Rethinking Lifestyle

This finishes up our series profiling the political parties in their attitude toward sustainability and environment. I’ve saved the Greens for last because, as well as the fact that the Greens are the fourth-place party in most ridings, this is also the most difficult column for me to write. First, because the Green stance on sustainability and environment seems like a given (what do you say about Greens being green?); and second, because I am a member of the Green Party, and I wanted to make sure I didn’t privilege my own party in this series. The goal of this series, after all, is not to sway you all to vote Green, but instead to show that all of the parties ultimately value environment and sustainability, and to enlist supporters of all parties to do their part to make the environment an election issue.

In the previous columns in this series, we addressed the way different parties value the environment: the Conservatives value it instrumentally, as an economic resource; the NDP values it instrumentally as an extension to human rights; and the Liberals value it as a distinctively Canadian value, seeing environmental stewardship as part of what it means to be Canadian. The Green Party holds that the environment has inherent value: it was valuable before we got here, and will remain so after we’re gone. Its value is entirely unrelated to how humans feel about it or can benefit from it. The Greens recognize that we do benefit from it, that we must use natural resources, that environmental justice is inherently linked to human rights and social justice; and they very much appreciate the notion that environmental stewardship is a Canadian value. But the reason that the environment figures so prominently in Green Party platforms and values is not because they’re a one-issue party, but because they believe the environment is not an issue at all – it’s the foundation of every aspect of our lives.

The environment isn’t an issue to be addressed in our discussion of agriculture; it’s the actual soil in which our food is grown, without which we’d have no food. It’s not an issue that coincides with human rights and healthcare; it’s the systems on which human life depends. It’s not an issue related to energy issues; it is the ground from which the oil is pumped, the air that moves the turbines, and the rays of light gathered by solar panels and plants. It’s not an issue to be taken into account when discussing natural resources; those resources are in fact small pieces of our environment that are being used for human benefit, often at the expense of the greater ecosystem that humans depend on. There is no government portfolio that doesn’t depend on our environment somehow, and the Green Party’s recognition of this is why they have the most comprehensive environmental concern and approach of any party.

And for the record, that’s why I’m a member of the Green Party.