Time among the World Wreckers by K.L. Kivi

When I walk among them, the children of the World Wreckers in Orchard Heights do not reply to good morning greetings in the street. Against the backdrop of 4000 square foot houses, three car garage, one acre Orchard Heights properties, the ten-year-old girl and the twelve-year-old boy just behind her seem oddly afraid. The blank windows of the luxury prison homes stare silently at us all, as if in mute indifference to the children’s furtive gazes. The tinted-glass SUVs and 8-cylinder sedans squat like sinister ornaments among the ubiquitous, landscaper-groomed front yards. Except for the scurrying children in the street, the place looks sterile and uninhabited.

This was, once, a place of work and food, not a chilled hideaway for the ultra rich, but a hillside orchard, a farm habitat interspersed among woodlots, a place know for its productive soils and vibrant agricultural culture. Here once stood row upon row of trees, providing myriad varieties of apples to Torontonians just south of here. The apples now consumed in Toronto and here come from as far away as Aotearoa (New Zealand). Gone is a culture connected to soil and weather and neighbours, a life known for its ups and downs, good times and difficult ones. This place is anathema to the rural community I come from in the Kootenays.

Here, the culture of the land has been replaced by the culture of wealth, a blank-faced neighbourhood and the spawn of the good life. But why do they not say good morning, or even nod, from their place of supposed security? Is it that economic security has not amounted to a sense of security in the world for them? Or is it perhaps that when economic security is actually excessive wealth, their fear is well justified. On some level, the people who consume far more than their fair share of the Earth’s bounty must know that they are purchasing and consuming and polluting at the expense of others. They must know that their lives that are grounded in the accumulation of stuff, none of it from here, are unsustainable. How could they not?

Noted climate activist and writer George Monbiot wrote in a recent article in The Guardian that the very wealthy are responsible for the majority of greenhouse gases currently generated on the planet. He challenges the notion that population growth is the key issue in the climate change debate. “It’s time we had the guts to name the problem,” he writes, “It’s not sex; it’s money. It’s not the poor; it’s the rich.” Where those of us who have the cash to drive hybrid cars and dutifully fill our blue boxes fit into this picture is debatable but the places where 63% of the world’s population growth happens produce negligible greenhouse gases. These are the majority of the planet’s denizens who never even dream of owning a vehicle much less live in a culture where anything packaged is ever purchased.

It is the mega-rich among us who create the problems the rest of us must live with: those who head up tar sand extraction industries, who jet about in private planes or at least with private rooms, who move money in perpetual quest of the financial bottom line, who heat, air condition and provision dozens of far flung monster houses, who cruise around in yachts that consume 3,400 litres per hour and send their children to exclusive private schools.

The ten-year-old girl, blond braids bobbing against her shoulders might not know why she is afraid; even her parents might not be aware how afraid they are. Fear is part of the culture of wealth. It seeps into every decision they make. Acquiring wealth is one thing, but hanging on to it is another. They must be constantly on the look out for anyone who might envy their riches a little too much. Who knows what guise they might take! Part of the problem with cultivating a consumer culture is that people end up wanting what the rich have. That is, of course, part of the point: to create want alongside creating the illusion that wealth is possible for anyone who has the smarts to go after it. This is what is called the free market economy of the so-called democratic world. A lot of money goes into convincing the masses that this system actually functions freely and that the only reason you and I are not rich is because we’re stupid or lazy. And if we reject that whole story, we must be stupid and lazy or criminal and deluded.

The poor are afraid, but of different things. They have little need to barricade their doors, hide in gated and alarm-ridden neighbourhoods and cower in heavily guarded countries. The poor have no need to lock up their potential enemies or send armed forces against them. Mostly, the poor are too absorbed with surviving their lives to bother with the rich. And in our increasingly economically segregated communities, few of us brush up against the truly wealthy. The bastions of the world’s filthy rich are well removed from our feeble protests. Long forgotten are the slogan’s of sixties leftists like “Eat the Rich!” Monbiot asks, “So where are the movements protesting about the stinking rich destroying our living systems?” Perhaps those few of us who live among the World Wreckers, in their neighbourhoods and in the countries that provide them haven, have still too much to lose. We cuddle up to the few of the public perks that haven’t yet been eroded by privatization and parallel private services – the occasional good public school, some well-funded hospital or other public facility.

Yet, their excesses threaten to swamp us wholesale. As I turn a corner and head toward the two-car-garage, 3000-square-foot neighbourhood that cosies up against the flank of wealth, I see no signs of more consciousness. The first week I witnessed garbage day in Orchard Heights I thought it was a special, large item pick-up day. I made a mental list of what was being thrown away in this one square kilometre of suburb: three couches, three computers, two end tables, three stools, many toilets, enough plastic lawn furniture to seat a celebrity wedding, computers, a photocopier, fridges, sports gear, enough carpet to do Buckingham Palace, etc. Then, two weeks later, it happened all over again. More plastic lawn furniture – it seems people here think it’s a disposable item, like menstrual pads – more toilets, office chairs, desks, goalie nets, more carpet, always computer monitors, lamps (which look very nice in my basement with the gold-rimmed lamp shades I picked out later), tobogannes, a Bosch hammer drill, slide projector…

But no, I can’t keep listing. Some garbage days, I can barely go out, I’m so appalled by the unadulterated waste. These people don’t even donate their off-casts to charity. The children stroll past this excess every two weeks, just like I do. It is no wonder they are afraid. There is the man in the red van who is perusing for a bicycle for his son; there is the man with the pushcart who picks through their blue box for returnables; there is the middle-aged woman (me) who carts pedestal sinks and mint condition, state of the art office chairs home. These scavengers must remind the children that their families have too much, other families have less and that they waste unnecessarily. These children must know that they are watched.

What will it take to stop the World Wreckers? What will be required to topple the culture of World Wrecking? And if substantive change to the world of the wealthy ever did occur, what would become of the miles upon miles of mansions that accommodate one small family each, sometimes one small bloated person? Would the sprawling fields of the mega-estates that surround Orchard Heights with their thoroughbreds be returned to the agriculturally productive state they once knew? Will ten-year-old girls smile and reply to their neighbours when they wish her a good morning?