4 - Sunday, March 8 1987 - Nort h Shore News Bob Hunter OFF TO Whistler to appea ® strictly personal @ ron a panel at the Canadian Bar Association’s mid-winter mecting. If the lawyers can tear themselves away from the slopes, we will be discuss- ing environmental activism and the law. As it turns out, mostly they are having too much fun to bother. Only about 80 legal beagles out of several hundred arrive to tisten to Alvin Esau, a Jaw professor from Manitoba, debate the issue with a West Coast QC, B.W.F. McLoughlin, global celebrity Paul Watson and humble old me. I’m there as the comic relief, of course, never having been able to work up to Watson's level of righteous indignance. Paul makes a fiery speech about why he can- siders himself justified in obeying a ‘higher law’? — as opposed to mere national or provincial or state laws — in defence of the environment. Surprisingly, there is only a flicker of argument from the lawyers. Prof. Esau wants to split hairs a bit, pointing out that what Watson does isn’t always civil disobedience. More often, it’s guerrilla warfare. No argument from Watson. The lawyers mostly all nod. Oh well, that settles that. Once you redefine an action, it becomes subject to a whole new set of rules. Civil disobedience may be jurisprudently improper, but war makes everything right. Once you declare war, anything goes. Inter- esting how quickly the lawyers grasp this. Well, not all. McLoughlin maniully takes the conservative position that laws shouldn't be broken under any circumstances, at least not by lawyers. And he doesn’t think that citi- zens should take the law into their own hands, either. There’s altogether too much of that sort of thing nowadays, he laments. At the very least, people shouldn't take action until they have the support of the majority. I suggest it is all very nice to wait for the meek to inherit the earth, but by that time there may be nothing left. He concedes quickly enough that the en- vironmental crisis is different from the political dilemmas of the past, but stifl doesn’t think we should worry about squirrels more than statutes, Most of the debate comes down to McLoughlin and Esau being shocked and disturbed by each other’s positions. The law professor argues there are moral and ethical laws that transcend regulations merely rigged to pro- tect the vested interests of powerbrokers. McLoughlin, rather plaintively, argues that The wind blows cold EVEN IN MAU! - on the summul of respect for law would be lost if lawyers set a bad example. Esau and McLoughlin actually clash over whether Gandhi should have been disbarred when he began his campaigns of civil disobedience. It turns out he didn't have his practising lawyer's certificate at the time, so it remains a moot point. But it is a bit like listening to jurists arguing about how many torts can dance on the head of a pin. 1 can't escape the feeling that meanwhile, out in the real world, the sky is falling... The best question from the floor comes when a craftly older fellow demands to know whether Watson is a vegetarian, what he thinks about God having let so many other animal species go ex- tinct in the past, and what’s his position on abortion. Paul obfuscared, I would have to report. Too bad the guy didn’t ask humble old me. I would have given straight answers. About vegetarianism, I would have said that I eat meat, although less all the time — for good health reasons. I take eating other creatures as a privilege of being at the top of the food chain. With it goes the responsi- bility of never eating or harming any animals remotely endangered or threatened. About God, can’t do anything about that. But we can do plenty | about what damage we do ourselves as humans, It’s up to us to control ourselves. And of course I believe in a woman's right to have control over her own body, but once she has conceived, surely the body within hers has some rights, too. I don’t see how you can be concerned about the extinction of-. various species of wildlife, con- cerned about the destruction of natural habitat, concerned about the entire biosphere being prematurely aborted, and not care about a living human foetus which is, after all, every bit as helpless and mute as the en- vironment itself. It is always worth getting out and hearing other points of view, if for absolutely no other reason than that it stimulates new ideas of your own. Like, for instance, the connection between internal and external environments that had never really struck me in this light before. Law is such a damned pro- found thing, you know. GOING SOUTH? Mount Hafeakala. 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