Dear Editor,
Have you ever been on a university campus and walked through all the different departments?
The business schools are the only spaces left on the planet in academe where facts and evidence about climate change, resource and human exploitation, and land and water degredation are all but ignored.
Here you will find people who still believe that economics are paramount to our existence on the planet, and these people are still shaping the minds of the next generations of business leaders and political thought.
It is sad though that not much thought is given to the fact that these people only reach out to the lowest common social and political denominators within our society, and use monikers like “jobs and the economy” to continue their assault on Indigenous communities in opposition to their enterprises, and continue their path of destruction to the land they draw waning resources from.
The Greater Langley Chamber of Commerce, and their counterparts across the country reflect the values of a bygone era, and have less teeth than we should be giving them credit for. Their mandate is driven by and founded on 300-year-old economic ideas founded in such universities, and are still using 100-year-old solutions to heating our homes and using fossil fuels as the driving force (no pun intended) for economics.
All those other faculties in universities such as horticulture, Indigenous studies, earth sciences, engineering, sociology, mathematics, architecture, English, and humanities need to start keeping those schools of business in check so we won’t have to listen to the propaganda that the earth and economy will come to a screeching halt if we actually smartened up and innovated how we consume fossil fuel products.
Have you seen the tailing ponds that dot B.C. and Alberta from oil fracking? Have you seen the Alberta tar sands lately? It is not as picturesque or as idyllic as Langley so its safe to support these pipelines from where you are all sitting right?
Those workers all have skills applicable in other sectors. So why not use that modern business and technological ingenuity, and put it to good use elsewhere. It’s a free market isn’t it? There is nothing stopping them from being prosperous is there? This is Canada isn’t it?
So to the GLCC please stop pitting your ideology against the rest of us and stop asserting that we are all safer, richer, and more prosperous if we continue on our current 300-year-old economic trajectory, when clearly it isn’t working out as well as you wanted.
Stop blaming all the people in opposition to your rhetoric that flailing prices and economic outlook for toxic oil products aren’t hitting the mark in the stock markets as well as you had hoped either. It isn’t our fault. Other people in other parts of the world, prosperous business people who are out there are already aware that what you are doing is unethical and the ethics actually have weight in their decisions to not support the Canadian tarsands economy.
Face that fact. Maybe it’s time to move on?
If your business acumen is as amazing as you tell us in your brochures, then you can collectively think your way out of perilous economic problems, and innovate your way into a new era of thought and action.
Stop supporting a business model that requires contract military police forces to remove people from protecting their land, drinking water, and their right to refuse your business aspirations from impeding on us when we say no.
Brandon Gabriel (Kweləxwəlstən), Kwantlen First Nation
• READ: Langley chamber joins call to kill ‘no pipeline ever’ law
