By CHRIS DIXON

In December, representatives from almost every country in the world will gather for the United Nations Climate Treaty talks in Copenhagen.

It’s not a moment too soon, considering that atmospheric carbon levels already far exceed 350 parts per million — the level considered to be the maximum our planet can tolerate and avoid catastrophic climate changes.

Just last week, delegates from 180 nations met in Bangkok for preliminary meetings. 

During Canada’s presentation of our current position on Kyoto, the delegates from 77 developing nations simply stood up and walked out of the room. Oops!

Canada won two “Fossil of the Day” awards in the first three days of talks.

Clearly, if Canadians sincerely intend to address climate change, we’ll need far better leadership, yet our political process seems designed to resist meaningful change.

It’s up to us as individuals to modify our habits — to consume less in every aspect of our lives, and to tirelessly encourage and support our leaders to do the right thing. It’s our new job description.

After we’ve changed our light bulbs and sold off that gas-guzzling second car, can we bring ourselves to examine our relationship to money, and more specifically, to debt?

Can we see how debt is a mechanism to enable consumption? Can we consider ways debt can influence all aspects of our life?

Imagine for a moment that we could don a pair of super-hero quality “debt-detector glasses” that presents us with a very different view of our home and our town and our nation.  

These magical glasses would make everything that has a debt against it invisible, leaving visible only the stuff that’s paid for. What a reality check!

The glasses are programmed to offer us the option of returning the missing objects into the picture and it scores us on our choices.  

The glasses reward or penalize us as we return schools, hospitals, houses and six-foot-long stainless steel barbecues (ouch!) back into our lives.

Our super-hero glasses would show us how debt can be useful as a tool to provide a home or maybe start a business, but that debt can also create needless waste. How debt can lead us into a form of slavery, as we find our freedoms and options eclipsed by the relentless need to repay debt.

Many of us start our adult liveswith a student loan and a manageable amount of credit card debt. We get an education, get a good job, make lots of money, and strive for the good life to which we North Americans feel entitled.

Before we know it, we’re immersed in all the trappings of success: a home mortgage, car payments, restaurant meals, child care, Air Miles, the distraction of consumer electronics, two jobs and no time.

Drowning in media messages that encourage us to overspend, we max out our credit card — only to find that the credit limit has quietly increased.

It’s an easy place to find ourselves and a much harder place to get out of, because debt and self-image possess a momentum that makes it difficult to embrace the alternative.

The alternative of course is to have less, to want less, to need less of pretty much every tangible thing we currently take for granted. In return, we get our lives back.

If we learn to control our ability to generate or to tolerate debt, we ease the burden we place on our planet.

On a local/global note, Oct. 24 is the World Day of Climate Action and there’s plenty of activity planned for Salt Spring Island.

It’s an opportunity to send a clear message to the world’s politicians that we expect some meaningful change. Please participate in as many activities as you can.

Learn more at: www.350.org; westcoastclimateequity.org; www.kyotoplus.ca; www.transitiontowns.org.