The Geography of Hope: A Tour of the World We Need - Couverture souple

Prologue
Two horizons

I don’t 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 it’s just a ­two-­minute upward scramble to the crest of a ridge known as Scotsman’s Hill, which affords one of the city’s best views. Here is Calgary, ­Alberta–­Canada’s ­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 world’s 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 ­badminton–­the Talisman Centre, named for the last Canadian company to divest itself of oil investments in Sudan. The foreground is dominated by the city’s 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 that’s sometimes used to illustrate the copious news stories that have appeared in recent years to document Calgary’s 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 ­boom–­the 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 would’ve 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 it’s never even hinted that it might be a symptom of a particularly advanced strain of mass ­insanity.

And who could be so impertinent, so ­misguided–­so ­deluded–­that they saw such things from this perspective? Look again from atop Scotsman’s 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-­Elysées. Look at the big ­houses–­mansions, really, in any other age but ­this–­stuffed 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 ­peaks–­the 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 mind’s 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 ­even–­especially–­delirious Shanghai. Isn’t 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.” That’s 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 aren’t 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 gas”–hydrogen ­sulphide–­in 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. That’s ­500 ppm–­in a curious coincidence, a figure that’s also the most liberal estimate of the maximum permissible level of carbon dioxide concentrations in the earth’s 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, it’s about 380 ppm. If the status quo that’s propelling Calgary’s giddy boom continues unchecked, it’s a scientific certainty that 560 ­ppm–­sufficient, by most estimates, to trigger catastrophic climate ­change–­will be reached by mid-­century.

You can’t see those ­sour-­gas flares from Scotsman’s Hill, not even on the clearest night. You can see only the sparkling city, a gilt cubist sculpture of triumph against a blackening sky. This is the blaze of colour on one horizon, and maybe it’s up to the beholder whether that brilliant light portends dusk or dawn. I can see only sunset ­myself.
My ­daughter–­two months old as I stand on Scotsman’s Hill on a warm spring day in May 2005, wondering at the darkening ­horizon–­will be ­fifty-­one years old in 2056, at which point our current trajectory would reach 560 ppm with a bullet. And who knows whether by then she’ll have a house worth keeping here, a life worth living, a world here or anywhere else sturdy enough to sustain her? I can’t say for certain, and it makes me positively ache in places I didn’t know I had until she was born that I can’t make her any ­promises.

And so I don’t take her to Scotsman’s Hill to see the ­Petro-­Canada towers or the Talisman Centre’s rippled roof or the Calgary Tower’s ­natural-­gas blowtorch. Instead, on a holiday Monday later that ­May–­Victoria Day, Canada’s vestigial tribute to the world’s first fossil fuel empire, the one built on coal that led to my country’s ­founding–­my wife and I take her on a field trip south to another ridge, another horizon, a place that to me represents the dawn of a new ­hope.

Traffic on Highway 2 is thin on this holiday Monday, and before too long, Calgary’s lolling southern suburbs give grudging way to empty prairie, and we are on our way. To our right, the jagged peaks of the eastern wall of the Rockies are our constant companions, ancient and certain and still dappled with last winter’s snow. We zoom south through rolling ranchland, past barns clad in chipped red paint, through quiet towns where the local tack shop is the main merchant. We stop at a gas station where a handmade poster outside the bathroom advertises a ­year-­old gelding for sale, “keep the coyotes out of your correl”–and, whaddaya know, there’s a coyote loping casually along in the roadside ditch a few kilometres further on.

Fifteen klicks north of Fort Macleod, an unforgiving crosswind sets our small car to weaving, and a bit beyond that there appears on the horizon a long, low ridge crowned with a row of thin sticks, like a faint pencil sketch of some grandiose reimagining of ...

Praise for Chris Turner and Planet Simpson:

“One of this country’s smartest and most original pop-culture commentators.”
—Hour (Montreal)

“[An] absolutely must-have tome for the many Simpsons freaks, not just an over-sized fan’s guide but an absorbing take on why it matters.”
—Toronto Star

“Turner has written the definitive Simpsons study. He shows both a lightness of touch suitable to his subject and the intellectual rigour to grasp its vast purview.”
—The Gazette (Montreal)

“[A] brilliant critique of western culture from the mid-90s to the present. . . . Turner understands pop culture in a way few others of his generation have been able to articulate thus far.”
—The Record (Kitchener-Waterloo)

“Smart and funny, Turner is clearly one of the converted, and he writes with fitting enthusiasm for his subject while working in seemly references to cultural theory and TV-insider politics.”
—The Hollywood Reporter

“One of the more fascinating and entertaining works I’ve read.”
—The Globe and Mail

“A broad-minded analysis that connects the television show to some of the most pressing issues in contemporary life.”
—Alberta Views
From the Hardcover edition.