44 ~ Friday, August 23, 1991 —

North Shore News

A decade for action

THIS MORNING was the first session of the first-ever

Canadian course in environmental journalism here in London, Ontario, and I felt my eco-perspective was being

widened exponentially.

i don't think J was alone, Par- ticipants in the course range from seasoned CBC reporters to the ed- itor of Harrowsmith magazine, but all of us, accustomed to work- ing our own beats in our own fashion, were left in awe by the presentation given us by Noel Brown, director of the United Na- tions Environment Program headquartered in New York.

Now here is a man who, day in and day out, ‘‘thinks globally.”’ With the United Nations for near- ly 30 years and in his current of- fice for nearly 20, his commitment to the cause and his passion for his work show in nearly every statement he makes.

He spoke about the water in parts of Czechoslovakia, which is too polluted to be put to industri- al use. About the oil spills in Iraq, in an area which is already 40 times more polluted than any other comparable body of water.

In the 20 years since UNEP was founded, he said, the world has lost 200 million hectares of treecover, and we are now at the point where between 50 and 100 species become extinct each day.

The latest U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report says the degradation of the ozone layer is proceeding at a rate twice that originally projected.

In Australia, he says, the wool trade is threatened by the increas- ed quantity of UV-B rays that reach the earth’s surface due to the thinning of the ozone layer. The rays react with the lanolin in the sheep’s wool, destroying it for ‘commercial use. The sheep are now outfitted with protective polypropylene jackets.

In Los Angeles, 12 million peo- ple drive their eight million cars 100 million miles each day, using half as much gas as the entire. Soviet Union, which covers 1/6 of the world’s area.

In that city — which has recent- ly adopted some laudable anti- pollution measures children have lost 18% of their lung capac- ity by the time they reach 12.

“*This may be the last decade in

Peggy Trendell-Whittaker

ECOINFO

which we have the luxury of choosing alternative futures,’’ he told us. ‘‘This is the decade in which we have got to act.”

Later in the day we spoke with Dr. Colin Baird, co-developer of the environmental journalism course and a professor at the University of Western Ontario.

He said that many of the terri- fying ecological predictions being

reported in the media cannot con-

clusively be proven. In fact some scientists won't even agree that global warming is indeed a threat.

But he says that more and more signs are supporting the conclu- sions put forward by scientists, and says that if we don’t act until we have definitely established the exact cause-and-effect relation- ships, it may be too late to avert ecological disaster.

As the UN’s Noel Brown noted, if you put a frog in a pot of hot

water, Ht will leap out: if you put it in a pot of cold water and gradually heat it to a ooil, the frog will stay where it is ‘‘and adapt to death.” We can’t wait until we are plunged into a crisis situation before we react to the knowledge we already have.

While some governments may be hesitant to enact ground-break- ing, strict anti-pollution legislation — especially if it raises the hackles of major industry or costs great suns of money — when the ecological threat we're facing can’t be scientifically predicted with 100% accuracy, another reporter at the conference pointed to the vast quantities of money the same governments are willing to spend on armaments that ‘‘pro- tect’” us from threats that are highly speculative.

So the time to act is now. But after hearing about the widespread international problems that we face, it’s easy to think that North Shore residents really can’t make a difference.

Guess what? ‘Think globally, act locally’’ still holds true, and I got that from the top.

“The survival agenda is essen- tially people-driven, not govern- ment-driven,”’ said Brown. ‘‘The people are now beginning to take charge of these issues.’”

He believes that changes can occur more rapidly at municipal levels, because the necessary crit- ical mass of people calling for an innovation can develop much more quickly here than at the fed- erat level.

An institute for urban initiatives is going to be founded in Toronto — whose mayor was commended by the UN for his environmental policies — and Brown says “‘if I'm going to put my money any place, I’m going to put it on the cities.*’

And the cities are us.

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