By Gagandeep Ghuman
Published: April 10, 2015
Even though there is a growing awareness on this, you can still hear people ask, “Does she work, or is she a housewife?” As if being a housewife, or homemaker, is no work. We have come to define work as something only of monetary value. If a type of work cannot be monetised or has no clear monetary value, it is considered no work at all.
We are living in a materialist age. Money or monetary value rules. The industrial and post-industrial cultures have ensured that we get drawn towards things that have clear monetary value while hazy monetary status does not attract us. I guess one reason we get infatuated by commodities is that they can clearly express their value: $24.99, for instance. Both missing and then acquiring a commodity create definite, measurable senses of deprivation and gain. Something that has vague monetary status or is difficult to monetise is also difficult to value. Good friends or neighbours are missed only when they are gone. And full-time moms are said to be not working.
It’s not a very good idea to fix the monetary value of the company a good friend provides or the services rendered by a wife and mother, for social and personal relations have complexities not always identifiable or measurable.
But it will not be a bad idea if something of great value faces cruel neglect with dangerous consequences and is being ignored or devalued in favour of things which flaunt their prices. That’s why the study on the cost of services provided by the Howe Sound ecosystem by the David Suzuki Foundation is such a welcome idea. On the face of it, it sounds absurd. How can you fix dollar value of the pleasure one gets by gazing at nature? Or the thrill one experiences when climbing mountains? But if it comes to a situation when these pale in comparison with services with clear prices, there is no harm trying. It is better to have a wrong idea of the monetary value a beautiful mountain view provides than not even beginning to factor that in our public policies. The report by the David Suzuki Foundation may be a thoroughly speculative enterprise, but one very definite thing it does is to tell policy makers that ignoring environment is not a non-financial act.
So what do we want, Woodfibre LNG or Howe Sound? The reader of the report may well ask. Doesn’t the report tell how we are already getting benefits from Howe Sound worth billions of dollars while Woodfibre LNG’s promised billions are still a long way off, if they are on their way that is? I don’t think the report purports to create an either/or scenario for you, though it won’t discourage you from doing that. The idea is to make nature part of the government accounting procedures, in whatever way possible, so that governments stop thinking that environment is something that only activists do. That Greenpeace does what it does and we do what we do. The David Suzuki Foundation report is the future of the environment movement which began with emotional sloganeering long back when Joan Baez sang, “What Have They Done to the Rain?”
I have heard an Australian artist of international fame is coming to paint our trees blue so that we become more aware of their importance. While public art will always remain debatable, the gimmicks that purport to promote conservation of nature are now certainly past their sell-by date. We don’t need painted trees to remind us that we must conserve forests, though blue trees might look pretty and add to the appeal of our town. We need more substantial ideas that disrupt public policy which is not sufficiently sensitive to environment. The David Suzuki Foundation has thrown up one such idea.
