A whole new kind of problem confronts peace-minded progressives in these still-early but disturbing years of the new century. The damages wrought by worldwide corporations, particularly those at the vanguard of the globalized manufacturing and energy industries, have never been more damning: the terrible toll of greenhouse gas emissions and their threat to our future existence is among the most documented and certain scientific phenomenon of all time, and yet some of these companies seek to muddy the waters so they may earn a few more dollars for shareholders while precious last chances to change our collective trajectory are squandered. At the same time, terrible new wars are waged on their behalf to secure energy and other resources necessary for their manufacturing plants, even while alternative energy sources and conservation measures are spurned, a massive loss of life and limb apparently being the cheapest of known alternatives.

But we also live in the age of the most sophisticated media-manipulating technologies and applied psychological sciences in human history, not to mention the age of the most concentrated ownership of global media ever organized. The opportunities for peace-minded progressives to learn about problems, let alone communicate to a large audience about solutions, has never been greater—even in the midst of the internet communications revolution, which for some unforeseen reason does not produce any different result than what the pre-internet media landscape produced, in terms of eliciting the complicity of the public in the crimes of the corporations and their handmaidens in government.

Prior to the launching by the US of war on Iraq in 2003, the world witnessed the largest and most widespread public protests ever recorded. Also, the lies issuing from the White House to justify the planned war were, among lies told by governments, surely the most widely panned, dissected, and disproven of all time. And yet the war proceeded as planned without so much as a delay.

The absolute connection between fossil-fuel-fired modern industrial activity, including car travel, and the warming of the planet ahead of a certain near-future climatological catastrophe, is among the most widely-known and accepted bodies of scientific theories ever. And yet, industrial activity and its burning of fossil fuels, including in private cars necessary for industry’s labour and consumption, has never been more encouraged—never been made more easy to do, never been more facilitated by our own government.

The malaise—this gaping disconnect between what we as individuals know for sure has to be done and what we as a society are absolutely not doing to address these issues—extends up and down throughout the entire political infrastructure.

In something as small in the global scheme as a neighbourhood council, the Grandview-Woodlands Area Council, which covers one quarter of the east side of Vancouver, Canada, a ferocious political battle erupted over whether a one-day street festival along the main commercial district of the community should be allotted its budget for preparations (money the festival organizers had themselves collected, by volunteers at the previous festival), because it was deemed inappropriate that the festival take on political overtones. The festival is a Car Free Festival, meant to demonstrate how life can be lived locally without cars, at least for one day. It was inspired as part of the local fight to prevent the provincial government from proceeding with a massive $3 billion freeway expansion which would funnel an excessive number of cars through that neighbourhood.

A group of people, myself included, managed to get elected as an ad hoc slate to that Council the past month that would in fact view opposition to freeway expansion as a worthwhile battle for a neighbourhood council to engage with, and that would view a car-free festival as a useful way of progressing with that fight. But it took a massive effort of mobilizing the residents to come out to a small airless room beneath the library one night to vote. I was interviewed the next day for one radio station’s newscast, but I was stumped by the interviewer: What were we planning on doing to stop the highway, what did I think we could do? I explained that we would sway public opinion, “anything we can do,” I made the fatal mistake of adding. “Are you,” she replied, sensing a story she could use, “calling for civil disobedience?”

The next day I was interviewed on another radio station, live and at greater length. I mentioned the phenomenon of peaking oil production, but I made the mistake of mentioning that virtually all experts in the field predict it. “Ah, experts!” the host quickly jumped in, seeing his old familiar launch pad. “But how many of those experts are stuck on the highway every morning?” I failed to recover the momentum.

The civic government of Vancouver, in an extensive debate about whether to allow WalMart to build a store in the city, made much of the traffic a new store would bring, but only one councilor ever mentioned peak oil production as a factor to consider in thinking about the future retail environment of the city, and none mentioned greenhouse gas emissions, or any civic attempts we might make to reduce ours.

The provincial government is planning to go ahead with the freeway expansion despite all expert opinion insisting the measure won’t reduce congestion—the raison d’etre of the plan—and that it will only increase single vehicle dependence and the burning of dwindling fossil fuels, add to regressive real estate development, and create more greenhouse gas emissions.

The federal government seems intent on joining all US attempts to use naked, brutal force to gain control of resource extraction sites, particularly oil reserves in the Middle East and Asia, where Canada—in Afghanistan—has squandered a fifty-year old military tradition of peacekeeping in a perverse attempt to impress the bully.

At the level of international governance, we seem decades away from even the remote possibility of building enforcement regimes when it comes to national responsibilities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and to behave peacefully toward neighbours in the era of declining resources—resource wars having been repeatedly pointed to as our future this century, barring any successful deflection of that global trajectory we might manage to create.

All this is to say that, though the problems seem the greatest today, and have indeed largely caught the attention of the public worldwide and alarmed it to at least a somewhat serious state, it nevertheless appears to be less possible to achieve a political resolution to any of these problems than it has ever been in history. We can’t even successfully get a powerless, zero-budgeted tiny neighbourhood council to effectively express—just express—succinct opposition to something as grossly offensive to the thinking mind as an extremely old-fashioned freeway expansion plan. What hope have we of actually altering the consciousness of a civic administration, let alone a provincial or a federal government, much less the international community, enough to become alert to these massive problems, which is only the precondition to actually changing legislation, which itself is only the first step toward effectively changing corporate and individual behaviors that might, if changed in time, alter our fate? That is the challenge facing progressives today.

What form does an effective set of local and international measures take anyway? The lack of a ready answer is perhaps one important source of the stasis gripping us each in our homes as the world outside balances on the precipice. Has anyone imagined yet what a world looks like that isn’t at constant and ever-increasing war with itself over dwindling crucial resources, one that isn’t degrading its environment to the sure detriment of its own life, and one in which the weight of public opinion both locally and internationally and at all levels in between is at least of one mind on the necessity to pursue those visions?

The first step may be that: to imagine a world that is not at war for remaining stores of resources, not self-destructive in its pursuit of wealth and prosperity, and not at loggerheads over the absolute necessity of pursuing these goals. What would we be doing, what would our households be doing, what would our local communities be doing, what would our civic, provincial, and national governments be doing, and what would the international bodies—the corporations, and the militaries—be doing, in that imagined future world? Perhaps if we can imagine those things first of all, we at least would have something to grope toward.

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