eye,

4 - Sunday, June 24, 1990 - North Shore News

X THINK I understand perfectly why people try bard not
to think about how serious our ecological concerns are.

Admit it. We do bury our
heads in the sand.

It’s a way of denying our essen-
tial guilt.

Parents who profess to love
their children (or, even more sad-
ly, grandparents who claim to love
their grandchildren), but who do
absolutely nothing to preserve and
protect the environment their off-
spring are going to inherit, are ei-
ther negligent or stupid beyond
belief.

Yet it’s not really surprising.
Look at what a weird society we
have!

A parent who spews carbon
dioxide into the air, buys products
that taint waterways, uses pollu-
tion-causing technologies, wastes
far more energy than necessary,
gobbles up unrenewable resources,
makes money from the destruction
of nature, maybe even wears the
fur of an endangered species, and
continues to use gizmos that re-
quire CFCs, is considered quite
normal and can even be regarded

as “loving.”

** The fact that such behavior vir-

tually guarantees that one’s

children and grandchildren will be
living in an environmental hel! on
earth in casually overlooked.

We’re good parents if we buy
our kids designer toys, even if we
help trigger the greenhouse effect
while driving to the store to do
the shopping.

Does anyone think the kids will
remember us fondly for the toysif
they happen to.be starving to
death in a ruined civilization sur-
rounded by desert or ice, bathed
in unbearable ultraviolet radia-
tion?

They will know by then that the
eco-catastrophe they will be en-
during was brought on by our
thoughtless, voracious, slothful,
selfish ways.

The innocent word ‘‘ecology’’
reminds us of something we'd just
as soon not think about: it re-
minds us of the real cost of our
current way of living.

These are bitter-sounding
thoughts. They are the result of
seeing so much irresponsible
madness in the world that I am
sometimes prone to despair.

Take the case of CFCs. They
have about 900 different end-uses,
only a handful of which could be
described as essential.

To say that they are used in re-
frigeration and air-conditioning,
and are therefore vital to our very
survival, as some apologists for
the CFC industry do, is an insult
to the intelligence.

We crawled up out of the jungle
and turned into human beings
without fridges or air-condi-
tioners. We have survived for

(“complimentary”)
MARKET EVALUATION

of your home.

IAN MeLAINE
i Residential Specialist 5
Give me a cali anytime.
i, f a: 922-9744 H.
926-7831 O.

maybe a million years since then
without ice cubes or thermostats.
These are recent inventions. Lux-
uries, basically.

If we need to keep our food
cold, we can do as we did when !
was a kid: get a guy in a truck to
deliver a block of ice.

Easy.

When it comes to temperature
control, what was wrong with
fans, anyway? Or leaving the
windows open with a mosquito
net? Or building our houses so
that they can naturally remain as
cool as caves?

decrease in the thickness of the
layer in the last 20 years, accord-
ing to the latest figures.

We are not talking about the
ozone hole over the Antarctic, ei-
ther. We are talking about the
skies over southern Canada, where
nearly all of us Jive.

Why isn’t there rioting in the
streets? Why is a multinational
corporation named Du Pont
allowed to continue to crank out
hundreds of thousands of tonnes
of chlorofluorocarbons — 12,000
tonnes annually in Canada alone?

Of course, the CFC industry is
a $48-billion-a-year business, but
so what? Money is not going to
shield us from the sun’s rays.

Ne EY SD

*‘Survival means having an ozone
layer around the planet to protect
us from the unrelenting storms of
ultraviolet radiation unleashed
from that gigantic sustained nuclear
detonation we live so close to...the

sun.’

Of course we are more com-
fortable on hot summer nights
with a central air conditioning
system. But it is just a question of
comfort, not survival.

Survival means having an ozone
layer around the planet to protect
us from the unrelenting storms of
ultraviolet radiation unleashed
from that gigantic sustained nu-
clear detonation we live so close
to, which we call the sun.

Without the ozone layer, we
would never have evolved. All
forms of higher life — that is,
from the microscopic
photoplankton upward — would
be eradicated by the blaze of the
sun’s rays.

I think almost all of us realize
this. And we know that the ozone
layer is thinning directly over our
heads: a six to eight per cent

FORCED TO REDUCE INVENTORY

If the ozone layer has thinned
by as much as eight per cent in 20
years, what will it be like 20 years
from now?

There is plenty of political talk,
and even an international Protocol
aimed at ‘‘limiting’’ CFCs, but so
far nothing concrete has happen-
ed. CFC production continues vir-
tually unabated.

And that’s just one issue.

We prefer not to think about
ecology because the problems that
have accumulated are so bad that
it’s a total downer to dwell on
them.

Downer it might be, but a lot
Jess of a downer than the one
that’s going to happen if we carry
on polluting the planet and
poisoning ourselves and our de-
scendants.

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