Turner - The geography of hope : a tour of the world we need

Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope.

H ARUKI M URAKAMI ,
Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

You want us to feel better
On these darker trails
With light revealing holy grails
To hike through dangerous weather
You need twilight eyes

G UIDED B Y V OICES , Twilight Campfighter

But now, says the Once-ler,
Now that youre here,
the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear.
UNLESS someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
Its not.

D R. S EUSS , The Lorax

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

I dont have to go very far to find a certain kind of reassurance that I live in a golden age. Out my back door and down the back alley to a steep-sloped residential street, and then its just a two-minute upward scramble to the crest of a ridge known as Scotsmans Hill, which affords one of the citys best views. Here is Calgary, AlbertaCanadas fourth-largest and fastest-growing metropolis. Here is a panorama Fritz Lang could only dream of, a marvel of engineering genius and financial might that even today equates in the minds of most of the worlds people with progress, prosperity, hope and ambition, the future: a glittering skyline.

In the middle distance, the downtown core stabs at the wide prairie sky with a hundred sleek fingers. At one end are the twin knife-blade towers of the Petro-Canada Centre, on the other a pair of older, squatter office blocks topped with the sled-dog logo of Husky Energy, and in between are anonymous skyscrapers housing the local offices of Chevron and Shell and Halliburton and dozens more companies with less famous names, all of them dedicated to the lucrative business of extracting fossil fuels from the earth. The whole scene is punctuated by the exclamation point of the Calgary Tower, a torch-shaped needle that belches a natural-gas flame from its crown on special occasions. Farther south is the white dome roof of the cavernous fitness centre where my wife and I sometimes go to swim and play badmintonthe Talisman Centre, named for the last Canadian company to divest itself of oil investments in Sudan. The foreground is dominated by the citys temple of hockey, the Pengrowth Saddledome, its last name referring to its whimsically bow-shaped roof and its first name to a lucrative fossil fuel investment trust.

This is the vista thats sometimes used to illustrate the copious news stories that have appeared in recent years to document Calgarys increasing prominence in the life of the nation and the energy economy of the world. These stories, too, offer a kind of reassurance. The headlines yelp excitedly about the unprecedented boom, about an economic juggernaut, about streets paved with black gold as the good times roll. The reports underneath detail the runaway growth of a city lucky to be situated in the middle of a wide prairie pocketed with vast pools of natural gas and blessed to be christened the corporate hub of a colossal mining operation far to the north. This, they say, is a city coming into its own, making its mark. A city entering its golden age.

Maybe those stories make passing mention of the catalyst for that mining boomthe skyrocketing price of a dwindling resource in relentlessly increasing demand, a global thirst for oil so inexhaustible that even the marginal, low-quality fossil fuel deposits buried in the tar sands of remote northern Alberta must be put to use, even if the operation required to mine and refine the stuff requires feats of engineering on a scale that wouldve given pause to a Kremlin apparatchik. Maybe this is mentioned; rarely is it suggested that it could be anything other than admirable and beneficial and essential; certainly its never even hinted that it might be a symptom of a particularly advanced strain of mass insanity.

And who could be so impertinent, so misguidedso deludedthat they saw such things from this perspective? Look again from atop Scotsmans Hill, peer beyond the office towers to the great blooming city stretching off in all directions. See the wide avenues, the meandering suburban boulevards, the eight-lane freeways as broad as the Champs-Elyses. Look at the big housesmansions, really, in any other age but thisstuffed full of the latest in digital gadgetry; the elegant shops and cavernous warehouse stores overflowing with anything else the heart might desire. Look to the horizon, to the jagged line of peaksthe Rocky Mountains, where championship golf courses and world-class ski resorts await anyone who wants to top up the hundred-litre tank in the ole Cadillac Escalade and rev up that growling 6.2-litre V8 and roar right on out into Paradise.

Look further still, use the minds eye, extend your vision to Houston and Caracas and Dubai, to cities where the fossil fuel wealth is perhaps less overt but no less ubiquitous, to New York and London and Tokyo and evenespeciallydelirious Shanghai. Isnt all this as impressive a facsimile of perfection as humanity has yet devised? It can be hard to argue otherwise: the fossil-fuelled, hyper-consumerist capitalism that has spread around the globe since the Second World War is quite possibly the most successful social experiment the world has ever seen, and it has birthed by far the wealthiest and healthiest societies in human history. A chicken in every pot and a car in every driveway. The Good Life: democratized, trademarked, mass-produced, shipped worldwide.

What a time to be alive, what good fortune, and what a joy it must be to be a Calgarian right about now. To live in one of those blessed cities on a hill at the end of history. Put your hands on the wheel / Let the golden age begin. Thats a Beck lyric, sung in a thin whisper over a country waltz as cold and cutting as a winter prairie wind, as sharp and precise as a glass office tower. A biting breeze of a tune, the vocal almost blown away completely, as if to suggest what the breathless news stories never do: that golden ages arent often found where they claim to be.

At night, the farmers fields north of Calgary look like a candlelight vigil on an Olympian scale: vast, empty prairie dotted at wide intervals with narrow multistorey scaffolds, blazing fires atop each one. These are the flares that arise from burning off the sour gashydrogen sulphidein the natural-gas wells. Ranchers have long suspected the flares to be the cause of stillbirths and other health problems in downwind livestock; the sour gas itself is potentially fatal to humans at concentrations of more than 500 parts per million. Thats 500 ppmin a curious coincidence, a figure thats also the most liberal estimate of the maximum permissible level of carbon dioxide concentrations in the earths atmosphere before a process often called catastrophic climate change (sometimes known, in more anxious circles, simply as apocalypse) will likely become inevitable. Prior to the onset of the fossil-fuelled industrial age, the concentration was 280 ppm; right now, its about 380 ppm. If the status quo thats propelling Calgarys giddy boom continues unchecked, its a scientific certainty that 560 ppmsufficient, by most estimates, to trigger catastrophic climate changewill be reached by mid-century.