'Greenest city' plan touts economic growth
On a couch in the spacious living room of his heritage home, nestled among trees in a quiet corner of Dunbar, University of B.C. professor Bill Rees adjusts his eyeglasses, strokes his salt-and-pepper beard and leans forward to speak.
"Society hasn't faced the fact that the economy has to shrink," says Rees, in the rehearsed manner of a veteran lecturer. "We should be in a planned recession, not the full blown uncontrolled collapse as it is right now."
Rees, who's on sabbatical from UBC's School of Regional and Community Planning, is an expert on ecology and economic growth.
Spry and energetic, the 66-year-old academic speaks passionately--sometimes with anger and frustration--about government policy in Vancouver and beyond. He's written books, founded organizations and spoke in lecture halls around the world. He created the "ecological footprint" method of measuring human demand on the Earth's ecosystems. A respected and admired voice in North America's environmental movement, he's advised governments and politicians, including former Vancouver mayor Sam Sullivan who enlisted Rees as an unpaid adviser for the city's EcoDensity initiative.
Although he maintains contact with city planners, Rees has not been offered a roster spot on Mayor Gregor Robertson's newly minted Greenest City Action Team, which will recommend to city council policies related to transportation, pollution reduction and "green job" creation.
Key members of the team include Robertson, environmental guru David Suzuki, former B.C. premier Mike Harcourt, Vancity CEO Tamara Vrooman and B.C. Hydro chairman Mossadiq S. Umedaly.
According to the city's website, the Team hopes to "tie economic growth to new technology," for the sake of the environment.
Rees shakes his head.
"We've been saying for years that technology will save the day--so we can grow without having an impact on the environment," he says. "It hasn't happened that way."
What does it really mean to be green?
Today, the prevailing mantra--trumpeted by the media and politicians--claims the environment can be saved through greater efficiency.
Buildings are constructed according to new environmental standards, like the much-ballyhooed LEED system. Corporations scramble to produce more efficient light bulbs, more efficient cars, more efficient coal-fired plants. Green businesses promise to help grow the economy while reducing Rees' pesky ecological footprint.
North American leaders, from Stephen Harper to Al Gore to George Bush and Obama, all promote greater efficiency while supporting mass stimulus bills--rife with infrastructure projects and giant automaker bailouts--to combat the global economic meltdown.
During B.C.'s current provincial election campaign, Liberal, NDP and Green Party candidates all promise a green future steeped in environmental stewardship and economic growth.
During the 2008 civic election campaign, Robertson promised to make Vancouver "the greenest city in the world."
Yet no politician talks like Rees.
We need a planned recession, he says. A cap on growth, fewer construction projects--not "greener" ones.
We need an ideas revolution.
Rees was "green" long before green was hip.
During his childhood back east, Rees spent summers working on his grandfather's apple farm outside Cornwall, Ont., where he learned to appreciate the land and the value of hard work.
His teaching career at UBC, which began in 1969, has focused largely on public policy and global environmental trends. During his tenure, he's watched the environmental issue evolve from relative obscurity into a hot button topic discussed at G8 summits, in presidential debates and online chatrooms worldwide.
While scientists compile evidence of global warming and the negative human impact on the environment, Rees studies how governments can reverse these troubling trends.
He opposes the policies of western governments, which propose "sustainable" economic growth to help solve the global environmental crisis, and chides Canada's "fossil fuel-driven, growth-bound economic path."
He recommends immigration reduction to combat homegrown production and consumption, and warns of pending "societal collapse."
"Imagine a society with greater equity--at least sufficiency for all," he says. "Thirty-hour work weeks spreading the available work around. No forced unemployment, more leisure time, less pollution, greater regional independence from trade."
This is radical stuff, Rees admits. The concept of a planned recession contradicts the basic tenets of western capitalism, which values hard work, ambition and progress. Yet Rees's ideas are rooted in the conventional wisdom of environmentalism.
"We're consuming too much, consuming more renewable resources than natural systems are producing," he says, "and we're dumping more waste than natural systems can assimilate."
Although environmental solutions require global cooperation, Rees insists municipalities such as Vancouver bear great responsibility. City hall, he notes, regulates transit and land use through zoning, development and business permits. "We needn't in the Lower Mainland develop another hectare of land," says Rees, who recommends a freeze on greenspace development. "There's plenty of underdeveloped, already serviced land that could be developed in much higher density."
Rees lauds Sullivan's EcoDensity legacy, which encourages residential and business density to reduce automobile traffic and carbon emissions. "We should see Vancouver's EcoDensity program going forward absolutely full tilt to reduce the need for transportation," he says. "We should get rid of automobiles in the city. In a compact well-designed city, you wouldn't need vehicles at all--at least not private vehicles."
So what about Vancouver's new mayor and his Greenest City Action Team?
While disappointed with the team's "economic growth" mission statement, Rees refused further comment due to the program's infancy.
However, he says candidate Robertson talked a "conventional green game" during the campaign, and noted the uniformed thinking of North America's political class. "I don't think the elected officials are anywhere near what I'm talking about," he says. "I think there is more common sense on the street about these issues than there is in Ottawa or Washington or at city hall."
Robertson and his Vision Vancouver party assumed power last November, winning majorities on city council, park board and a near majority on school board.
Robertson's election campaign, viewed by critics as vague and fluffy, relied heavily on unabashed environmentalism. His campaign resume--which included co-founding Happy Planet, an organic fruit beverage company--demonstrated his green-business bona fides and helped craft his image as an environmentally conscious leader tailor-made for the new economy.
During a backyard press conference Monday afternoon at city hall, Robertson and a handful of Greenest City Action Team members released the team's Greenest City Quick Start report to a throng of television cameras and print reporters.
The 35-page report begins with a Rees-style warning: "The future of humanity hinges on cities dramatically reducing their devastating impact on the planet." It then outlines a "green economic development strategy," which includes cutting red tape for green business, technology and building construction.
"We need to work with industry to bring these initiatives into play," Robertson said at the press conference.
Robertson refused an in-depth interview for this story. But Vision Coun. Andrea Reimer--a Greenest City Action Team member--welcomed the Courier into her cramped city hall office, dominated by a computer desk and black sofa, to outline Vancouver's green future.
Reimer's environmental credentials are formidable.
In 2002, she became the first Green Party candidate elected to a school board in Canada.
She left the Greens before the '08 civic election, opting for the well-organized, well-funded Vision Vancouver machine.
In addition to her role on council, she's director of the Toxic Free Canada and Environmental Education Action Project and the executive director of the Wilderness Committee.
In 2007, she was ordained by Al Gore to deliver local PowerPoint presentations about the former American vice-president's documentary An Inconvenient Truth, and was the driving force behind Vancouver's controversial "backyard chicken" initiative.
As part of the Greenest City Action Team, Reimer will help devise other initiatives, such as city hall's new community garden, to help grow green thinking in neighbourhoods around the city.
But what about the big picture, which involves real estate development and industry pollution? What does Reimer think of the Rees doctrine, with its planned recession and cap on development?
"I don't think it's that simple," says Reimer, an articulate 37-year-old rookie city councillor. "There are things we could use a lot less of, but there's things we could use a lot more of--like people having adequate affordable housing."
Reimer says the team will consult with private developers and unions, although during his backyard press conference, Robertson said the development industry's influence on the Quick Start report was minimal.
Incidentally, Robertson recently met with well-known "green" strategist Terry Tamminen--a key adviser to California Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and a member of U.S. president Barack Obama's transition team. In addition to other business ventures, Tamminen managed a multi-million-dollar real estate company based in the United States.
Team member Alex Lau, vice-president of Golden Properties Ltd., a Vancouver-based investment company, may further enhance the team's corporate culture.
Lau's held management positions at several companies in the computer software industry--a favourite target of anti-pollution activists--and helped organize the first "sustainability forum" for Fortune 500 leaders.
According to Reimer, the team will maintain close contact with the province's climate action secretary and environment minister, noting any big, expensive green projects will require money from senior levels of government. Future costs to Vancouver taxpayers will be hammered out at council.
So how will Vancouverites know if the team is winning?
"The true test of it will be over the long term," says Reimer, adding that a detailed 10-year plan will be released in June. "While there's things we can start quickly, it doesn't mean we'll have results quickly."
While Rees withholds judgment on the Greenest City Action Team, Conrad Schmidt is less diplomatic.
"It's nonsense," says Schmidt, the bearded and bespectacled founder of B.C.'s Work Less Party. "City hall sounds exactly like George Bush--they say the same things and they behave the same way."
From his seat inside a Commercial Drive cafe, Schmidt expounds his worldview with a hard-to-place accent, more reminiscent of England than South Africa where he was born and raised.
Despite his inflammatory rhetoric, Schmidt is no coffee house polemic.
He's produced several books and short films advocating an economic slowdown, for the sake of people and the environment.
Schmidt echoes Rees's contention that so-called green economic growth is anathema to environmental progress. He takes dead aim at Vancouver's condo development boom, which has speckled the city's skyline with construction cranes and high rise apartment buildings, and the venerated LEED system, which rates new buildings on their water efficiency, construction pollution, public transit access and other environmental considerations.
"The big companies spend years mining the resources and the building's create huge daily electrical bills, but because it's LEED certified they say it's good for the planet. No! It's grey, it's not green."
The Greenest City Action Team's business-friendly appearance, says Schmidt, mirrors American economic and environmental policy. "Clinton was saying the same thing, Obama's saying the same thing, the United Nations is saying the same thing--but it's physically impossible. The only thing that will help [the environment] is to shrink the GDP."
The Team's Quick Start report repeats Robertson's ambitious campaign trail claim: "Our goal is to be the Greenest City in the World by 2020."
Schmidt, who says he's friendly with both Robertson and Reimer, is unimpressed. While his political party may exist on the political fringe, Schmidt's criticisms of the Greenest City Action Team carry a populist ring.
"Being green is not about green business," says Schmidt. "They can fool people, but they're not going to fool the ecology."