EARTHWATCH

By Paul Henderson

ENVIRONMENTALISM MADE SEXY

The audience at Convocation Hall in June listening to “Bobby” — as Mayor David Miller called him in his introduction — hung on his every word, applauded his one-liners, and laughed at his jokes. The crowd seemed truly swept up in the Kennedy charisma. Much of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s speech seemed a series of carefully crafted one-liners pulled together with surprisingly coherent, yet unscripted, talk.

But this was not a political speech full of empty promises, vague generalizations, polished with the veneer of a sparkling smile. Kennedy has a powerful message and he is more than a mouth-piece and a pretty face. As president of the Waterkeeper Alliance and chief prosecuting attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper he is not simply doing the lecture circuit, he is out there targeting polluters, bringing them to court, and making them pay.

Kennedy was the Keynote Speaker at the three-day Natural City symposium at the University of Toronto. His message: “It’s not about protecting the fishes and the birds for their own sake. The environment is the infrastructure of our communities.” For him environmentalism is not about a spotted owl saving a forest nor is it about some sort of benevolence. Kennedy’s environmentalism is simple self-interest, with the long view.

One of Kennedy’s great strengths — though it may be a turn-off for some — is that he speaks the language of big business, of lawyers, of conservatives. And in that language he shows that protecting the water and the air is not frivolous but is forward-thinking. Dumping PCBs into the river is not bad because it is bad for the trout. Dumping PCBs is bad for communities and for people because it will kill the rivers we rely on. If you can’t breathe the air or drink the water it doesn’t matter if you are a social conservative or a radical anarchist.

“ENVIRONMENTAL INJURY IS DEFICIT SPENDING”

What Kennedy seemed to want to get across as much as anything else is that the current administration in the U.S. is slowly crushing their environmental laws. But more importantly the us-versus-them stance of the Bush administration – and some of those in the environmental movement – is an anachronism.

“The shibboleth of this administration is the notion that we have to choose between economics and the environment,” he said. “Good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy...All they see is the cost of compliance to their contributors.”

In the 90s the Clinton administration was criminally prosecuting the coal industry. That industry gave $48 million to Bush, he got into office, and killed the prosecution.

“I saw something from a plane flying over the Appalachians that if all Americans could see, there would be a revolution.” What he saw was enormous “half billion dollar machines cutting off the top of the mountains to get to the coal seams.” This method of coal mining entails dumping the rock into the streams and creeks below, which is illegal, according to Kennedy. The problem in the U.S. — as in Canada — is a lack of enforcement.

This is where his organization, the Waterkeeper Alliance, comes in, defending various water sources using a 19th century law that allows individuals or groups to civilly sue polluters. One thing about Kennedy is that he projects a real optimism and a sense of possibility. A lot of good laws are on the books thanks to the environmental movement that started on Earth Day back in 1970. Many countries around the world followed suit with environmental protection laws, but those that didn’t were mostly not democracies. That’s not a coincidence.

“There is a direct relationship between environmental degradation and tyranny,” he said. Democracy is antithetical to corporate profit-making; fascism is the perfect companion system to big business (as it is operated today).

Kennedy makes it clear that he is no hippie, tree-hugger, nor is he in the slightest anti-business, or anti-industry. The major issue to him is subsidies.

“There is no stronger advocate for free market capitalism than me,” he told the crowd. “You get true efficiencies in the free market. You show me a polluter, and I’ll show you a subsidy.”

Corporations are — to steal a term from Joel Bakan’s The Corporation — “externalizing machines,” meaning they aim to keep profits to themselves while making someone else pay the costs of doing business.

Kennedy’s example is General Electric, which was dumping PCBs in the Hudson River in New York. When GE dumped PCBs in the river they saved the cost of eliminating the PCBs. This is what business does, it’s taught at all business schools. But the cost didn’t go away. The community paid the costs in all kinds of ways from unquantifiable things like decreased quality of life to concrete expenses such as increased water treatment costs, a dead fishery, and decreased property values.

“It’s all about the subsidies,” he said. “There is a big difference between a free market democracy and corporate crony capitalism.” The former has never existed in Canada or the U.S. and the latter is all either country has ever known.

More on the Natural City Symposium

Of course, this conference wasn’t just about RFK Jr. The point of the conference was to challenge the world view (as it seems to exist, according to the organizers) that puts cities in opposition to nature. The supposition is that environmental issues are mainly focused on land and air and water in pristine wilderness areas, while green issues in cities are overlooked.

But most people live in cities. At confederation about 80% of the population lived in communities of 10,000 or less. Now it is the opposite with 80% living in cities, according to John Godfrey, Parliamentary Secretary for Cities and recently re-elected Liberal MP for Don Valley West.

The Greater Toronto Area sprawls across 7,000 square kilometres and is home to about five million people. Some estimate that about one third of the Canadian population lives within a four hour drive of Toronto.

If it wasn’t for the signs on the 401 telling you that you are entering Oshawa, Ajax, Toronto, Mississauga, Burlington, the industrially, residentially, and commercially paved world of the GTA seems as one flowing unit.

Compared to Ontario at about one million square kilometres and Canada at 10 million square kilometres, the Greater Toronto Area covers a miniscule portion of the entire nation. But compare again to Japanese, European, or even some American cities, and we are still pretty loosely packed here in T.O. It seems to many that Toronto has a lot of people in a small area, but to some we could, and should, have more. Increased densification of the urban area is seen by many as a way to decrease the environmental damage caused by insatiable sprawl. According to many of the speakers at the Natural City Symposium it is this sprawl coupled with the required automobile usage out to those ever-burgeoning suburbs that is the bane of the environment.

There is, though, a chicken and the egg question regarding suburbs and the environment. Standard logic suggests that a “need” for space led to developers snatching up farm land, municipalities salivating over property taxes rezoning as fast as possible, and then downtown workers packing up and moving out to Oakville, Markham, and Brampton. But according to former Metropolitan Toronto Planning Commissioner, David Gurin, sprawl is less a symptom of a city expanding than it is an intentional creation of automobile manufacturers.

To live in the suburbs you need a car, or two, or three. So, according to his logic, to sell more cars you need more sprawl.

“The problem begins at the end of the assembly lines and factories of GM, Ford, and the rest of them,” Gurin told the crowd at U of T. “These large automobile manufacturers demanded sprawl to accommodate the cars they wanted to build.”

In essence sprawl is the acme of achievement for automobile manufacturers, but as is so often the case, corporate commitments to profits are antithetical to the interests of the public as a whole.

But long time commentator on these issues, David Lewis Stein who wrote for the Toronto Star for 30 years, has a problem with this term “sprawl” as it is so often used.

“What we are scornfully calling ‘urban sprawl’ is home to 2.5 million people,” he said. “The issue is not urban sprawl versus the city, but instead we have a city that reaches across 12,000 square kilometres. We decongested the city, we have dispersed the city.”

Stein worked diligently, if futilely, in the battle to save the Oak Ridges Moraine from that housing development. His opinion is that if we had an attitude that considered the whole GTA (and beyond) as an “urban region,” fiascoes like the Oak Ridges Moraine – a housing development far from the “sprawl” right on a pristine and sensitive watershed – would not be possible because we would say that “we don’t need that, we have enough housing already.”

And the suburbs, the sprawl, is indeed home to millions. Many of us grew up on tree-lined streets while our parents drove 10, 20, 50, or more kilometres along government built roads, enjoying the benefits of grassy front lawns and quiet middle-class neighbours.

To Gurin and many of the participants in the Natural City Symposium, it is that automobile, allowed to grow in popularity because of the roads built with tax dollars to support it, that allow folks to live in the suburbs and – admittedly somewhat inadvertently – pollute the environment as much as has been done.

The most serious transportation issue in the world is the “occupation by private cars,” according to Gurin. He likens the current situation also to a military occupation with 700 million motor vehicles in the world (one third in North America), that number expected to bloat to 1.1 million by 2020, mainly as a result of the current rates of “growth” in China.

And cities designed for and around automobile usage have paradoxically created greater immobility for those without a car, according to Jack Diamond of Diamond and Schmitt Architects in Toronto.

Diamond says that we now require three times the land area per person than we did in the 1960s. As a result the government spends about $1 billion extra a year that it shouldn’t be spending.

“Clearly we are going broke,” Diamond said. “Clearly we need to make a change.”

For Diamond one of the main sources of urban sprawl is subsidies. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in his speech as keynote speaker (in fact, Kennedy quoted Diamond’s talk that he had attended earlier in the day), “it’s all about subsidies.”

The provincial government pays for trunk-line sewers and expressways. This means that each house built in the suburbs is highly subsidized, according to Diamond.

“The key is full-cost pricing,” he said. Those buying houses in the suburbs are not paying the true cost of their, fully-serviced communities.

Another huge problem in the whole debate/discussion about sprawl comes down to economics. Much of our economy is based around the massive automobile industry so no government is going to create a pariah out of the internal combustion giants overnight. Motor vehicles, parts, and accessories accounted for 37% of Canada’s total exports in 1998.

“It is hard to fight what is central to the economy,” Gurin said.

He gave an example of an English politician who was quoted in the Guardian saying that government policy wants to control congestion, not traffic. Congestion is a hassle but traffic is a sign of economic prosperity. No government would willingly fight that.

But, according to Gurin, “building new roads to solve the problem of traffic is like loosening your belt to solve the problem of obesity.”

As an urban planner Gurin is a huge supporter of public transportation. His dream is of a TTC system of such quality that hopping on a streetcar would be like hopping on a conveyer belt. There would always be a streetcar coming in the distance. No waiting, no line-ups, less congestion, and even less traffic.

Imagine that city.