Those different, better choices are important. I'm not saying that there's no use in buying compact fluourescent lightbulbs. That's a good thing to do. But all of the actions proposed centre around making the right consumer choices, buying the right products; when it is precisely our consumerist society and our tendency to try to solve all problems through purchasing products that got us into this mess in the first place. The North American Way could be summed up as: Maximum resources for minimum result. And the popular environmental critique could be: Slightly less than maximum resources for slightly more than minimum results.

People are not stupid. They do all of the things they're told to do, and they see it doesn't get them anywhere and it's not saving the world. They buy an energy-efficient car and house, yet the smog keeps getting worse. They don't pour oil or paint down the stormdrains, yet water pollution isn't any better. They buy energy-efficient appliances and light fixtures, yet there is still an ever-greater need for electrical supply. They buy a patch of the rainforest and donat to save a whale, but the rainforest is still being mowed down for hamburgers and the whales are still on the verge of extinction. What gives?

MOreoever, they begin to resent what they correctly see as their own sacrifices. Here they are, taking the extra time to recycle, spending the extra money on environmentally-friendly goods, living in a smaller house and using a smaller car--for what? So someone else can use more, waste more, live in a bigger house with a bigger car? Where is the impact? Where is the certificate in the mail saying, CONGRATULATIONS, you've saved three acres of old-growth forest through your dedication and sacrifice! It isn't there. So why keep doing it? Why keep giving and sacrificing when it seems to accomplish nothing?

Good question. Why indeed?

I think the answer has two parts. I'll try to be brief with the first one because it's largely a rehashing of my argument from before.

1. Try to make it into a carrot, not a stick.

If you really want the bigger house, the bigger car, the nicer things, the extra-effective scum remover for mildew stains in the shower, boy are you in trouble if you try to "do without" them. It will never feel good. It will always be a struggle. All I can suggest is to try to develop an anti-consumerist value system, so you feel comfortable and good about making other choices because it's what you want to do, rather than what you think you are supposed to do.

2. Stop trying to do it on your own.

It's easy to forget that all of these individual actions proposed every April 22nd are really only beneficial as a part of or a support to collective action, to systemic change. Even if everyone in Canada (or the US) changed over the compact fluourescent lightbulbs and energy-efficient cars, we'd still be in trouble. Bigger changes are needed in the way we structure our societies and our lives.

Intelligent (most) people realize this, another reason they get frustrated with the "vote with your wallet" mentality of do-goodism. It's not working! And it's never going to work.

There are many, many options for becoming involved in larger actions that can have a bigger impact. Most of them do not involve waving placards at G8 summits. I'll summarize a few I know of here, with the caveat that these apply specifically to Ontario, Canada, and I'm not at all well-versed with options in other locations.

Environmental Assessment

Most big projects, and many little ones, undergo some kind of government review of their anticipated environmental impacts. Especially for the larger projects, there is almost always a structured public participation component. Previous generations of environmental activists worked hard to win these seats at the table, so use it.

There are a number of ways you can find out about these opportunities. Here in Ontario, proponents must advertise in local newspapers. Note: The big dailies will have nothing in them. We're talking the free papers that end up on your doorstep, thick as bricks on Fridays, full of flyers. Those papers.

Much of the time the participation will be structured into evening meetings or presentations; if you can't make it to the meetings and you want to be involved, contact the name and phone number in the ad and ask if you can make a submission or get copies of the documents in another way. I'll bet you they say yes.

And in this age of the internet, there are usually online registries of ongoing environmental assessments as well. The national Canadian database contains all environmental assessments being conducted by the federal government under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. You can easily and quickly see if there is anything going on in your area that you might be concerned about, and you will see the government contact person and phone number for more information.

The thing is, most of the officials involved in these processes really, really want you to get involved. They're idealists. They got into this work because they care, deeply, about the environment and they want to make a difference. An intelligent person who wants to contribute and makes intelligent, well-informed suggestions is a blessing. It makes what we do worthwhile. It doesn't mean all of your suggestions will be taken and used, but any that are feasible, they'll fight for. I've seen it happen.

And, of course, the more of the public that is involved and makes known their preferences, the harder time the proponent will have in ignoring them.

The key is: intelligent and well-informed. Don't be the person who goes to the public meeting for the EA on a new road and rants about how no one should drive ever again, no roads should be built, they're evil, for thirty minutes. Don't be the person who calls the public environment hotline and complains about your toilet leaking or that your magic markers smell (yes, I've received those calls). That's what gives public participation a bad name and makes officials wary of participants. Inform yourself as much as you can, and go to war.

Urban and Municipal Planning

I have no way of knowing how much any of you know about the planning process in Ontario or elsewhere, so forgive me if this is repetitive or seems condescending.

Urban and municipal planning have a huge, if not the determining, impact on our environmental interactions. Zoning determines where housing, commerce and industry locate, and of what kinds. Official Plans lay out the roads, their sizes and types, the locations and sizes of sewers of all kinds, parklands and recreational areas and agriculture. It specifies the type and density of these uses. It plans for transit, low-income housing, environmental conservation--everything.

Basically, planning structures our lives. It's easy to tell someone to buy a house close to work and take transit, but come on. If the houses are all being built on the city's fringes, and only single-family detached houses are going up, and zoning has determined that commercial and industrial uses are on the other side of the city, and the transit only comes every 45 minutes and it takes three hours, then what kind of sadomasochist is going to take transit to work? Let's not blame the individual. There are reasons why people buy single-detached family houses and drive long distances by themselves to work and back every day, and for most of us, it's not because we enjoy knowing that we are doing our bit for smog formation. It's because the other options either don't exist or are unpalatable.

I used to be a dedicated transit user. I lived on the west side of Mississauga and worked in NOrth York, a 50-km trip each way. When I bought my house, I worked in Mississauga; but then I lost my job and the only job in my field I could find was far away. The trip by transit took three hours out of the day when the weather was good and traffic was flowing. Throw in snow or an accident and it could easily be five. FIVE HOURS. This was a tremendous sacrifice, but I was willing to make it at the time.

Then F.E. was born. And if you're asking me to make a choice between being a bad environmentalist and a bad mother, guess what?

So I started driving to work, and I hated it. Believe me, I would so much rather take transit. I hate driving. But I couldn't justify spending that time away from my little girl. So instead, we moved. We bought a house fifteen kilometres from our workplaces. Much better, right?

Well, from one perspective, yes. From another, no; because the only houses available in that area (that met our exacting criteria of not-falling-apart, affordable and not-located-in-an-area-with-cars-on-the-front-lawn) were large single-family detached homes. There was nothing else available. Don't get me wrong, it's a beautiful house and I'm grateful to be able to live in it. But environmentally friendly it is not.

What structured these choices? Urban planning.

You can get involved in these decisions. You can make your voice heard on critical decisions that affect the location of business and housing and the availability of transit. It might not have the impact you want, but without the committed involvement of concerned citizens the outcomes will be much much worse--and sometimes a group of committed citizens can make a huge positive impact (though in my experience never quite the impact they were hoping for).

Again, you can find ads in your local newspaper for anything from public consultation for the development of master plans, to sub-master plans, transit planning, transportation studies, water and sewer studies, zoning by-laws, zoning amendments, all kinds of things. And usually, these ads are also included on the local municipal website.

I know it can seem esoteric and kind of weird to worry about this kind of stuff, but this is exactly the stuff that we need to worry about. For instance--build a water pipe, and a residential development will spring up like mushrooms after the rain. If your local council is debating building a new water pipe in an undeveloped area, they are prepping it for a new subdivision, and probably single-family detached houses at that.

At the very least, get a copy of your local Official Plan (sometimes also called the Master Plan). This will tell you everything you need to know about how planning works in your area, what the priorities are for your local government, who is involved, what the public participation was like for that process, and what is forecast to change in your local area for the next ten to twenty years--everything from employment to population to kinds of industry to transportation and transit to local parks to wildlife preserves to education to health care. It could give you some great ideas on where you'd like to become involved in making changes, local changes that could have a great impact.

Intervenor Funding

A brief aside:

A lot of times these projects involve huge stacks of very technical reports prepared by experts on such things as acoustic levels resulting from a new rail line. If you're not an expert, they can be gibberish. If you are trying to read some of these reports or participate in these processes and you find it frustrating because you simply don't understand what the fuck they're talking about, see if you can access intervenor funding.

Intervenor funding is money provided by the proponent or government to allow citizen's groups and lobby groups without in-house experts to hire expert consultants of their own, to help them understand and navigate the information and the process. Some jurisdictions have intervenor funding, some have inadequate funding, and some don't have any. But it's worth looking into.

That said, if anyone reading this becomes involved in a public participation project someday and is trying to read some obnoxious report written in technical jargon and wants to get some help, I don't mind trying. I'm not an expert in most of these fields but I've touched on a lot of them over the course of my career, enough that I can usually understand what they're doing.

Industrial Voluntary Initiatives

Sometimes business and industry, most often when they are anxious to avoid a new law that mandates some behaviour, will begin a voluntary environmental initiative. Responsible Care is one example.

Most of these initiatives have forums for public participation. I can't speak as to their structure or quality, as it varies vastly depending on the sincerity of the initiative itself, but again, it's an avenue for making your voice heard.

A lot of times, the environmental movement is like democracy. Not using pesticides and using recycled paper is like voting and writing the occasional letter to your local politician: basic, easy actions that are necessary for the functioning of the system, but not enough in and of themselves to effect real change most of the time. That requires the investment of a bit more time and legwork--but it doesn't mean you have to run for office, either. It almost always means that you have to get yourself involved with some kind of group or official participatory process. There is only so much you can do on your own.

These are just a smattering. There are lots more, including waving placards at G8 summits, if your inclinations run that way. It take some time and effort to dig them out because they don't make good copy (unless one of the meetings erupts in some sensationalistic way--"riot police escort protesters from public meeting on transit improvements!").

There are alternative, parallel governing bodies structured on bioregional lines in some areas. There are community groups that go into schools and educate kids on environmental issues. There are lobby groups that research waste management options and intervene on issues of landfill siting, recycling and incineration. There are local programs that collect used computers and refurbish them to go into schools so they don't end up in landfills. There are groups like freecycle that arrange for swaps of goods between people to reduce consumption of new materials. There are carpool and bike initiatives and some communities where, for a small fee, members can access community cars or bicycles so they don't have to purchase on of their own. There's guerilla gardening. Some communities have parallel economies with alternative money based on bartering and a bioregional ethic (sometimes called greenbucks). There's food not bombs, a group that takes fresh produce thrown out by supermarkets and uses it to cook meals for homeless people. There's second harvest, which does something very similar but for food banks.

There are so many options. There's no reason to feel hopeless. Or, at least, not that hopeless.

By the way--it's perfectly ok not to be able to participate in any of them. It's hard to find and justify the time, I know. But if you're looking and if you want it--there are lots of ways to get involved and make a real impact.