I want to thank you, Mr. Chairman and Mr. Clerk, for inviting me here this afternoon. My name is Dr. Gregory Heming, and I come from a small town, Haines Junction, in the Yukon.
By way of introduction, I would like to say that by profession I am a human ecologist. I study the way humans interact with systems natural, environmental, political, economic, social, and cultural. By vocation I am a communitarian, and by that I mean I am one who believes in the value and livability of small rural communities, particularly the one I'm a member of.
Both my interests have convinced me that former Secretary of State (Rural Development) Andy Mitchell was correct when he asserted that rural communities are the future of Canada.
As you know from preliminary correspondence, my remarks to you this afternoon are centred on two core problems, neither of which is written directly into the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. However, I submit to you today that both of these core problems are equally important to the eventual success CEPA may realize in preventing pollution, protecting the environment, protecting human health, and contributing to sustainable development.
Canada's small rural communities are being adversely impacted from the inside by what I call internal disaffection and from the outside by external exploitation. Both disaffection from inside and exploitation from outside begin to occur when communities are unable to supply local needs from local sources.
It is my contention that communities, provinces, territories, and first nations, as they become increasingly dependent on outside sources, centralized governments, and larger and larger corporations for their basic needs, become correspondingly disaffected from our local businesses and our local governments, and most troubling to me, with our own neighbours' civic demeanour.
The Canadian Environmental Protection Act can, if it reconciles many of the criticisms and suggestions that this committee has heard over time, do much to protect us from the negative by-products of a large-scale economy. But even with wholesale refinements and adaptations in how CEPA chooses to regulate and enforce environmental law and corporate responsibility, it will do little to promote an interdependent series of small-scale economies, which would include the likes of family farming, community markets, innovative and productive cottage industries, and community alternate energy capabilities.
Therefore, while CEPA may help us identify and regulate the symptoms of a toxic economy, which does in fact include thousands of bioaccumulative and inherently toxic substances, we cannot expect CEPA to help us treat the root cause of pollution, which is our own inability to distinguish our basic needs from our unnecessary wants. Nor can we expect CEPA to help us redesign our economy so that it may become less exploitive, more authentic, and more local, healthy, and sustainable.
Our present economic model, which demands unlimited economic growth through unlimited consumption, and which we hope to temper with the likes of CEPA, is prejudiced against the small. It has an inherent industrial prejudice against anything rural. It works against family business, competitive business, and small-scale innovation. In fact, it may even be fair to say at the end of the day that it just may be prejudiced against the delicate balance inherent in our natural world.
Because rural folks live in very close proximity to our natural landscape, we understand in ways that others do not that our lives and livelihoods are always a mixture of what is natural and what is fabricated and altered. In short, we understand in rural communities, as few do, that culture can only happen by consuming nature.
As our current economic system continues to pump resources out of the periphery into the centre, from the countryside into the city, from the poor to the rich, as the economy heats up, as it must do in the system that we have, it has become increasingly acceptable to ruin one place for the sake of another.
The key question for community folks and country folks, and ultimately for this committee, is what mixture of nature and culture is acceptable? What mixture of pristine wilderness, resource extraction, automobile pollution, toxic substances, displaced wildlife is acceptable before rural living becomes too much like urban living?
While this committee will likely hear much about a priority substance list, screening level, risk assessments, toxic substance, management policies, and administrative and equivalency agreements—and make no mistake, these are absolutely invaluable to make CEPA effective—we must not allow the particular and overly precise language of experts, of scientists, of lawyers, of lawmakers, to cloud over and obscure the common sense language in which we express many of the common sense Canadian values.
In an attempt to serve this more ordinary approach to pollution protection and environmental protection, in an attempt to prevent small communities from falling in on themselves or from being overridden by external forces that they are incapable of fending off, I would like to put before this committee four notions that just might serve you well when the regulatory and administrative waters of CEPA get choppy. If nothing else, strict adherence to these four notions will give you the philosophical framework, the economic foundation, and the political rationale to think about CEPA in ways that will ensure that our rural communities are indeed the future of Canada.
Number one, Trappist monk Thomas Merton once remarked that, having lost our ability to see life as a whole, to evaluate conduct as a whole, we no longer have any relevant context into which our actions are to be fitted, and therefore, all our actions become erratic, arbitrary, and insignificant. For me, I believe Merton was suggesting that community was the relevant context in which we can somehow begin to see our lives as being less erratic, more sensible, and infinitely more significant.
If CEPA does not tie directly and pragmatically into community life and into rural life, it is not likely to gain the support of the people and therefore will always be seen as one more management regime filtering down and put upon lesser levels of government. CEPA must always ask and always seek to answer one question: what will any proposed regulatory change or innovation do to a particular community? How, we must ask ourselves, will CEPA affect our common unity?
Number two, Daniel Kemmis, the former mayor of Missoula, Montana, in response to his constituents about the heavy hand of federal government, said something that's always impressed me. He said:
It would be an insult to these people to assume that they are incapable of reaching some accommodation among themselves about how to inhabit their own place.
This simple rule of local government can guide this committee as it searches for ways to mould seamless cooperation with provinces, territories, aboriginal people, and ordinary citizens when it comes to implementing CEPA.
Number three, university professor in law Professor Charles Wilkinson once outlined what he called an ethic of place:
An ethic of place respects equally the people of a region and the land, animals, vegetation, water and air. It recognizes that westerners revere their physical surroundings and that they need and deserve a stable, productive economy that is accessible to those with modest incomes. An ethic of place ought to be a shared community value and ought to manifest itself in a dogged determination to treat the environment and its people as equals, to recognize both as sacred, and to insure that all members of the community not just search for but insist upon solutions that fulfill the ethic.
This committee should never forget that pollution prevention, environmental protection, and sustainable development are all tied together--end of story.
Even more specifically and of greater significance is the fact that we must never forget that air, land, water, vegetation, animals, and human civilization are all on an equal footing. The cultural and economic systems that emerge from these natural systems must be accessible to those with a modest income. This, in fact, may be the premier Canadian value from which everything flows.
Number four, Erica Jong, with clear brevity of thought, gave me great pause once more. Take your life in your own hands, she said, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
This committee and all of us in this room can no longer afford to shuffle the entire blame for contaminated water, for smog, climate change, and toxic chemicals solely to either industry or to government. As citizens and consumers, we are ultimately responsible for making healthy choices about our own lives and our own livelihoods.
This committee would be ill-advised to alter or amend CEPA in any way if such alteration or amendment took individual consumers off the hook for their own failings, no matter how innocent. In 1853, just six years prior to when construction began on this original Parliament Building, British poet laureate William Wordsworth penned the following poem:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
...
For this, for everything we are out of tune;
....
If I can impact upon this committee one single message that must come through clearly in this mandatory five-year review of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, it is this. We cannot continue with our infinite consumption of our finite resources, for if we do, we will most certainly give our hearts away; for if we do, we lay waste our powers and we never get to the bottom of things.
Thank you.
