Editor:
According to the Rocky Mountain Outlook and the editorial “Need for housing Bow Valley to see significant change in coming years” in the May 9 edition, Bow Valley residents must prepare themselves for an inevitable explosion of business growth, residential density and accompanying infrastructure.
This “jarring experience” is, apparently, necessary to save the area from its previously “stagnant and slow-moving” existence.
In other words, capitalism and shareholder primacy demand constant growth to produce profitability and a bunch of nostalgic hippies are disrupting this natural economic evolution.
Great West Media – corporate owners of the Outlook – have a vested interest in this Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek editorial narrative, as the success of their community newspaper empire depends on maintaining this rigid capitalist perspective.
I ask readers of the Outlook to recognize that there is – and always has been – another distinct choice: stop growing.
We live in an advanced society that is now facing crippling climate change. We can no longer claim to be ignorant of the permanent environmental consequences the disease of economic growth produces.
Why should Bow Valley residents submit to an insatiable growth that will clearly result in the irreparable destruction of the place they profess to love so much?
As Bow Valley residents, you have the power, communally, to resist this false narrative. You can refuse to listen to the Siren’s fatal song and, instead, celebrate stagnation by demanding the end of metastatic growth in your community.
Max Wilkie,
North Vancouver, British Columbia
