Today's posting follows from a seemingly endless series of articles, recently filling newspapers across Canada and the United States, bemoaning and remonstrating against the need for change in one ethic group or another, one definable subsection of society or another, in this changing society (changing world) of ours. My native Albertans have had decades of strong economy based of raping the land of a limited supply of burnable carbon. The same is true of many of the eastern United States with coal and the central and western United States with oil. Many First Nations groups have continued to follow a subsistence pattern largely based on hunting and fishing declining herds and fish stocks. Canada's Inuit state their opposition to global warming primarily in terms of their perceived need to preserve their traditional way of life. The cries from all are long, loud and increasing in frequency, demanding that whatever is necessary be done to allow them to continue living the same life their parents and grandparents lived.
I am well aware that this posting will shock and anger many. Many will accuse me of an utter lack of empathy for those who see their traditional ways of life threatened. Many will even accuse me of racism in my comments against the First Nations and Inuit groups who demand to be allowed to continue their traditional ways without change. My position, however, is that all such groups, no matter their region, nation or ethic group, should take a long hard look at reality, stop whining about having to change their ways and start working on new and better ways to live in a rapidly changing world.
Let me begin by reminding the reader that I am one of those Albertans who has benefitted, both directly and indirectly, from those decades of hydrocarbon extraction. Much of my work as an archaeologist and palaeo-environmentalist was done in the tar sands area of northern Alberta, directly paid for, largely, by the oil companies and consortiums who intended to tear up the land. Let me address potential accusations of racism by pointing out that I have lived among both the Dené of the Mackenzie Valley and the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic, have worked with both peoples, for months at a time, many times over a career spanning decades. I have even spent decades studying first hand the archaeological reconstruction of their traditional cultures and prehistoric ways of life and the palaeoenvironmental reconstructions of their traditional environments. I have the very highest respect for these people, finding them to have been and to continue to be brilliant technologically, innovative culturally, and extremely warm and giving, even to strangers, as social beings.
I would add to this a reminder that I am not simply a member of an industrialized Canadian society. As someone who, since childhood, has had a strong connection with my own ethnicity (Scottish/Irish) and with history in general, I have lived my entire life very much aware that it was only a short time ago (as an archaeologist views time) that my ancestors were hunters and gatherers. Although I am sure many resisted the change, they had little choice but to adapt to a farming, cattle herding and/or shepherding way of life over time (sometimes over very little time) no doubt with much accompanying complaint. Shift forward in time just a little and see the drastic lifestyle changes my more recent ancestors had to engage in adapting to the industrial revolution, accomplished haphazardly with poor planning and much suffering. Alvin Toffler, in 1970, wrote a book entitled Future Shock, in which he described the pain anxiety and disorientation which people can experience when they are forced to change their accustomed ways and in which he predicted increasing occurrences of this socially disruptive effect as the world becomes more globally unified into what he termed a "super-industrial society."
Now we all, of every region, nation and ethic group, are facing another great time of change; only it is now evident that we won't even have as much time to adapt as Alvin Toffler thought. I speak here, again, of global warming. Within decades, not centuries, we will not only see but we will be immersed in global changes in water availability, animal, plant and mineral resource availability and socio-economic diversification requirements such as has never been seen before in the history of human society. We can not, in this situation, afford the luxury of letting the change-deniers and those who wish to cling forever to the comfortable and customary past hold us back from making the economic and societal changes required to not just survive but to thrive in the coming new reality.
Contrary to the warnings of doom by the conservatives and global warming deniers, this does not mean we in Alberta, and elsewhere, have to give up prosperity. It means we have to quickly get up off our duffs and use this very limited time of prosperity to diversify our economy, including diversification of our energy usage away from our current hydrocarbon-based monoculture. It means we have to quickly get more rational about recognizing the changes we are facing in water availability and must start planning now for how to deal with it. It means that First Nations and Inuit peoples will have to stop looking at the hunting of particular, traditional target herds as their right and start diversifying into more sustainable socio-economic practices in a much changed physical environment. I am not saying they should have to, in a perfect world. I am saying that global warming has already advanced to the point where, in this world, they do have to. It is only if we fail to take these steps that we face serious economic stresses, recessions and potential regional economic collapses. Keep in mind that those regions, nations, cultures who first make the necessary changes to take advantage of the new environmental and global/cultural reality will have a substantial economic/power advantage over those who are laggards, and they may care a great deal less about your particular culture than you do.
Making the necessary changes also does not mean we have to give up all of the cherished parts of our past or our ethnicities. Far from it, we need to work hard to preserve those aspects of our ancient ways which can be preserved and cherished. These include languages, traditional clothing, games, recipes, ceremonies, and other cultural practices which can be continued no matter what the environment or socio-economic base of the society becomes.
There is a wonderful future available to southern industrialized societies and to the Dené, Inuit and other more traditional peoples, if we all accept this challenge now and start making the necessary cultural changes. There simply is not time, this time, to be very tolerant of the untra-conservatives and nay-sayers who are constantly trying to hold us back. Any of us, globally, who try to freeze our culture as a sort of museum piece are likely to see that culture falter, fail and disappear, with a great deal more concomitant cultural stress and "future shock" than is involved in making the necessary cultural changes to preserve the best and most future-viable parts of our respective cultures in the first place.
We are all, more rapidly than ever and more rapidly than most understand, heading into a very different world. It is already too late to avoid that even if the world governments immediately switched to greener energy sources, and they show no signs at all of making any great move in that direction. The greatest factor holding us back, and therefore the greatest danger to our making a relatively smooth transition into the future, lies with the ultra-conservatives in all cultures who are poorly informed scientifically and are philosophically blind to anything but their own particular version of the past. If you care about reducing the future shock experienced by people of your particular culture, start now to get more vocal and more argumentatively forceful in stopping these cultural Luddites from holding us back from making the changes we must now make.
