4 ~ Wednesday, October 27, 1993 - North Shore News

Canac

lans Slee

A CURIOUS thing happened to the environment on the way to the election, as you probably noticed. It got drop- ped almost totally from the agenda. Somehow, something called the deficit became more fearsome than the threat of global warming or ecological breakdown.

Can it really be that people are such boneheads they don’t see the environmental storm that’s com- ing? You can’t tell me they don’t see the connection between jobs

and resources. Please.

But the polls and the election

- results would seem to indicate that the vast majority of Canadians are virtually brain-dead on the ques- tion of what is happening to our biological world.

And this, i in 1993, afier an en-

tire generation of massive publicity about ecological matters!

I think one of the great myths of the early days of environmen- talism was a belief that once the public had been made aware of an environmental problem, politicians would someliow automatically be pressured into doing something

_ about it, and everything would be hunky-dory by the following week. Back to the hot tub!

I remember approvingly quoting psychotherapist Fritz Perls’

" famous line that ‘awareness per se is curative.’’

Qh yeh?

The environment issue is, by definition, a big picture item. Sure, act localiy. But you have to know how the little things you do, like recycling a soup can, feed

“back into the global eco-system, otherwise you feel isolated and taarginatized. And that leaves you : alone, basically, with your fears.

Polls show that 40% of those of

i} us with jobs expect to lose them as ‘things continue to fall apart. In our isolation, that’s the sort of

thing we fret about.

In terms of our concerns during the federal election, however stressful it may be to contemplate the future (‘‘It’s: murder,” “Leonard Cohen wars), it is a lot jess stressful than being out of

fwork right here, right now, or

} having no prospects until the end — ’ ‘of the century at least, according

i

~ Home Appliances

Hunter.

STRICTLY PERSONAL

to former prime minister Kim Campbell (I’ve been waiting hungrily ail summer to use that ti- tle).

Didn’t someone tell her you'll never get elected by being the bearer of bad news?

If she was going to blast herself in the foot, I just wish she’d fired off a full round, and owned up to the bleak prospects, as well, for our air, water and land, upon which all possibilities of jobs ultimately depend, anyway, never mind how much money we owe on the money markets and to whom. Most of our debt is to ourselves, anyway.

Surely, as a member of the federal Cabinet, Campbell must have been exposed to some bu- reaucrat, at least, who might have drawn her attention to her own environment department’s com- puter models showing not just a likelihood of precipitous climate change, but a mathematica! cer- tainty.

And not far in the future: this is something that is already in mo- tion.

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One of the characteristics of global warming is increased at- mospheric turbulence, with the weather swinging to wilder ex- tremes. Hotter summers. Colder winters. Wetter rainforests. Super burricanes. Floods. Droughts. Mass die-offs of species. Cod, for instance. Look around. It’s all happening already.

The ozone layer is still at least 15 years away from ‘‘bottoming out’’ on the tidal wave of CFCs surging up from the surface, from. our fridges and air conditioners.

At the rate of the current phase-out, so serenely paced to avoid any trauma for industry, we are looking to somewhere around the year 2060 (and even that might be optimistic) before the ozone layer returns to its pre-CFC level, the one that was so beautifully suited to our human needs.

Despite all the wishful thinking to the contrary, while the official speed of the CFC phase-out may be slightly ahead of schedule, keep in mind that that schedule, as it stands, was already significantly behind where it should -have been.

All CFC production ought to have been stopped years ago, on an emergency basis.

It seems that everything has been done that could be done, but, in fact, the measures have been half-baked, the result of too many compromises linked to po- litical and commercial interests.

In any event, relatively speak- ing, the increase in UV radiation reaching the surface of the planet isn’t going to have anything like the impact of an increase of even just 10 degrees in global temperature.

And on the global warming front, where are we?

I would say we are back to square one, roughly where the en- vironmental movement was on the issue of nuclear weapons a quarter of a century ago.

The political parties, the media, the public (we're all in this together) are refusing to take re- sponsibility, or action.

I think we’re thoroughly

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daunted. We're in denial.

The scale of the problem seems beyond solving.

In the midst of the biggest ex- ponential leap in human popula- tion ever seen, we are somehow supposed to rein in the giant greenhouse gas-emitting industrial machine we have come to depend on to sustain us.

If we cannot find alternative fuels, we must literally abandon our cars, shut down our coal-fired generating stations and our smelters, ban the trucks from our highways, ground the jetliners.

Easy to say. Impossible to im- plement as a policy, at least until the disaster is so far advanced no- body any longer questions it, or denies it.

And the sooner radical measures

are taken the better, because the lead-time involved to try to turn the global warming trend around is quite possibly already in the hundreds of years.

We are talking about humanity embarking on an effort to control the planet’s temperature.

It’s not something we might do someday. It is something we have to do immediately, since we have already set the house on fire.

Meanwhile, what did we Cana- dians do with our federal election? We got passionate about the na- tional debt, and hurled insults back and forth across the rapidly building Canada-Quebec border, acting out an ancient tribal feud. Talk about sleepwalking toward disaster!

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