For most species in this part of the world, winter is all about conservation of energy, hibernation and resourcefulness. So it strikes me as ironic that the mid-winter holiday season has come to embody such excess. I don’t need to inform you about the commodification of holidays that once represented simple things like love, harmony, community and peace — you know all about that already; and for the next month or two, you’ll be soul-deep in it.
With the excess of the season on everyone’s mind, perhaps it’s no coincidence that this, the December/January issue of The Sasquatch, not only cautions us about the dangers of excess, but proposes some intelligent solutions.
We’ve got too much of everything in this issue — a national oversupply of hogs, an imminent provincial cherry surplus, too-high carbon emissions (and what some groups are doing about them), excess wealth (and how we should be sharing it), and more.
In nature, excess is self-regulated. Left alone by humans, an ecosystem will produce exactly everything that it needs to sustain itself; nothing more, nothing less.
Humans are still learning this all-important element of a balanced and sustainable existence. Is there a magic switch that’ll tell us when to stop producing? Brett Dolter suggests that one answer is to incorporate the entire climate into our sense of self-interest (pg. 11).
Prince Charles, in a lecture I recently heard on the radio, had a similar message — a surprisingly simple message for a person of such wealth and royal status. He said that the starting point to sustainable human existence is a change in perspective. We need to see ourselves as part of nature rather than separate from it. Every organism, he said, is a microcosm of the environment around it, a smaller version of the whole. No organism can exist in isolation, nor out of the bounds of the whole. The language of empirical science sets humans apart from the rest of the living world. If we’re going to bring humanity toward a more balanced existence, in harmony with the world we live in, we need to change our language and our perspective, Prince Charles said.
I agree. And I think one of the best ways to change perspectives is through story-telling — through taking the time to learn and understand the full story of the things we experience and consume.
Take Saskatchewan’s economy, for example. If we each took time to understand the current economic boom not simply as increased financial wealth, but as the much more complicated story that it actually is — increased wealth, yes, but also increased disparity and depletion of natural resources — the province would be a different place. If we could witness the growing gap between the rich and the poor, which is how economic growth is currently being experienced in this province, we may find wise ways to redistribute the excess (as Armine Yanlizyan suggests on pg. 13). And if we took time to really hear the stories of plundered earth and disenfranchised communities — the origins of our economic wealth — and if we understood our own actions in the context of this broader story, perhaps we would be compelled to temper our consumption.
This is the power of a story. If we all grew a greater appreciation for the full story of everything we consume, our tolerance for excess would subside. It’s worth a try. You can start now, by reading and sharing the stories in this issue.
Thanks for reading,
Shayna Stock, Editor