To the Editor,
Re: Complaints show people care, Saturday Beat, March 19.
Columnist Toby Gorman asks, “What do we want Nanaimo to become? Do we want to announce to the world we have a little piece of paradise here and all are welcome?”
The question contains a fundamental (flawed?) assumption, one perhaps shared by some of the present city council and some of the byelection candidates, that being ‘more is better’.
All growth (read: development) is good – even necessary – for us to reach our potential, they hold.
This same notion, in decades past, spawned the present ‘city sprawl’ circumstance we’re now having to wrestle.
The sentiment continues popular today, just with different specifics like ‘more tourists; more golf courses; more airport capacity; wider roads; more hotels; more trinket shops downtown’.
It’s all good, isn’t it? Everyone deserves the ‘American Dream’ don’t they? Well, no.
We have only one home (planet). Presently, we are consuming its finite resources at a rate that, some say, would require us to have 4.5 planets to sustain for a longer term.
Development can be good. It’s even absolutely necessary to now provide the most basic life supporting capacity for our exploding world population.
But we must re-think the assumptions we’ve based our lives on until now.
Technology alone is not the answer. In fact, it’s our assumptions and blind faith in technology that caused and has us perpetuating our present unsustainable cycle.
What is true for our world is also true for our local region, our ‘little piece of paradise’.
Simplistic bitching will not bring the answer. Re-thinking assumptions may help. Expert climate change economist Lord Nicholas Stern puts it succinctly: “Pay me (some) now, or pay me (lots more) later.”
Jordan Ellis
Nanaimo
