by Stan Hirst
Langdale, B.C. on a Sunday afternoon in early spring. Background of sunny weather and balmy breezes. Add in a few thousand Sunshine Coast vacationers and day-trippers heading home. Result = a humungous line-up for the Horseshoe Bay ferry. Which is how I found myself in a tightly packed line of parked vehicles with nowhere to go for an hour and a half.
Behind me was a spanking new red F-150. Made my 13-year-old RAV look a little faded and submissive, but that has nothing to do with anything (except my ego). The F-150 driver was a well-built middle-aged dude with greying hair and a goatee. What to do? What all mature males do when forced into confined situations of course – shoot the breeze.
Pick-up Truck Guy (or PUG for short) turned out to be a lumberman. Owned his own cedar milling operation south of the Fraser River. Just a few weeks earlier I had ventured closer to poverty by having a new cedar fence built around my own humble abode on the North Shore. Turned out the folks who built it were PUG’s competitors just down the road from his own yard.
He must have been doing pretty well at the lumber business since he owned a summer home on the Sunshine Coast. He needed no prompting to pull out his smartphone and show me pics of the house which he had built himself. I was genuinely impressed.
He was interested in what route I had taken to get to Langdale. When I mentioned Powell River and Saltery Bay he launched into an almost bucolic musing about salmon fishing, especially for chinook. It seemed to be an annual event for him. As I do fairly often when the conversation involves salmon off the B.C. coast, I threw in a few casual comments about commercial salmon farms and declining sockeye runs. He didn’t rise to the bait. He hadn’t checked out any salmon farms, didn’t know anything about their operations.
From salmon to dams wasn’t a big jump in conversation (we were in B.C. after all), and just one step from there to B.C. Hydro. PUG allowed as how his uncle had worked for Hydro. When he told me the name the old Six Degrees of Separation concept proved itself, as always – uncle had been the Chief Engineer during my own years with Hydro. We were getting along famously.
It was inevitable that, at some point, climate change would sneak into the discourse. One reason was the threatening black clouds scudding overhead. Another reason was that I tend to throw climate change into any conversation where phrases like “heavy rain”, “weird weather”, “unseasonal”, “forest fires” or “freezing my ass off in summer” are being deployed. His reaction was unexpectedly vehement. “Its all BS! “
In my experience, climate-change denialism has usually been linkable in some way to ignorance or, more frequently, to a basic lack of interest. That certainly wasn’t the case with PUG. He obviously had thought about it, and his strong opinions were fact-based, as far as he was concerned. “There’s only 0.04 percent carbon dioxide in the air! How’s a little extra going to change the climate of the entire Earth eh?” I gently pointed out that CO2 levels in the atmosphere measured on Mauna Loa in Hawaii were now at the highest level in 60 years of monitoring. “So? Still just a tiny little amount in a whole lot of air!” I started to manoeuvre my way towards a discussion of the greenhouse effect, then gave up. No way through there.
I tried another tack, something a little closer to home. “Forest fires are way more widespread now due to changing climate. Must be affecting the wood supply?” He shrugged it off. “Didn’t bother me any. Supply and prices are always moving around. Anyway, I deal mainly with cedar, fires have been taking out mainly pine and spruce”.
He enquired as to my profession. I told him that my working days were done, but that I had a lot of years in a lot of countries behind me. Somehow the conversational links then went from climate change and flooding to Bangladesh where I spent some years of my life and where there is lots of flooding as well as lots of people and lots of poverty.
“That’s why this global warming stuff is all crap” said PUG. “Makes no difference to all to the people in Bangladesh if the air is a little warmer and it rains a little more or less. What would help them is a bigger economy, higher employment, more exports and lower child mortality!”
At that point he surprised me by mentioning that he had learned all this by watching an online video of Hans Rösling’s presentation on the dynamics of population growth, child mortality and carbon dioxide emissions
I have to admit that I was stumped to learn that a hands-on B.C. lumber man like my new PUG friend knew all about Hans Rösling and his cutting edge graphic presentations on global resource and population themes. I also have to reveal that I felt a pang of regret after I remarked that it was too bad that Rösling had died last year. “Nooo! Damn! That guy really knew how to present data with his 3D moving graphics. Not many get that right!”
The conversation became somewhat eclectic after that. Floods, climate change, poverty, foreign aid, world politics. We were busy trading more name-droppers when David Suzuki suddenly leaped into the conversation. I had carefully skirted any mention of my connection to the Elders, so it was a bit of a conversation-stopper when PUG declared “Suzuki is a hypocrite!”
Me: “How’s that then?”
PUG: “He tells everyone what to do, what not to do, and how to live. But he himself has got properties all over the place. Talks up a storm on global warming and then spends thousands of dollars flying around everywhere!”
Me: “I hear he also spends thousands of dollars on carbon offsets”.
PUG: “What’s a carbon offset?”
The PA cut short the evolving conversation. “The ferry has arrived. Please return to your cars.” We shook hands and traded a few final smart-ass comments. He roared off with all 395 horses kicking. I followed in my humble 13-year-old RAV.
Sitting in the Queen of Surrey’s coffee-shop, I thought about the hour-long conversation I had just had with my fellow British Columbian. Stand-out characteristics – competence, self-confidence, strong opinions, some very wrong ones, unfortunately. Curious about things he hadn’t directly experienced. Open to new information but also very refractive to new ideas on things he had already decided upon, for whatever reason.
Maybe I should go back to Langdale next weekend and try this again
I think that we should hear the other side of the conversation. “There was I relaxing after a heavy weekend puttin a larger cedar deck on my cottage when this cantankerous SOG engages me in conversation, couldn’t get away from him as we were both stuck in the line-up. He kept telling me this airy fairy stuff he got from Suzuki and other left wing channels on the box. Turns out that he used to work for my uncle, I don’t know how Uncle ever managed to have an employee like that! This country needs guys with definite views not to be swayed by fake news, listen to my friend to the South. Wow it will be good to get on the ferry, open up my six-pack and swill out all that garbage that I heard”
Chugging 6-packs on the ferry is strictly verboten. This is B.C., not Holyhead.
Great story Stan! Well done hanging in till the ferry came. I wonder if there was a some way of getting through with different, crafted questions. I see that you did use questions rather skillfully, but can we develop other ways of connecting through different questions. I suspect, and hope, that he will contemplate some of the conversation and be influenced at a distant time?
At least you tried…
It’s like sowing seeds. Some take hold. And you never know how many of your comments will germinate at a later time for him. It’s been a learning curve for all of us.More and more Albertans are starting to ‘get it’ now too.
‘E’ for effort, Stan!
I know someone whose views are very much like PUG’s. Smart, informed, thinks the little bit of CO2 is most certainly not responsible for any changes we’re observing. Claims all his info is factual and science based.
I’m curious though, I thought Rosling’s graphics show how CO2 IS responsible for climate disruption… but read that PUG likes Rosling, but denies what he’s saying. Did I miss something?
Rosling’s widely viewed 2013 video (and the one which I think PUG was referencing) contains his widely-cited comment that “extreme poverty today results in the deaths of seven million children per year; this is, for now, a much bigger problem than climate change. If you burn coal, you save children”.
I realized I mixed up Rosling with another graphic genius, Johan Rockstrom, who has a fabulous talk, Abundance within Planetary Boundaries (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLV4wjdac8A) which IS all about CO2 and climate change. Rosling is often about progress, I guess, which is why PUG would like him!
Great effort, good listening, excellent prompts and fine patience. And you tell the story brilliantly. A classic piece. And – this is how it is. Reality Bites.
I can relate to that encounter.
Here’s one reason we keep plugging away
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ycsru6o6kid8l91/image1.jpeg?dl=0
It is interesting how selectively people take in information.
From what I can see, what Rosling in his videos was saying in regards to climate change was that the billion wealthy people in the West produce far more GHGs per capita than the developing world — but they are catching up (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxbprYyjyyU). So it makes little sense to focus on the GHG production of the very poorest countries — what they need is development. It is true, as pickup guy said, that it “makes no difference to all to the people in Bangladesh if the air is a little warmer and it rains a little more or less.” (Of course it often isn’t raining in Bangladesh, just a “little” more.)
But while Rosling made it clear that we need to focus on the GHGs produced by the West, the pickup truck guy however took the message to mean that NO ONE needs to pay attention to GHGs. “This global warming stuff is all crap.” That was not a logical leap.
In 2013, Rossling in an interview said that while he had gained great fame as an interpreter of statistics, he hadn’t had much of an impact on knowledge. (https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/feb/07/hans-rosling-obituary). People seldom are persuaded simply by argument and reasoning. I suppose that if you enjoy driving a 395-hp truck around, to also accept the fact of global warming would create, as Bob Worcester would say, too much cognitive dissonance.
So, what do we do? Well I commend you, Stan, for talking to this guy and gently presenting him with contrary views, and trying to bring up climate change into the conversation. Perhaps you could have pushed the wood supply question a bit harder — yes, the fires don’t affect people like him who use cedar, but what about those people who do need pine and spruce.
Sounds like you had an interesting conversation, Stan. That gossip about David Suzuki has been circulating for a few years now and it’s hard to battle. But then we are “all hypocrites” because it is very hard for any one of us to be “truly green”. We DO use airplanes to get around but not in a frivolous way – we are usually visiting relatives or educating ourselves and enhancing the economies of others by spending tourist dollars in locations that open up our minds. The conversation also shows that one cannot stereotype – all of us have ‘some good/green in us’ and care about nature ie the truck driver’s love of salmon and fishing.