Q: La Presse - How did you come to be elected V.P. of the Green Party ?
A: Claude Genest - At our first Congress, three weeks ago, I spoke up several times and I guess people felt I had a solid handle on the various dossiers. I was nominated for the post and I was voted in.

Q: Where does your environmental consciousness come from ?
A: When I arrived in Vermont five years ago, I knew I didn’t want to waste my time mowing this huge lawn I had inherited ! I found Permaculture over the internet. It’s a system of ecological design that uses Nature’s resources to foster a regenerative agriculture.

Q: for example?
A: For example, currently orchards keep lawn under their fruit trees. But grass is the natural enemy of young fruit trees. Here we’re planting around the trees with plants that attract beneficial insects, repulse pests, and others that fix nitrogen. We want to do like the Native Amerindians did: They grew their corn, beans and squash together - The corn served as a trellis for the beans, the beans fertilize the corn, and the squash kept weeds down and soil moisture in.

I put in a greywater system near the house. All the household water, except that coming from the toilets, is purified by a constructed wetland which then releases the water to nourish a planted out “berm” - Everytime I brush my teeth I water my garden ! I’m turning a waste into a resource the best way I know of to keep that pollution from reaching the lake.

I was happy to see that a system just like this one has been approved for use in treating blackwater (toilet water) in Quebec. Here in Vermont, I was only able to put this system in because the age of my house gave me an exemption to current rules.

What worries us permaculturalists is the loss of our soils. So many civilizations declined as a result of soil loss - Greece, North Africa, Israel - these are all man-made deserts. When we lose our soil, we lose our natural capital, but in industrial agriculture, that’s called profit....

Q: Your father, Emile, was, for so many Quebecois, the incarnation of the American Dream. How did he react to your new ideas ?
A: When I got home after my father’s funeral, I had a bunch of unheard messages on my answering machine. One of them was from dad ! These were literally his last words to me: “ this green party business of yours son... It’s good... I’m proud of you ....”.

But I certainly had to battle with the old boy for a lot of years before convincing him !
By the way, I got quite a taste of American style health care with my dad in Florida. At one point he had 17 different doctors on his case. They’d come in, take his pulse, and bill the insurance companies. It was crazy ! He and I would laugh at it together. In the entrance of the hospital there was a Mcdonald’s - I took pictures of it. When a patient was brought in for a heart attack, the nurses would jokingly refer to it as another “Big Mac Attack”. I guess you could say it was good for business.

Our Green Party platform stresses that Health Care doesn’t begin at the hospital. It begins in the soil. After all, a dollar of prevention is worth how many of cure ?

Q: What’s wrong with the current economy ?
A: People don’t realize that in the last decade, the chemical companies have merged with seed companies and pharmaceutical companies. And these people have devised the business plan of the century: Sell you the stuff that makes you sick, and then sell you the stuff that makes you well.
The seven deadly sins have become the seven consumer virtues. We’re encouraged to be gluttonous, envious, lustful, prideful etc.
The entire unsustainable transport system is made possible because the oil industry is subsidized. If we were to tallly the real costs of gas, we wouldn’t be paying $3.00 dollars at the pump, but more like $25.00. Amory lovins of the Rocky Mountain institute estimates the hidden costs of transport in the U.S. at nearly a trillion dollars per year ! 100 billion in wasted gas and labor productivity from sitting in traffic - medical costs from disease and accidents at 300 billion, and another 350 billion for the damage to agriculture from acid rain and emissions. That adds up to about 7.5.% of the Gross Domestic Product. And all these costs are ‘externalized” meaning they don’t show up on the balance sheets of the companies who cause them.

80 % of everything manufactured in North America is thrown away within 6 months. We’ve got to close the loop on the cycles of production. In Burlington for example, a beer manufacturer decided that their wastes could become resources for others. Now, their waste heat is piped into a greenhouse, and their waste materials, barley and hops, becomes substrate for mushroom growing while the spent substrate becomes high quality pork and chicken feed. The waste of the animals becomes methane gas for the production of electricity, and once that is spent, the material becomes compost for the greenhouse. No pollution, more jobs, more profit. I wonder who’s against getting more for less?

Capitalism clearly postulates that there must be healthy competition. But we’re going in exactly the opposite direction. Today, a mere 1000 companies manufacturer 80 % of all goods worldwide, and they employ less than 1 % of the world’s population.

The economy in its present state can’t be sustained. We need to begin transitioning. It is literally acting like a cancer which by consuming its host, sows the seeds of its own destruction. How is it that at the end of the biggest economic boom in the history of mankind, Quebec finds itself with a 108 billion dollar debt and is incapable of financing basic services like health and education ?

Q: Isn’t all this a bit radical ?
A: Not at all. We are the real conservatives since we aim to conserve. We’re talking about creating more jobs and more profits by turning wastes into resources, instead of resources into wastes. Let’s stop taxing the goods and services and start taxing bads and disservices. In every debate i’ve been in, people agree with these arguments - they recognize the truth when they hear it.

Q: But overall, industry must be against your approach ?
A: Industry has yet to realize how profitable it would be to change their approach.

Q: You must get called a utopianist
A: I’ve always dreaded being marginalized. But Utopianism is thinking that more of the system causing the problem can be the solution. It’s like realizing your headed for a brick wall at 100 M.P.H., and being told the solution is to accelerate. We’ve been lead to believe that we have to choose between jobs and the environment. But it’s not true. We can have both.

Q: Do you think you’ll ever be elected ?
A: I don’t know if that will ever happen, but it won’t keep me from speaking out. I’ll be running in the next Federal election as well. I don’t care to be a politician, but I do care to see this information promulgated. I’m working to produce a television series “Regeneration, the Art of Sustainable Living” and it’ll be optimistic because there are so many positive and profitable solutions out there.

After the elections I’ll be speaking at business luncheons and Chambers of Commerce. I’m going to carry this message right into the belly of the beast !