Commentary/Book
Review:
Watchdogs and Gadflies:
Activism From Marginal To Mainstream,
by Tim Falconer, Penguin Books Canada Ltd., 2001, 277 pages,
hardcover,
ISBN: 0-670-89417-6, $35.
(photo: Tim Falconer.com)
Particularly for Canadian left bios, this is a book that we need
to take account of. Recently, I have seen a couple of reviews and
read of the author, Tim Falconer, being quoted in a column in the
national newspaper "The Globe and Mail", on his views
concerning the anti-Globalization movement, post September 11th.
Anti-globalization activists, for Falconer, "are not against
international trade", want "fair trade," not free
trade, and do not want "protectionist policies." (See
pages 94 and 97.) The author does not have an Earth-grounded
ecological critique, which therefore influences his view of
activists not fundamentally opposing globalization. He also, quite
erroneously and dangerously, calls the Sea Shepherd Society an
"eco-terrorism group." (p. 123) The chapter on
globalization does present some radical voices who refuse to condemn
property damage or violence given specific circumstances, and also
give the view that the State and its ideological defenders cannot be
reformed. When an author writes such a book, the media will turn him
into an "authority" so it is appropriate, I think, to have
a viewpoint on "Watchdogs and Gadflies".
There are eleven chapters in this book and only one, although it
is the longest and perhaps the most substantive, is on the
environment. Falconer teaches journalism part-time at Ryerson
University. He describes himself as a capitalist, but "not a
terribly good one." (p. 50). I think of him, based on his book,
as tuned to basically making capitalism work better - and not
challenging those core beliefs of interest to left bios. His early
education is candidly described as that of a "a pampered
upper-middle-class private-schoolboy." (pp. 2-3) The book
describes the author as someone who has engaged in
"cynicism" for many years but also says that meeting the
people described in his book has made him see the impoverishment of
his conception of citizenship. In Canada, Falconer believes,
citizenship needs to incorporate the activism he has seen in the
research done for his book.
He makes the following comment about the academic level of his
students: "I often wonder what, if anything, schools are
teaching these days. Most of my students have no sense of history or
current events and few read newspapers or magazines, let alone
books, even as they profess to want careers in journalism. When I
teach second-year students, I must spend the first few minutes of
each class going over basic rules of grammar. But I can't blame my
students; usually only one or two in a class of twenty-five have had
any grammatical training. Under ‘child-centered learning,'
teachers don't worry about grammar or spelling, they just want the
kids to ‘express themselves.'" (p. 74)
For direct local interest, the author interviewed three
Maritimers, including myself, and our ideas, based on these limited
interviews, are written about. A former left bio, living on PEI, is
also interviewed and quoted, as is a local activist in my area.
Actually, the only discussion of deep ecology in the above book
derives from these three interviews. I consider Tim Falconer's
accounting to be quite fair for the people interviewed in the
Maritimes.
This honest and interesting, although limited, book raises a
couple of issues of concern for me. The first concerns how Falconer,
and we ourselves, define "activism". For most of us, doesn’t
the term activist/activism have positive connotations? A
considerable part of his book deals with right-wing groups and what
the author calls "conservative activism." Is this a
legitimate use of the term activism from a left bio perspective,
even if we do not like it? For example, Falconer spends 22 pages of
his book describing the work of the federal director of the Canadian
Taxpayers Federation (CTF). In 2001, the federation had a budget of
3.2 million dollars. The CTF considers government spending on arts
and culture "an abuse of our money." (p. 63) For the
author, all activists seek to "change the system from the
outside" but conservative activists have less antipathy to
participating in electoral politics. (See p. 51) Yet it is difficult
to see how Falconer's basic definition of activism, "activism
is the struggle for justice" (p. 201) lends itself to so-called
conservative activism.
So, I am very uneasy about how Falconer defines the activism he
writes a book about. It is strangely disembodied, without context,
in a post-modernist way! Even though many left bios do not accept
the left/right continuum in any fundamental sense, from a social
justice perspective we see ourselves as part of a Left. In a June
2001 article on "Joanna Macy and the CIA", I pointed out
that while communism and capitalism, as political and economic
systems, are human-centered, growth-oriented, and basically
anti-Earth, social justice has more of a natural affinity with the
Left than the Right. Does Falconer's class grounding prevent him
from seeing this, as shown in the disembodied definition of activism
he works with in his book?
The second issue concerns the "reason model or power
model" of decision making outlined in the book, articulated by
Alberta oil and gas environmentalist, Mike Sawyer. Sawyer has a
progressive reputation among radical environmentalists for
challenging the oil and gas companies in appearances before federal
and provincial regulatory boards, what he calls "regulatory
monkey-wrenching." Rather than the ‘reason model’, Sawyer
prefers the ‘power model’. It's not the people with the most
reasoned argument who win the day, this line of thinking goes, it's
those who have the most power—e ither in terms of money or the
ability to offer benefit or inflict pain. "If you have power
and the other side knows you're prepared to use it," he
explained, "then you can sit down and negotiate. The way
activists view decision making--reason model or power
model--determines the tactics they'll use." (p. 123)
I prefer the reason AND power model. It is totally pointless, for
example, for environmentalists to take part in conferences with the
forest industry and governments, without a large organized base of
supporters who can be mobilized, and with so-called environmental
representatives who are sometimes fairly ignorant about actual
forest struggles and who have their "status" tied to
shallow ecological activities within industrial capitalism. Here in
Nova Scotia, where I believe there is a growing, as yet unmobilized,
fundamental discontent with industrial forestry practices, we have
yet again a "get together" at the end of November, with
the Registered Foresters Association of Nova Scotia, the Certified
Technicians Association, the Canadian Institute of Forestry, and our
N.S. Environmental Network in the form of a "Forest
Caucus". The end result of this meeting will be another PR
victory for the forest industry, who will be presented as
"reasonable" and "open to dialogue."
Falconer, because he is not involved in environmental activism,
has difficulty understanding the bitterness of the feelings of more
radical environmentalists, who see activities as the one described
above as Earth-betrayal, not in any way as moving things forward.
Also, this book will help the Right appropriate the progressive
connotations associated, in the past, with the terms
"activism." and "activist." But it is still
worthwhile to read, for those concerned with the theoretical
analysis of the green and environmental movements in Canada.
