Winter solstice is time of greatest darkness, which of course is why so many cultures have festivals of lights at this time. But in our culture the lights have gotten over the top, with thousands of lights blazing as you walk down the road, and when you get to the mall at the end of the road (all our roads may not lead to Rome, but most lead to a mall) the lights have become so bright there are no longer any shadows. That’s a profound loss. In the shadows lie our deep fears, and this time of the year traditionally allowed us to look at those fears, to name those shadows, and to learn how they connect to us. If we don’t connect to our shadows, we never grow up, and (like my namesake) we can only live in never never land.

This year, when I look in the darkness, I see the shadow of my country, and it is a dark and oil-stained shadow. I used to be proud of Canada. When I travelled around the world, and people asked me where I was from, I would answer Canada, and they would say, “Oh, Canada good” and then make jokes about snow and cold and I would laugh, and then we’d go out and have a drink and become friends. But as George Monbiot so accurately says, “So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petro-state. The tar barons of Alberta…are turning this lovely country into a cruel and thuggish place.” I read that and wish I could find a reason to disagree.

And it’s not just about climate change and global warming. It’s about the pollution from the tar sands that flows into the water table and causes the First Nation peoples who live downstream to develop exotic cancers and other once rare diseases. I still have trouble giving the climate change denialists any more respect than I give Holocaust deniers, or flat-earth proponents. But we all believe what we have to in order to get through the night, and as Upton Sinclair famously said, “It is difficult to convince a man of something if his paycheck depends on his not understanding it.” Still, climate change is complex; people dying from the pollution the tar sands produce is not. And yet other people are willing to go on doing it.

I was on a forum about Copenhagen last week in which someone posted that he was only interested in what was best for Canada, and if our pollution hurt others, that wasn’t really an issue of much concern to him. I looked at his answer for a while, and decided not to respond, because flaming someone never really helps a situation, and I knew I wouldn’t do anything else. I don’t understand how people can think that those on the other side of an imaginary and arbitrary line are somehow less important than those on our side, but I suppose if I did understand that, I could also understand how people draw the lines between themselves, and the people who have no choice but to drink that oil-polluted water.

The Guardian had an article this week in which the writer asserted that it was time to take decisions about climate and pollution away from politicians and give them to scientists. I thought about this, because while it’s clearly impossible (Rule one of political understanding: no one ever gives up power willingly) I was surprised how much it struck me as desirable. I still believe in science, and that it gradually evolves towards better and better approximations of Truth. I believe in statistics, and in double blind experiments, and in peer-reviewed articles. I believe in evidence and rationality, and I am amazed at those who don’t believe in it. Not in terms of the questions outside of science’s magisterium, as Stephen J Gould eloquently put it: I don’t expect science to tell me who to love, or what food tastes best, or what will happen to me after I die. But I am incredulous with contempt at those who believe that the earth was created 6000 years ago, or that the planet is getting colder, or that H1N1 vaccine is a government plot to kill black people, all of which I have been told. These are not ideas that can be taken seriously, because there is no evidence for them, because they are illogical, and because they hurt innocent people. And yet people do take them seriously, and since as William McAdoo once said, “It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument,” it is hard to know how to argue with them.

Some politicians and activists do argue with them, but too many others try and ride the waves of fear to power, whatever tundra, coastlines, or minarets may get drowned along the way. I don’t think that today’s politicians are necessarily worse human beings than those in Greece 2000 years ago, but I do believe that the much greater differences between the poorest of our society and the richest mean that our political leaders are subject to greater pressure than in early democracies. And way too many don’t resist those pressures.

I can live with the lunatic theories about H1N1. But people are dying and will die because of climate change, and in the next 20 years or so that the actuaries tell me I probably have left on this planet, we can expect to see over 100 million people become climate refugees whose homes no longer exist, and who will want to find new places to live. In the generation following, Gwnnye Dwyer says that another half billion will need new homes. And who of us can imagine an easy or a happy resolution to that conflict? So when I listen to Jim Prentice or Stephen Harper defending Canada’s petro-given right to pollute, I feel deeply saddened by how happy I am that I do not have any children who will live in the world my leaders are bequeathing them.

But after the darkness of the solstice there comes light, and perhaps observers like Johann Hari, who sees the dawn of a new society in the mass democratic agitation at Copenhagen are right. I hope so. But before we get to that day, we all need to look at the shadows our life-style throws across the planet. And the fossil-fuelled lights we love to indulge in at winter solstice are losing their power to hide those shadows.