Vancouver's Green Identity Crisis Is the World's

In a March 2010 cover feature for Walrus Magazine, Gary Stephen Ross contrasted Vancouver's hunger for global status with the complexities of its relative youth. "There is a palpable sense of participating in a grand civic experiment," he wrote at the time. "This adolescent city is a work-in-progress, and many citizens, one way or another, eagerly partake in the work." Since then much of "the work" has served City Hall's goal of transforming Vancouver into the world's "Greenest City."

More than just slick public relations, Mayor Gregor Robertson's promise to achieve that status by 2020 is a sincere attempt to repair planet Earth. Yet it also conceals an adolescent city's struggle to form an identity. Feel that struggle in the Greenest City Action Plan's opening paragraphs, which conflate the 1967 activist defeat of a massive freeway through Vancouver's core with 1990's Clouds of Change report, an early effort to describe the fight against climate change in economic language.

What follows are 10 green targets that fuse the often contrary worldviews of activism and business into a single civic narrative. On Thursday Mayor Robertson is unlikely to dwell on the tensions created by that union when he delivers the opening keynote address to Partnerships 2014, a major clean economy conference hosted by UBC's Sauder School of Business.

It's too bad, because the 200 or so "world-class" investors, business leaders, researchers and policy makers attending it are in a better position than most to recognize that Vancouver's green identity crisis also happens to be the world's -- and if human existence is to become truly sustainable, somehow it must be resolved.

Big Brother

The Greenest City Action Plan begins with an exhortation. "It's up to everyone to do their part," it reads. Encouraging people to do their part means giving them tools to become less dependent on large industrial systems. That's the implication of policy goals promoting community gardens, small-scale clean energy and home efficiency retrofits. Yet ultimately "the City's ability to influence the decisions that will lead to a reduced [ecological] footprint is limited," the plan laments.

Which is why the job may be better left to technology. Speaking after Mayor Robertson at Partnerships 2014 is Andy Baynes, director of Nest, a U.S. firm bought recently by Google for $3.2 billion that makes home appliances capable of learning people's daily patterns. Such data might someday feed into a broader "Internet of Things" that would allow cities to dramatically reduce their energy use. Vancouver hopes by 2020 to speed that shift by doubling such green jobs as "business energy advisor" and "smart grid engineer."

Yet there's a tension between each vision. Because at the same time City Hall urges people to liberate themselves from large industrial systems, it also aims to wire them into a global network that analyzes data from their private lives. One result of that tension is B.C.'s ongoing grassroots revolt against smart meters, a movement whose fears of Big Brother intrusion (which also drive a similar U.S. opposition) have for years delayed efforts to more smartly conserve the province's electricity.

A price on nature

Some call those fears irrational. But many facets of human identity are not explained by logic. People's relationship to nature is one of them. "Anyone who has walked through a park on the first sunny day of spring has experienced the importance of green spaces," reads Vancouver's Action Plan. To reap the oft-intangible benefits these spaces provide, City Hall aims to plant 150,000 new trees by 2020 and "ensure that every person lives within a five minute walk" of nature (or its approximation).

Yet the plan also implies that much of what we cherish about the natural world is under threat. That is, unless humankind can "live in better balance with the Earth's natural systems." Fortunately, it goes on, "there's a strong business case for going green." At Partnerships 2014, Sustainable Prosperity's Alex Wood will deliver a keynote address on how "green bonds" -- which fund projects like small-scale hydro power and sustainable forestry -- make that business case even stronger.

These visions sound complementary. But to many people they are profoundly not. Because while the first seeks to preserve something wild and intangible about nature, the second treats rivers, sun, wind and trees as valuable commodities. That tension split B.C.'s environmental movement right down the middle during 2009's provincial election, and continues to drive opposition in Canada, the United States and elsewhere to the deployment of renewable energy.

Fighting oil tankers

Vancouver's Action Plan instead urges people to oppose coal, gas and oil. One of its top goals is to "eliminate dependence on fossil fuels." Partly that reflects a technocratic desire to build low-carbon energy systems across the city. Yet it's also expressed in Mayor Robertson's activist efforts to ban new coal exports through Vancouver's port. And in his fight against Kinder Morgan's oil sands pipeline expansion. "The proposal is all risk and no benefit," he said last December.

Yet City Hall also acknowledges that such industrial firms may actually support its "Greenest City" ambitions. "Many of the resource-based companies headquartered in Vancouver have sustainability departments, which have created green jobs," the plan reads. Should Cenovus be included? Though based in Calgary, the oil sands producer's "sustainability department" is a major investor in Vancouver water-solutions firm Saltworks, both of which will appear at Partnerships 2014.

This may be the Greenest City's biggest tension: whether to fight "dirty" industries or encourage them to get cleaner. So long as it remains unresolved, people will continue to conclude that Vancouver's "green activities" are separate from the "real economy", a distinction that helps conservative politicians like Prime Minister Stephen Harper win elections (and justifies their hostility to climate solutions). None of these questions are Vancouver's alone. So let's hope the clean economy thinkers gathering here on Thursday can help provide some answers.