Watchdogs and Gadflies: Activism
From Marginal To Mainstream,
by Tim Falconer, Penguin Books Canada Ltd., 2001, 277
pages, hardcover,
ISBN: 0-670-89417-6, $35.
Canadian left bios
need to take account of this recently published book. I have already seen
a couple of reviews
and read of the author, Tim Falconer,
being quoted in a column in the national newspaper The Globe and Mail,
on his views concerning the anti-Globalization
movement, post September 11th. Anti-globalization activists, for
Falconer, "are not against international
trade...", want "fair trade," not free trade, and do not want
"protectionist policies." (Pages
94 , 97.) The author does not have an Earth-grounded
ecological critique,
which therefore influences his view
of activists not fundamentally opposing globalization. He also, quite
erroneously and dangerously, calls
the Sea Shepherd Society an "eco-terrorism group." (p. 123)
The chapter
on globalization does present some
radical voices who refuse to condemn property damage or violence given
specific circumstances, and also give
the view that the State and its ideological defenders cannot be reformed.
When an author writes such a book,
the media will turn him into an "authority" so it is appropriate, I think,
to
have a viewpoint on Watchdogs and
Gadflies.
There are eleven
chapters in this book and only one, although it is the longest and perhaps
the most substantive,
is on the environment. Falconer teaches
journalism part-time at Ryerson University. He describes himself as a
capitalist, but "not a terribly
good one." (p. 50) I think of him, based on his book,
as tuned to basically making
capitalism work better - and not challenging
those core beliefs of interest to left bios. His early education is
candidly described as that of a "a
pampered upper-middle-class private-schoolboy." (pp. 2-3)
The book
describes the author as someone who
has engaged in "cynicism" for many years but that meeting the people
described in his book, has made him
see the impoverishment of his conception of citizenship. In Canada,
Falconer believes, citizenship needs
to incorporate the activism he has seen in the research done for his book.
He makes the following
comment about the academic level of his students:
"I often wonder what, if anything, schools are teaching these days. Most
of my students have no
sense of history or current events and few read newspapers or magazines,
let alone books, even as
they profess to want careers in journalism. When I teach second-year students,
I must spend the
first few minutes of each class going over basic rules of grammar. But I
can't blame my students;
usually only one or two in a class of twenty-five have had any grammatical
training. Under
‘child-centered learning,' teachers don't worry about grammar or spelling,
they just want the kids
to ‘express themselves.'" p. 74
Three left bios,
including myself, were interviewed by the author, and, based on these limited
interviews, he writes
about our ideas. Actually, the only
discussion of deep ecology in the above book derives from these three interviews.
A former left bio, living on PEI,
is also interviewed and quoted, as is a local activist in my area, whose
work I know
quite well. Given the limitations
of such interviews (mine was something over two hours) and the task set by
the
author for his book, I consider Tim
Falconer's accounting to be quite fair for the people interviewed in the Maritimes.
There are a couple
of issues for me raised by this honest and interesting, although limited,
book, which should
concern our discussion group. The
first concerns how Falconer, and we ourselves, define "activism". Doesn't
for
most of us, the term activist/activism
have positive connotations? A considerable part of his book deals with
right-wing groups and what the author
calls "conservative activism." Is this a legitimate use of the term activism
from a left bio perspective, even
if we do not like it? For example, Falconer spends 22 pages of his book,
the
result of three visits, with describing
the work of the federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. In
2001 the federation had a budget of
3.2 million dollars. The CTF considers government spending on arts and
culture "an abuse of our money."
(p. 63) Other right wing groups are discussed. For the author, all
activists seek
to "change the system from the
outside" but conservative activists have less antipathy to participating
in electoral
politics. (p. 51) Yet
it is difficult to see how Falconer's basic definition of activism, "activism
is the struggle for
justice" (p. 201)
lends itself to so-called conservative activism.
So I am very uneasy
about how Falconer defines the activism he writes a book about. It is strangely
disembodied, without context, in a
post modernist way! Even though many left bios do not accept the left/right
continuum in any fundamental sense,
from a social justice perspective we see ourselves as part of a Left. In a
June 2001 article on "Joanna Macy and the CIA", I pointed
out that while communism and capitalism, as
political and economic systems, are
human-centered, growth-oriented, and basically anti-Earth, social justice
has more of a natural affinity with
the Left than the Right. Does Falconer's class grounding prevent him from
seeing this, as shown in the disembodied
definition of activism he works with in his book?
The second issue
concerns the "reason model or power model" of decision making, outlined in
the book,
articulated by Alberta oil and gas
environmentalist Mike Sawyer and frequently discussed in the past on left
bio,
using perhaps different terminology.
Sawyer has a progressive reputation among radical environmentalists for
challenging the oil and gas companies
in appearances before federal and provincial regulatory boards, what he
calls "regulatory monkey-wrenching."
"Rather than the ‘reason model,' Sawyer prefers the ‘power model.' It's
not the people with the
most reasoned argument who win the day, this line of thinking goes, it's those
who have the
most power - either money or the ability to offer benefit or inflict pain.
‘If you have power and
the other side knows you're prepared to use it,' he explained, ‘then you can
sit down and
negotiate.' The way activists view decision making - reason model or power
model - determines
the tactics they'll use." p. 123
I prefer the reason
and power model. It is totally pointless, for example, for environmentalists
to take part in
conferences with the forest industry
and governments, without a large organized base of supporters who can be
mobilized, and with so-called environmental
representatives who are sometimes fairly ignorant about actual
forest struggles and who have their
"status" tied to shallow ecological activities within industrial capitalism.
Here
in Nova Scotia, where I believe there
is a growing, as yet unmobilized, fundamental discontent with industrial
forestry practices, we have yet again
a "get together" at the end of November, with the Registered Foresters
Association of Nova Scotia, the Certified
Technicians Association, the Canadian Institute of Forestry, and our
own Trojan horse within the environmental
movement, the government-funded N.S. Environmental Network in
the form of an alleged Forest Caucus.
The end result of this meeting will be another PR victory for the forest
industry, who will be presented as
"reasonable" and "open to dialogue."
Falconer, because
he is not involved in environmental activism, has difficulty understanding
the bitterness of
the feelings of more radical environmentalists,
who see activities as the one described above as Earth-betrayal,
not in any way as moving things forward.
Also, this book will help the Right appropriate the progressive
connotations associated, in the past,
with the terms "activism." and "activist." But it is still worthwhile to read,
for
those concerned with the theoretical
analysis of the green and environmental movements in Canada.
David Orton
November 12, 2001
Printed in the Socialist Studies
Bulletin, No. 65, July-December 2001. Also published in the
online magazine Elements http://www.elements.nb.ca/theme/resolutions/dorton/book.htm
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