Born in Toronto, Robert Bateman has been a dedicated artist and naturalist from his early days. Robert Bateman's remarkable talents have earned him a reputation as today's leading painter of the natural world. His honors, awards and honorary doctorates are numerous and include being named an Officer of the Order of Canada, the country's highest civilian award.
His fourth book Natural Worlds is his most sensational yet, containing over 130 new paintings, along with complementary lithographs and evocative colour sketches created especially for the book. With settings from Bateman's island home on Canada's west coast to the High Arctic to Central American rain forests and Africa's Serengeti plains, this is a breathtaking celebration of nature in all its splendid diversity.
Robert Bateman has often focused his talks on the fact that the solutions to are environmental and social problems are known, but we need a change of philosophy in order to make them work.
LGQ: Robert, in a recent talk, you said that what we really needed in North America was a change of philosophy to solve environmental and social problems. You compared the prevailing extravagant philosophy of the French court just prior to the French Revolution with the simpler philosophy of the Quakers in North America and then remarked that we had gone the wrong way, moving from the Quaker ideals to those of the French nobility.
RB: I feel that the real problems facing this planet are not economic or technical, they are philosophical. In North America our current philosophy will, in the long run, be very costly because it will destroy human self-respect. As well, the planet has taken almost all of the human growth it can stand. Our forests, fisheries and family farms are in ruins, and our cities are disaster areas. There is a steady rise in crime, substance abuse, family violence, violence among young people, teenage suicide, homelessness, soup kitchens and food banks. The main cause of death of children under one year of age today in North America is being killed by their own parents. Unless we change our philosophy, this trend seems tragically unstoppable. And then there is the list of problems facing the planet, big, awesome ones such as the carbon problem, running out of resources, etc.
In traveling around the world, I have looked at a variety of societies and have read about other such as the Bushmen in the Kalahari in The Lost World of the Kalahari by van der Post who is the mentor of Prince Charles. These places are different: Japan is different; Germany is different. And they are probably more successful because of their philosophy. So that s the defense of the statement that the real problems are philosophical and that if we had a different philosophy or different attitude or a different set of standards of what we think is a good idea or bad idea, we could solve those problems.
LGQ: Where do you feel these changes are going to come from? From the government on down or do you feel it will be from the grassroots on up?
RB: I think it has to be grassroots on up. But it would help if there was some leadership coming from government, from some of the enlightened big businesses and from the academic community to talk about those things. We need to stop using the word growth, as they are doing still in the current national political campaign, as if it's a good thing. They are saying: "Vote for me and I will guarantee more growth." We have to get our mind set totally opposite to that . That is one of the toughest things to stop and I don't know the answer on how to do it.
We have a microcosm of opinion here on Salt Spring Island and in British Columbia, particularly southwest British Columbia, on how do you say when. What are the repercussions of saying when? The immediate problem when you try to limit growth with rules and regulations is you raise the price of real estate. Then you make it a rich man's sanctuary. So there has to be a multifaceted approach. One thing I don't think we should be encouraging is trying to get our communities to grow. It has been a mind set, and a mistaken one, that if our communities, in places like Richmond and Abbotsford, grow faster, they will get a bigger tax base and more businesses. And they mistakenly believe that will bring a better quality of life.
LGQ: They never think of the resources they will need to support that community, especially fresh water which on the islands here is a great problem.
RB: Exactly, and there is a price to pay for it. I think that one of the ways of getting at this would be from the top down from enlightened government implementing a realistic tax system whereby you have a tax advantage if you have a lifestyle, either a person or a company, that lives gently on the planet. That could easily be done if we wanted to do it.
But, I'm not getting at the philosophy which is your basic question. I'll try to come back to it.
LGQ: You have said that current European models are perhaps a good first step for us in North America to move toward in terms of the way we live.
RB: That is coming back to the focus of your first question. We lived in Germany, Bavaria actually, for a year, and I have traveled in Europe throughout the years since the 1950s. I have a number of friends there who are naturalists and environmentalists, particularly in Holland. I hear about the things they are doing, which seem to be very civilized and mature things. Go and visit Europe; it's far from a tired, old, war-torn has-been. It seems to me to be near the cutting edge of civilization.
Europe is a wonderful place for nature. I can go for a drive around Holland, one of the most densely populated parts of the world, get a bigger and better bird list than most places around North America, and have wonderful and even solitary experiences in nature. They are re-building nature there. Restoration is one of their societal goals, to bring nature back.
The thing about Europe, certainly for the last thousand years or more -- roughly since the time of the Vikings right until the 1940s -- they have been bashing each other over the head and having incredible disputes with much violence and viciousness, culminating, of course, with the Holocaust. But now, they are showing signs of growing up and becoming much more civilized -- about as civilized as I think an animal can be, because we still have our animal instincts.
I feel we are still in the juvenile or adolescent stage of development here in North America. That has a lot of assets to it when you are young and when you have room to maneuver and don't need to have a sense of responsibility. It's kind of fun to be adolescent and energetic and not care about limits, to just crash and head off in all directions and try all different things. But, now we see that there are limits to everything. We can't "go west, young man" anymore.
LGQ: I guess we have reached the limit here on the west coast islands, there is only water to the west.
RB: That's right. But we also found the limit in the Canadian Shield, where I spent the happiest days of my youth, in Haliburton, the cottage country north of Toronto. That was an area of great promise around 1898 -- in fact I did my BA thesis on the subject. The population there peaked then. There was a big logging boom cutting the white pine. Farms all over the place were growing things, very viable farms. In fact we got in on the tail end of it. We just lived off the produce from the farm right next to the cottage.
Farming supported many families back in the ‘30s and ‘40s when I was there. But even then you could go wandering through the forest and find a lilac bush or a rose bush in second-growth forest. If you looked around, you usually found a bit of foundation, and you knew that was some farm wife's doorstep. The farm has been abandoned and gone back to bush. You can't keep on producing agricultural crops on the Canadian Shield, with its podzol soil, for very long.
We didn't know that then, but we know now that much of the space Canada has is not going to be of any use for settlement, although it may be of use for recreation. Clearly Canada is plenty crowded now. I think the same applies to most parts of America. That is why I believe we now should become adults and start looking at how we can live in our own nest without fouling it. Because, up until now, we have been able to just dump our refuse outside the nest, and it didn't matter, we could move on. Now we can't.
LGQ: I guess that is part of making change. When adolescents learn the rebellious stage is over, they take a more respectful look at life.
You have talked many times about a renewed sense of respect as an important step in making these changes. You have commented on hiking in Bavaria where the trails cross private lands. People allow their land to be walked across because they know it is not going to be damaged or littered. And the people who walk across it have the respect and the discipline within themselves that they are not going to damage it. It is quite different than the "put up a big fence and don't let anyone through" attitude of North America.
RB: We found no vandalism in any of the areas that we were in. The only thing we ever saw was some litter, Marlboro cigarette cartons mostly. There were a few Marlboro billboards around that showed a cowboy. Again that message, "Don't fence me in, I'm a macho big guy, and I've got total freedom and I can do whatever I want." That seemed to be the type of people who bought Marlboro cigarettes: people who throw the cartons out the car window.
LGQ: We are seeing that the tobacco industry has sought certain market niches by developing this attitude, one that pushes that macho image young males try to emulate.
RB: Exactly. I could go on with endless detailed examples from our stay that year in Bavaria. There were trout streams everywhere and they all had trout in them. I have a couple of slides showing the centre of the little town that was one kilometres away from where we lived. You'd swear there were no new buildings in the town. But there were all kinds of new buildings built in the style of the old. The bank and the post office fit in with the charm of the Bavarian style. Like the houses in the town, the pizzeria run by Italians was built in the appropriate Bavarian style. You could eat outside the pizzeria beside a little brook with brown trout swimming happily in it. This was right beside the main road through town.
Across the road from the pizzeria was a huge, old Bavarian barn. They walked the cattle into it every night. There was a little backyard from the barn where the clothes were hung out on the clothesline, which is a new-fangled way of drying clothes called solar clothes drying. And there was a little vegetable garden, a little orchard and a pony for the child. In the background of this particular picture is another building which looks like a typical Bavarian house but which is actually a highly sophisticated computer centre, teaching all the latest computer techniques. Their neighbours are the barn and the cows and the pizzeria and the trout stream. It is all right there within less than one acre: a "small is beautiful" world living together very compatibly.
LGQ: I have heard you speak about the local family who have been the gamekeepers of the area for several generations. When they took the hunters out into the local woods, they alone decided whether a certain deer could or could not be shot. And if no appropriate animal is found, no shots are fired.
RB: Yes, the point I made was that the people who lived in the valley were in charge of what went on because they had the legacy of being there and expected their children to be there. I run into problems if I say: "Okay, that should be the new rule, we should just make everything local." I don't know if some of the people in some of our logging communities up the coast would be such conscientious stewards from what I hear some of their mayors saying. If the people of Ucluelet were in charge of Clayoquot Sound....
LGQ: There wouldn't be much left.
RB: That's right.
LGQ: Until they realized they had no livelihood anymore because they had cut it all down and it would not regenerate until their grandchildren were of age.
RB: I don't think they would care about that. The whole idea that there is a common good is a very philosophical thing. Look at the way the Japanese approached environmental regulation in the 1970s. When the Americans established their Environmental Protection Agency and then set up the rules and regulations, the Japanese -- more in those days than now -- were observing everything American did and copied a lot of things. They looked around Japan and said: "Yes indeed, we need some environmental protection." So the government set up their own rules and regulations. The immediate reaction of Japanese business, industry, labour and government was to get together and form committees and task-forces to figure out how they could meet the goals of the guidelines and regulations as efficiently and as soon as possible. They a hired whole new batch of engineers to retool their industry. And labour was cooperating. That is the way the Japanese did it.
The immediate reaction in America was to hire teams of lawyers to take big cases full of money to Washington and take the Cabinet Secretaries and other politicians out to lunch to make sure they could find the ways of getting around the rules and regulations.
The average Japanese company that makes widgets has seven times more engineers and technical people than the average American company making a comparable thing. Whereas the average American company that makes widgets has seven times more lawyers working for it than the average Japanese company making an equivalent item. It is a totally different mind set.
LGQ: I was in the environmental consulting industry for a while, and the joke was that the acronym for the Clean Air Act CAA stood for the Consultants and Attorneys Act. That is why the US has so few environmental standards for air and water quality. Everything has to go through the courts.
RB: A lot of places have copied American ways in the past, but I think it is our turn, speaking generically as North Americans, to look around and copy what is being done in other countries.
Look again at Japan. How they respect the possessions of others. It is much more difficult to afford a Porsche in Japan because people do not have the disposable income and because taxes are so high and Porsches so expensive. But if you are able to get a Porsche, you can feel quite relaxed about it and park it wherever you want without worrying that it will be robbed or vandalized. However, in Washington DC, there are lots of people who can afford Porsches and own them, but they are totally prisoners because their Porsches are always getting vandalized and damaged and stolen and so on. It costs you an awful lot more for your Porsche in the end in Washington DC.
I show a slide taken outside a Tokyo subway station. The area was filled with the commuters bicycles. And none were locked. The owners expected they would be there when they returned home, and they were.
That comes back again to the question of philosophy. Here in North America our philosophy is based on competitiveness. I guess that is part of the being juvenile. In adult males, it has a lot to do with testosterone levels, I imagine. Although adult males are still competitive, they do not seem to be as competitive as teenage males, who always seem to be bumping each other or showing off for the girl or are more heavily into sports. In adulthood there seems to be much more cooperation in committee work and making joint decisions. However, America is still into this very highly combative, competitive stage. There has to be winners and losers in everything.
There are an encouraging array of writers who are also saying we need a different model, a different philosophy to work from, where there aren t just winners and losers -- one where we have mediation, where we have cooperation. Instead of lawyers, we should have mediators and come to a consensus. So there are little signs of this more civilized, adult trend starting.
LGQ: Definitely, it shows in the Natural Step program that Sweden started and is taken very seriously in Europe. But it is just beginning here in North America.
RB: But that program needs a lot more talk and a lot more praise here.
I guess the biggest problem with the direction I am heading with my contribution to the thinking is: "What is the next step?" I have engaged in conversations with people sitting beside me in airplanes.... I shouldn't be saying this, but occasionally I get bumped up to first class because someone is a Bateman fan. They ask me to come up and say: "Oh, we've changed your ticket for you to first class." One of the little spin-offs of having a reputation, I guess.
I then get a chance to sit beside some fat-cat businessman, and somehow or other like a Jehovah's Witness, I get a chance to work on him a little bit. Nobody says I am wrong, no one says it's baloney. In fact, I have never met anyone I have spoken to in Rotary Clubs and Chambers of Commerce, the Canadian Club and other business-oriented organizations who disagrees with me. But they almost all ask what can they do.
My wife Birgit keeps criticizing me on this, and I criticize David Suzuki for the same thing. She says: "Okay, everything you are saying is right, but what is the next step?" So what is next, what do we do to get the thinking shifted or changed? I have to admit I don't have the answer there yet, but. I've been working on it, giving it some thought. I think there are several steps to possible answers.
The first step is to ask the questions. The thrust of the book that I am working on with my son Christopher poses the question: "Is this a good idea?" Maybe it is a good idea to be doing what we are doing and to keep on doing it on into the 21st Century. Maybe not.
Almost all my questions are rhetorical and I ask a lot of questions during my talks. That is my style. For example: Is there any connection with what is on television and youth violence? I am not sure but I think we should be asking that question. We should be coming up with many responses and answers to all such questions.
First of all we should be asking the real question: "What is the problem?" Why do North Americans want to buy drugs so much? I discuss that question in my essay on homo sapiens teenager consumerensis. How can Nancy Reagan think you can just say NO to drugs when everything else in society just says YES to self- indulgence? This is is utter nonsense. We have to attack the real reasons for drug use, that we have turned our kids into self-indulgent micro-markets, trained to have special needs. At the same time, the very industry that is creating these needs is automating, downsizing and shipping jobs overseas thus taking away meaningful work for these young people to do. Is it any wonder that some turn to anti-social activities such as drugs? We can't clear up the drug problem until we get at that root.
We have to change a lot of basic beliefs that are just myths, What I am talking about may be a myth too. But these other myths are not sustainable, like the market-driven economy myth that we can keep giving jobs to machines or sending jobs overseas and expect to sell products to Canadians who don't have an income to buy things, which is probably why industry is getting worried. They are watching malls in trouble and office towers closing down and seeing themselves living more and more in need of the communities they have destroyed.
As Albert Einstein said, "We cannot solve the problems of today with the same thinking that gave us those problems in the first place."
LGQ: Gifford Pinchot III has commented that industry really wants to talk seriously with environmentalists because they are scared. They know that these problems are out there. They are not stupid. What environmentalists are saying is not something they have not heard or thought about. They are scared because they are stuck in this market niche and they want to get some cooperation to make things happen across the board so that there is a level playing field.
RB: I have heard there are a few enlightened industries like that.
LGQ: The process of establishing that cooperation, is basically where Robért started with the Natural Step concept. He wondered why industry and environmentalists have to be fighting all the time. He said: "Let's talk together. Let's agree on something as a basis for discussion and go from there." That seems to be where those questions should be asked. Environmentalists should be going to those companies and saying: "What can we be doing to help you" rather than saying "Close down your business." Logging, for example, can be done in an environmentally sound way and still provide quality local jobs.
RB: That is exactly right. First, we need to ask the questions, then we have to come up with, not one answer but a whole range of answers and possibilities. My degree is in geography, and one of the most interesting things I learned in four years in honours geography was about the philosophies of geography which encompasses two areas of thought. One is determinism, which means you can't do anything about your future. The future is like a little train on the train track, and the track is always specifically laid out there and you go along it to your fate. The other is possibilism where at any given moment you have many, many choices. For example, right now I could hang up the phone or I could change the topic, etc. And we make choices out of free will. We either make wise choices or foolish choices or something in between, but we always have choices. We can decide what are the good choices.
To me the best philosophy for getting through life and having an effective life is to follow that path. I'm not saying possibilism is right or determinism is wrong or right. I don't know. I am just asking which is more useful. The possibilism philosophy to me is more useful. That is the whole basis for why I go around giving talks. Because I think we have choices, even more choices than we have ever had before, and we have free will to make those choices.
But we have to ask the pertinent questions and then come up with multiple-choice possible answers, not necessarily the right one. With multiple choices we will be on our toes "to float like a butterfly, sting like a bee," and thus we will always be able to shift and move into what is the most common sense thing to do at the time, the beautiful, elegant solution. But as conditions change we need to be ready to move again. I am fully convinced that we must do that and talk about the problems and solutions -- talk, talk, talk. People have been talk, talk, talking about the deficit, for example. It seems to have become a big major topic for discussion. People vote for Ralph Klein and Mike Harris and Newt Gingrich because they (the people) understand the talk about the problems of the deficit. They talk about it a lot, and therefore things happen. The deficit gets dealt with and handled. I've taken the slogan from the movie The Field of Dreams "If I build it, he will come" and changed it to suit the situation. to "If we think it, it will come." I'm absolutely positive this happens.
LGQ: The self-fulfilling prophecy.
RB: Certain important, influential people in Germany were thinking in the ‘30s along certain lines and it came to be: Nazism came. It started with a small group. I think at the recent conference I heard somebody quote Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, concerned citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
So that is what you are doing and what I'm trying to do. That is also the answer to Birgit's challenge: how will this all happen, this change in philosophy. We have to ask the questions and come up with a whole variety of answers and approaches and just think all the time about the quality of life, about our grandchildren, about our neighbours, about other species and so on. If we think along those lines, the answers will unfold. I have no doubt about that.
LGQ: And in the process we find more fulfillment in our lives.
RB: Yes, you have the whole thing in your Quarterly here. That's right. Absolutely. A human being needs to be productively and usefully engaged with both hands and brains. We should promote such radical ideas as small is beautiful, self-reliance, lower capital- higher labour input and job-sharing, and aim for a sense of permanence in our lives, jobs and communities.