If We Love This Planet, We'll Take Action Now

These days, there’s the really bad news and then there’s the really, really bad news.

In the former I’d put starvation in Afghanistan, the persisting violence in Israel and the volatile standoff between Pakistan and India. In the latter category, I’d put environmental degradation and global warming.

Think I’m overreacting? Well, I’m taking my cue from a North American Free Trade Agreement commission on environmental concerns — hardly a hot bed of radical green activism — set up by the deal’s three partners: Mexico, Canada and the United States.

In a report released Monday, the conservative, Montreal-based commission said that “we stand on the edge of a global cataclysm,” noting that North American wildlife is in “a widespread crisis” due to pollutants, over-consumption of water, over-foresting, over-fishing and over-farming, and the burning of fossil fuels.

“North America’s diminishing biological diversity has profound consequences,” it stated. “Because the loss is irreversible — species that are lost are lost forever — the potential impact on the human condition, on the fabric of the continent’s living systems and on the process of evolution is immense.”

For the commission, the proverbial canary in the coalmine is the monarch butterfly. The migratory insect travels across the continent and is threatened in all of its habitats — from coastal development in California to depletion of forests in Mexico to the use of pesticides on milkweed plants, its main food source.

And if the plight of the monarch butterfly doesn’t sway governments, the commission also attempts to hit them where they really live. The report recommended that Mexico, Canada and the U.S. recalculate the gross domestic product to account for the use of their “environmental wealth” and depletion of natural assets like farmland, fresh water and forests.

“By spending natural capital without replenishing it, or by damaging processes and living systems that cannot be fixed by technology, we are living off our capital rather than the interest,” the report noted.

Take the Atlantic fisheries, for example. Past federal governments encouraged massive fishing of cod in order to boost Newfoundland’s economy. But the plan backfired. Cod stocks were rapidly depleted and the industry collapsed leaving thousands of people unemployed, destroying an Atlantic Canadian way of life, permanently devastating the cod population and costing Ottawa billions of dollars in unemployment programs.

If that weren’t ominous enough, the news from the Arctic is even bleaker. The cover story of this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine was a profile of a Seattle-based ornithologist, George Divoky. He’s spent the past twenty-seven summers on a remote island in northern Alaska studying a colony of guillemots, an Arctic seabird, which has become Divoky’s own canary in a coalmine. Tracking the mating patterns of the guillemots, which lay eggs in early summer as the snow melts, Divoky has found a disturbing warming pattern in the Arctic, noting that the snow melts almost a month earlier now than it did in the 1970s.

If the trend persists, the already thinning polar ice cap, which plays a significant role in regulating the planet’s temperature, will continue to shrink with apocalyptic results, including floods that will cover parts of the Maritimes, Mexico and Florida as far as inland as 50 kilometres north of Miami, along with other natural disasters like droughts and ice storms.

The only remotely good news in all this is that the destruction of the environment has been created by humans and is still, but just barely, within the hands of humans to fix.

First, individuals must consume less of just about everything — less oil, less meat (wasteful of water, grain and farmland), less non-recyclable stuff that winds up in landfill, less power and less water.

Second, industries of every kind must immediately adopt environmentally sound practices that create radically less waste and don’t deplete or damage natural resources.

Third, governments must legislate environmental practices and regulations, such as the Kyoto protocol, and immediately stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry and hydroelectric power. Instead, money must be invested in public transit, wildlife protection and the development of alternative energy sources.

I recently talked to an environmental activist and researcher, who said about the planet’s history of climatic change and the evolution and extinction of thousands of species: “Earth has survived millions of years. I have no doubt that it will also survive even what we have done to it. It isn’t a matter of saving the planet. It’s a matter, now, of saving our own lives.”

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