4 - Wednesday, January 30, 1991 - North Shore News Ecological terrorism changes meaning of war I GOT caught last week in the shifting sands of televi- sion coverage of the Gulf War. No sooner had | walked into my TV station than a producer rushed over to tell me, somewhat breathlessly, that Saddam had just unleashed a giant oil spill. Bush was taking it seriously. There was going to be some kind of counter-action, maybe burning it or sending in paratroopers on suicide missions if necessary to stop it. This was going to be at the top of the Six O’Clock news. Ecological terrorism, on an unbelievable scale, finally happen- ing. War becomes an eco-story. Go find some experts, Hunter! In- terview the hell out of them. As the reports and video feeds filtered in through the rest of the day, the picture built up of a slick ‘ta dozen times worse than the Exxon Valdez," which, by the -way, gives hardly any true indica- tion of its proportions, if the reports were true. To be as big as the Pentagon said, this particular slick would have to be equivalent in size to the three greatest previous slicks in history all put together: The Amoco Cadiz (69 million gallons), the Torrey Canyon (43 million gallons) and the Exxon Valdez (a ‘*mere’’ 10 million gallons). Being from the West Coast, J am more than slightly hyper about oil spills. Back as early as 1969, 1 was one of the people down at the Peace Arch, demonstrating against the planned passage of super- tankers from Alaska. The first oi! spill I actuatly saw was in 1971, when a freighter named the Irish Stardust hit the reef just north of Cormorant Island at the upper end of Johnsto». Strait. People fought that one with hay, soaking up the stuff as it lapped ashore, shovelling it into piles and burning it. It mage you realize that the whole world could become like the mess your hands turn into when you try to do something with your car engine. Once you have watched the en- tire occar as far as the eye can see heaving siuggishly under a thick shroud of bunker crude, there is a part of you that is never quite the same. Until word of the giant Sad- dam-engineered slick came through, I had been personally opposed to Canada's involvement in the war against Iraq. It was a war, So far as I was concerned, which was being fought as much for reasons of American hegemony and George Bush’s hidden domestic political agenda as it was for the lofty stated pur- pose of containing regional im- perialism by Saddam Hussein. Accordingly, especially given the insignificance of our military contribution, I saw no good reason for Canada to be in there fighting. Not to save a decadent Middle Ages-style monarchy that had been artificially created in the wake of the collapsing British Empire! If a war had been called to close down the oil wells of the Mideast, as opposed to trying to keep them flowing, I would have been in favor of Canada being there, front and centre. While we are all fixated on the Nintendo-like war being played on Bob Hunter STRICTLY PERSONAL our television screens, by far the bigger story —- almost utterly unreported — is the news that 1990 was the hottest year on re- cord, signalling the start of a se- cond consecutive decade of steady and measureably-rising global temperatures. Only an idiot or somebody get- ting their paycheques directly or indirectly from the oil industry argues any longer that the Greenhouse Effect isn’t reality. Who can have failed to notice the wild variations in weather that are occurring, not just on the Lower Mainland, but everywhere in the world? The extremes are getting more extreme, the climatic pendulum is wobbling wonkily. It all comes back to carbon dioxide getting trapped in the at- mosphere, and the CO2 all comes back to petroleum. In other words, those thousands of oil wells in the Arab countries are slowly gassing us to death. If we were a sane species, we would be in there, using force if neces- sary, closing them down. Instead, we are waging a war to allow the Arabs to keep on pump- ing the oil that turns into the CO2 that has triggered the atmospheric clogging process that threatens our global climate that in turn en- dangers our food supply and ultimately the ability of all living things to remain alive. With this sort of a mind-set, I would naturally be ambivalent about the Gulf War, even if I didn’t think that Canada under the Mulroney Doctrine has thrown away our greatest international asset, our hard-earned role as honest brokers and peacekeepers, in order to march in lockstep with the Americans, under their com- mand, as they prime the pump of their vast defence establishment. Then came the giant oil spill along the shore of Kuwait and northeastern Saudi Arabia. And my first thought was: nuke Sad- dam! The madman is committing ecological terrorism, with the planetary eco-system as the hostage. Thus was I caught in the shif- ting sands of war... eee CANADIAN » CLOSET Hy Free home estimates m S86-4263 1385 Crown St., N.Van. Jessup named school board chairman NORTH VANCOUVER SCHOOL BOARD MARG JESSUP has been elected chairman of the North Vancouver District 44 School Board by her fellow trustees, and Richard Walton has been elected vice chairman. By Patrick Raynard Contributing Writer Trustee representatives to various committees were also an- nounced at the Jan. 15 board meeting. Pat Heal, the one new member of the board, will join Anne Macdonald and Jessup on the ad hoc committee that is currently negotiating with the North Van- couver Teachers’ Association. 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