Dear Editor:
Why double our city’s population? Yes, global population is increasing, and more people are displaced by Canada’s and NATO’s wars — by all wars — and by related global warming.
These terrible realities do not impose a moral obligation on us to fill every square foot of earth and airspace, making our own place unlivable. There are many places to live. If it just has to be New Westminster, wait your turn.
Can we even picture in our minds, double the number of people in this small city? On the floodplain of one of the world’s largest river systems as sea levels rise? Bumper-to-bumper traffic already wastes time and gas. Who makes these decisions? Not the people who live here. We just subsidize the developer feeding frenzy at the heart of this dysfunctional growth “culture.”
Yes, more people equals more business, big box emporiums, condos to build. But growth also costs. Financing hard and soft infrastructure leads to social costs: growing income disparity and homelessness, from demolishing good housing for property value and high-density up-zoning. Resource depletion, waste, pollution. We are being grown too fast to absorb all this change.
We are not obliged to follow the maximum profit demands of the development industry, of planners doing business as usual; of the shadow government — the corporate world. If population growth were the answer to economic health, the world would not be in the trouble we are in.
It’s past time to look at limits to growth in New Westminster. We need town hall meetings to discuss these issues, not in a context of an ‘open house’ and a plan focused on maximizing growth, but in open investigation of all aspects, including our options for long-term economic, ecological and social stability.
Hildegard Bechler, New Westminster
