Back in its environmentalist heyday, Vancouver was world-famous as the birthplace of Greenpeace. Today, we are taking the lead on another front, but a more troubling one — greenwashing.
In the rainbow's range of the ways politicians and corporations can avoid taking on difficult issues, green is the colour of the moment.
Geenwashing is really just another form of whitewashing, but it gets a more urgent and contemporary aura with of-the-moment references to “global warming,” “ecological footprint,” and the direst but emptiest shibboleth of them all — “sustainability.”
These days virtually any human artifact or activity can and is being promoted as a paragon of “sustainability” and the word is so overused as to become meaningless.
Accordingly, we now have sustainable nuclear power plants, sustainable dormitory suburbs, and sustainable blister- pack plastic packaging.
One day, I predict, the six-page non-manifesto released last month by Mayor Sam Sullivan entitled Vancouver EcoDensity Initiative will achieve global renown as a minor masterpiece of the literature of greenwashing.
From this slick brochure's fuzzy cover image of a multihued butterfly touching down, mid-Pacific, upon the words “political globe” that line the tropical latitudes of a kid-sized pocket planet, to its syncopated photos running inside of sunny leaves, happy condos, shiny river rocks and wholesome neo-heritage houses, right on through to its very last words — “printed on recycled paper”— the EcoDensity initiative implies a lot, but says almost nothing.
This is, of course, the purpose of the publication: Loads of implications, absolutely no specifics, not even of the wonky policy type. The language is as awkward and earnest as a first date with a political science graduate interning at the David Suzuki Foundation: “More attention than ever before is being paid to addressing the factors leading to climate change.”
The dozen too-generic principles are hardly Martin Luther's 95 theses nailed to the Wittenberg chapel door. Some the brochure's helpful hints: “sprawl is compromising our environment;” “we are responsible stewards;” and perhaps most revelatory of all, “urban green space provides numerous benefits to city residents.”
Okay, okay, so the brochure is drippy and the writing bad, but inspired by his ecological reformation, Mayor Sullivan has a crack team of urban planners working out the details, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, right?
Well, er, no.
Mayor Sullivan's initiative was whipped up without even consulting his own caucus colleagues on council, never mind Vancouver's much more powerful permanent government of city manager Judy Rogers and staff.
What we have here is not a fast electric car to sustainability, but a long and winding road of consultation and tentative policy probes whose deliverables are an “EcoDensity Charter and Toolkit,” which may or may not, this council or next, some time before the next ice age, hypothetically result in the possible modification of policies bearing upon the framing of emerging regulations shaping attitudes toward, well, you get the idea.
In his “How Do We Get There” letter to Vancouverites in the brochure, Mayor Sullivan writes: “The EcoDensity Toolkit will be produced in partnership with leading experts in our local universities,” which will shape the charter, and in turn, will also “fit inside the broader city principles of sustainability, adopted by council in 2002.” Vancouver urgently needs specific plans and regulations to reshape our wasteful current city building, but instead we get bland generalities.
tboddy@globeandmail.com
