CONSERVE OR DIE

This morning I was drawn to a piece in the Toronto Star by architecture and urban critic Christopher Hume about a company called SAS which has turned their downtown office building “green.” It is a cautionary tale about what will happen if we don’t start to conserve. It should be read by every near-sighted politician who insists that the economy comes first. “The economy trumps the environment,” is the clarion call of the myopic corporate world and of “market forces” ideology of too many politicians.

In spite of the fact that economic models have been created to show that green policies, conservation, and pollution-control, will generate an entire new industry and will not only be cost-effective, but profitable. However, when business takes a short-term, quarter-to-quarter point of view, there is scant hope for change. Unless.
Unless there is a will by governments everywhere to intrude on the “rights” of the corporate giants and act on behalf of the people and of social sanity, we will march down the road to ruin. The failure at Copenhagen where so-called economic reality overwhelmed global common sense is indicative of how far we still have to go.
Empty words about the environment don’t do the job. The grotesque part of all this is the presence of global climate change deniers who claim that the climate change movement is propaganda and, in the words of the Senator from Oklahoma who went to Copenhagen to protest – “a hoax!”

Sixty Minutes gave us Arnold Schwartzenager promising to do something to alleviate the critical fresh water shortage in California. The majority of our fresh vegetables come from hot, arid California valleys where irrigation turning desert-like acres into lush gardens. It was done with water, the same fresh water that runs in the taps and toilets and garden hoses of Los Angeles. We were shown the reservoir and saw how far it had shrunk. In places like California and Phoenix, people grumble when they are told to stop watering their lawns, the looming water shortage is not as dominant as it should be. It won’t be until the day the taps run dry.

It is years since the crisis appeared. The great plains heart of America has been, since the first plough broke the plains, irrigated by water from the Ogallalla aquifer, a giant underground water table thousands of square miles in size. They have known for years that this abundance was coming to an end. In the Imperial Valley of California, so much underground water has been pumped into the air for wasteful (but cheap) irrigation, that ocean water has been seeping in so that the irrigation water is becoming brackish. It will soon be useless. And that story goes back at least 20 years!

If we want to be truly green we can’t wait for lily-livered governments to do it. We have to vote our consciences. We have to create, and we have to do it right now – a system, that does not water lawns and wash cars and flush toilets with fresh drinking water. How many years ago did countries in Europe pioneer on-site home filtration systems that would filter “waste” water for re-use? Here in Ontario, under the late and maligned Rae government, we built a huge cachement basin to divert storm-sewer water and restore our local beaches. I wonder, as I watch the growingly frequent flooding from colossal rainfall, how long it will be before a country like the United States builds enormous cachement basins so that instead of flood water flowing our and leaving destruction, will form giant freshwater lakes. Look, for example, at Winnipeg, where they have dug diversion canals to handle the annual flooding of the Red River. The canals divert the water from the city. Could they not divert the same water into giant cachement basins and create artificial lakes?

I am not making a political statement in favour of the Green Party. I think they are a one-trick pony. The mainstream parties must put the environment up front. We can no longer tolerate politicians who proclaim that “employment trumps environment.”