4- Sunday, October 30, 1988 - North Shore News Bos HUNTER © strictly personal o. - I WOULD like to think that in this federal election, rather than contemplating a fleet of nuclear submarines, we were debating the question of whether $8 billion or $20 Dillion or $15 billion should be spent on a program of seriously doing something about protecting the ozone layer, halting acid rain, or arresting the Greenhouse Effect. But the opposition parties, while opposed to nuclear subs, aren’t proposing anything at all along these lines. They are still stuck looking in the rearview mirrez. Instead of nukes, they would - waste the same amount of raoney on conventional subs and naval vessels. They want to appear at least as macho as the Tories when it comes to defence. Defence is fine. I am all in favor of it. . But defence against what? Against an old, fading political and military threat? H. ow ironic, how pitilessly ironic, that just as we came out of the shadow of the valley of atomic — doom, we should look up to see that ‘the sky is, indeed, * falling!’ (SEY Or against a real, growing phys- ical threat — meaning the en- vironmental collapse that is now beyond a shadow of a doubt upon us? . During the last couple of years, I found my old sixties-style pessimism passing away. - For quite some tite before the ’- arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev on the scene, I sensed that the threat of nuclear war was diminishing. . It wasn’t, incidentally, just because of a change, or even a pending change, in leadership in the Soviet Union. Quite simply, with the development of smart missiles, the kind of blanket Ar- mageddon which we had been im- agining since the fifties had become statistically less of a prob- ability. The hardheads in both the Kremlin and the Pentagon knew that a military victory in which you wiped absolutely everything out and couldn’t occupy the territory you’d ‘“‘won”’ was very little of a military victory at all. With the signing of the Interme- diate Missile Treaty by Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, the world did indeed turn the corner in terms of the imminent danger of a universal nuclear holocaust. And no more welcome sight has greeted us, at least in my lifetime, than the mutual destroying of both American and Russian nuclear missiles, which is now well under- way. How ironic, how pitilessly ironic, that just as we come out of the shadow of the valley of atomic doom, we should look up to see that the sky is, indeed, falling! Back in the late sixties and early seventies, I had a reputation, in Aflan Fotheringham’s phrase, as the ‘Chicken Little of Canadian journalism.’”’ I was more or less convinced that pollution was out of control and that an environmental horror show of planetary proportions was about to come down, even if we did somehow avoid nuking ourselves out of existence. Well, we have avoided the nuke nightmare thus far, and things haven't looked as good in this department since the end of the Second World War. But, meanwhile, an ecological Gotterdammerung has been gathering force. And like a tide, it is starting to come in. For a while there, I was beginn- ing to think we were approaching the gate leading to a billion-year eco-topia. I thought I could hear the hinges squeak as the door began to open. And, yes, for sure, there has been a string of hard- won environmental victories dur- ing the last decade. But, in retrospect, | can see that they were the “‘soft’’ targets — like. seals and whales and new parklands. A species here, a species there. Given enough time, these kinds of high-profile victories might add up, achieve some sort of critical mass, and become the norm of the next century. But we are running out of time faster than even the Chicken Lit- tles like myself could envision back at the dawn of the seventies. Looking through my old writ- ings from that period, I see that, like everyone else, I missed utterly the three main ecological threats that now confront us: If anyone even knew there was such a thing as an ozone layer, it was only a handful of meteorolo- gists —- and they had no clue whatsoever that the layer was be- ing eaten away. ' The terms “‘acid rain’? and “greenhouse effect’’ had simply not been coined. They are phrases born in the eighties, not a minute sooner. No one, so far as my research goes, saw them coming. Oh, it was possible to predict that there was a global heating trend, due to pollutants, but that the temperature might begin to rise virtually overnight, as in a greenhouse, was something no one foresaw, just as no one saw the super-hurricanes and hemi- sphere-wide droughts coming. Sorry to come on as a born- again environmental alarmist, but these issues can’t be ducked any longer, Besides, ] am no longer in a mi- nority. The vast majority of Ca- nadians, polis show, are perfectly aware of just how desperate the situation is becoming. What has this got to do with our little Canadian election? Everything! More to come... MP to judge contest CAPILANO MP Mary Collins will judge a pumpkin-carving contest scheduled to be held Monday at her 1718 Marine Drive, West Van- couver campaign office. & The contest is scheduled to kick — off at 4 p.m., and Collins will judge the carvings at 5 p.m. Call 925-4150 for information. 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