Many people won't vote in the upcoming Federal election. This abdication of civic duty is typically chalked up to voter apathy. Personally, I don't see much apathy among the electorate. What I see is despair. A lot of people aren't voting because, on a deep and often inarticulate level, they fear that both our country and our world are unsalvageable, that we're powerless before the economic, technological, and ecological forces that we've unleashed. Unfortunately, those fears are well-founded.

Regardless of whether the Liberals or the Conservatives form the next federal government, there are some things we can be pretty sure of. The welfare state will continue crumbling, burying more families beneath the rubble. More government services will be privatised and, thanks to NAFTA, they'll never return to the public fold. Corporate rights will expand while civil rights contract. The middle class will wither, and the ranks of the poor will grow. The chemicals flooding our ecosystems will continue poisoning developing bodies and brains, spreading sickness, psychopathology, and learning disorders among our children. Since we haven't stopped spewing carcinogens into our biosphere, and since the World Health Organisation estimates that environmental factors account for up to 80 percent of cancers, we can expect our cancer rates to keep rising. Our fossil fuel industry will make sure that Canada keeps producing more greenhouse gases per capita than any other G8 nation. The weather will worsen, as will the fires and floods. Our forests will shrink, the air will get dirtier, and our asthma and allergies will become more severe. The powerless, denied access to our nation's collective resources and forced to live in the most polluted areas, will suffer more than most. First Nations people, living under continuing occupation, will suffer worst of all.

On the global stage, our oil, arms manufacturers, and military forces will continue feeding America's imperial addictions, making us complicit in all of its crimes in places like Afghanistan, Haiti, and Iraq. To defend themselves from the American threat, countries everywhere will increase their military budgets, and the world's weapons of mass destruction will multiply. Totalitarianism, wars, and all forms of terrorism will spread as the planet's resources disappear, as the demand for oil outpaces its supply, and as storms, droughts, pestilence, and rising seas ravage our economies. Diseases will become more virulent, and our antibiotics will become less effective.

We'll also see growing resistance to these destructive trends, especially as climate-related catastrophes become more common. The anti-war, anti-globalisation, and environmental movements will expand their memberships. The nations most affected by rising seas, along with certain business sectors like the insurance industry, will apply pressure on both governments and the fossil fuel industry to become more environmentally responsible. The demands of poor nations for more equity in the global economic system will become louder and more forceful. The oil-soaked power-holders in the United States, panicked by their country's collapsing economy and by widespread international hostility, will probably interpret these calls for ecological accountability and social justice as a challenge to US hegemony, and will respond harshly. Domestically, US citizens will be subjected to an ever-more comprehensive police state; internationally, the US will use its military and economic muscle to obtain control over the planet's resources and to persuade other governments to treat all dissidents as potential terrorists. Like every other empire, the US will likely overextend itself and then begin disintegrating. This will take time, however, and during that time the US will probably prevent the international community from using this rapidly closing window of environmental opportunity to stabilise the climate.

These dynamics will take a heavy spiritual toll. As our physical and psychological traumas intensify, our minds will become more rigid and our capacity for joy, empathy, and creative thought will diminish. In the search for dignity and security, many people will turn to religious, economic, and political forms of fundamentalism, losing themselves within their ideological delusions. Others will try to anaesthetise their critical faculties with drugs and alcohol, romance, escapist fantasy, and consumerism. Still others will abandon all ethics in the search for pleasure and power. Those who challenge the collective state of denial will be increasingly ridiculed and marginalized.

Is it surprising that, faced with the sheer magnitude of these horrors, there are people who've given up, people who won't vote or participate in any other kind of political activity? While we can agree that our situation is virtually hopeless, we should still condemn this decision to commit political suicide. To understand why, it's useful to consider the works of Albert Camus.

Camus developed his philosophies as a member of the French resistance to Nazi occupation, during a time when totalitarianism seemed poised to drag the world into endless darkness. He wrote that the most important philosophical question a person could ever ask was whether suicide in any form was justified. As someone who suffered from lifelong depression, he took this question very seriously. Camus believed that the challenges facing our tragically flawed species were so insurmountable as to be thoroughly absurd, and that the appropriate response to this predicament was despair, but despair without contempt for either oneself or others. After all, none of us deserved to be thrown into such a hopeless predicament, where both our world and the limitations of our own nature conspire against us. On a fundamental level, we're all innocent: we don't deserve this damnation. By recognizing this innocence in ourselves and in one another, we can find freedom, strength and kindness in the very heart of despair. We shouldn't commit suicide, Camus reasoned, because suicide slanders this innocence; for the same reason, we shouldn't be cruel to others or abandon them to their suffering. Instead, we should struggle on behalf of our innocence, doing whatever we can to promote compassion, clarity, and joy. This, in Camus' mind, was a kind of existential rebellion against a diabolical cosmic order. The cosmos will necessarily win in the end, but despite this, through solidarity with one another, we can retain and assert our essential dignity. Camus was only referring to solidarity within the human community, but the principles he espoused apply equally well to our relationships with all sentient beings, all of whom suffer unjustly.

Elections matter, because they provide an opportunity to rebel on behalf of innocence. Like every other form of progressive political action, voting for the party that has the most compassionate and ecologically sensible platform is a way of expressing our existential solidarity with all the damned in our burning world. So, don't give up. We can't win, but, by God, we don't have to be beaten.

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