. We can turn this world around.  We have no other choice.

Elizabeth May was elected Leader of the Green Party of Canada on August 27, 2006 by a 65% majority of the 3000 ballots cast in a contested election. She was Executive Director of the Sierra Club of Canada from 1989 to 2006. She is a member of the Board of the International Institute of Sustainable Development and is former vice-chair of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy. In 1999, Dalhousie University created a permanent chair in her honor: The Elizabeth May Chair in Women’s Health and the Environment. She is the recipient of the United Nations Global 500 award and has received two honorary degrees. She is the author of four books.

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