Earth Matters

When I was in high school and people were looking for an excuse other than ‘cause it makes me look cool’ to justify taking up smoking, they would often say ‘well you’ve got to die of something, right?’

The insanity of paying to give yourself cancer aside, this classic addict’s response is something I’m seeing increasingly in people trying to deny taking action to avoid the destruction that humanity is causing through climate change, which will kick into the rest of our planetary systems in the next decades.

It’s easy to see why – when you benefit from the fossil fuel status quo; when it makes you money, gives you a job, and pads your RRSP, it’s really comforting to wrap yourself in denial of the consequences of your actions and think of some magical technology or silver bullet that the next generation (not you) will create.

Don’t think about the climate crisis – just keep living the unsustainable dream! After all, we all have to die of something, right?

Well yes, but it’s not the deniers who will be dying from the consequences of climate inaction, which makes this a different moral dilemma.

Imagine the garbage cans in your place, empty.

But it’s not garbage day. It’s every day. Sound impossible?

Not according to Marnie Newell and others who have taken on the zero waste challenge. Newell works part-time for SPEC, the Society Promoting Environmental Conservation, an organization based in Kitsilano which has been around in Vancouver for more than four decades, and was responsible for bringing recycling to the city.

SPEC promotes zero waste, something that is exceedingly difficult during the holiday season. 

“True zero waste to me is a goal of eventually creating nothing that natural systems can’t safely digest... thus zero waste is really the idea that one day humans could learn to live without causing any pollution”.

It’s more of a moral issue than simply an environmental issue, one that should be our duty as humans, she believes. Add to the fact that there’s a plethora of information out there on zero waste for people to read about and to get started.

The Vancouver Fraser Port Authority's response yesterday to the open letter from climate scientists and others delivered on November 27 got a scathing response from climate advocates, who called the response "evasive" an "inadequate". 

Voters Taking Action on Climate Change, a citizen's group, criticized the Port Authority for "narrowly defining its mandate as the demand-driven facilitation of trade" and "disavow[ing] any responsibility for the problems created by the export of coal."

"Global demand for coal is growing, but it is neither in British Columbia's nor Canada's long term interest to blindly service that demand," the group stated in a press release.

Last month, 26 scientists all published a paper together on groundwater, which must have required either some massive Skype sessions, or people getting very sick of email chains where everyone hits ‘reply all’. As I’ve said before: science – it’s a collaborative thing.

What these researchers were trying to do was to work out exactly what we know about groundwater and how it will be affected by climate change and where the gaps are that we need to fill.

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