Canada, China, People, Oil, and Trees

Resource management will be a crucial factor guiding the success or failure of independent nations, and of the whole world in the coming decades. For starters, there are too many people running around this rock. We are able to feed what we’ve got right now…kind of…but one wonders how localized events could shape policy decisions among the world’s policy makers. And how long is our system sustainable?

Recent developments in Canada have the locals all fired up.

Healthy economies need growth. Growth presumes additional human and raw resources to fuel the system. Recent Chinese census results have policymakers across the Pacific wondering about the nations’ long-standing one-child policy. In China, like everywhere else in the world, the aging population needs eventual care, and when the demography shifts disproportionally away from the working age population…

Population density in China is already pretty high. China is still a fairly massive land, but many of its territories simply aren’t the most hospitable for human population. I won’t get into any sort of “Free Tibet” argument here—Every map I’ve seen printed for a very long time contains this patch of Himalaya within Chinese jurisdiction. The point here is that even though it’s a massive amount of territory, much of it remains to this day completely undeveloped.

So where will the Chinese, and other developing nations to obtain their raw materials and building supplies if their resources become tapped? Over this century, the strain on worldwide resources will necessarily become an increasing topic of international mandate and policy. Nations will remain autonomous, I’m sure, but who is currently well positioned?

I look North. Canada’s Provincial Governments are taking steps toward management of timber and oil reserves across its massive boreal forest. The oil is important, to be sure, but the responsible management of the timber reserves is at least as great a long-term international concern. At a moment in time where the Canadian Dollar is swapping close to straight-up with the US Dollar, we need to start asking ourselves about our own positioning for the decades to come.

Furthermore, liberal governance in Canada has been pushed aside for the moment at the Federal level. We will see over the coming months and years just what they might have in mind, and if it has anything to do with autonomy of local government.