Home »
There is a way to save Mother Earth
“Perceptions,” by Gerry Warner
Op-Ed Commentary
Last Thursday, April 22 was Earth Day.
Did you notice?
I hope you did because once again the miracle of new growth, renewal and celebration is in the air as Nature draws back the curtain on another year to enjoy the true treasures of life – clean water, clean air and all the living things around us be they plants, animals or the people you love.
Did you do anything to celebrate Earth Day? Plant a tree? Start a compost pit? Put some recyclables in those shiny blue boxes the city recently provided us? Or go for a walk in the Community Forest just to marvel at the sights, sounds and smells of spring erupting all around us?
Almost anyone can be an optimist in the spring. The warmth in the air. The first shoots of green. Bright blue crocuses popping up on the hillsides. The yellow flash of balsam root sunflowers to follow. The golden western Larches growing needles again and orange-breasted robins returning to mix with the jet-black crows and ravens.
It’s easy to be an optimist in spring. Too bad it’s difficult for Mother Earth to feel the same.
Like it or not, our 4.5 billion-year-old planet has more to fear with each passing year. Factories continue to belch smoke into the atmosphere and sewage into the streams. The pandemic has slowed the economy a bit and that has helped the air and water around the planet to become cleaner. But that’s only a temporary fix.
One of these days, humankind will get its act together and take measures strong enough to end the pandemic or it will die by herd immunity. And when that happens, what will be the result? You know the answer.
Business as usual. And it isn’t that business is bad. We need business to survive. But it’s the amount of business and industry that’s the problem and the way we do business. The earth can no longer support an industrial global economy of the size we have today. The sheer amount of business and industry being carried out on the planet today is unsustainable. The load is too heavy.
Our environment and ecosystems are breaking down under the sheer weight of a bloated economy that’s slowly – and not so slowly – destroying the air, the water and biomass on which we all depend. Scientists tell us we’re on the edge of a sixth mass extinction like the one that destroyed the dinosaurs.
Something is going to break in these conditions. And whether it’s a climatic calamity, famine, war or financial collapse it’s going to happen. Look at the provincial and federal budgets that were introduced last week. Does anyone seriously think we can keep running billion-dollar deficits like this? We can’t and we know it.
So, what do we do? What I’m about to suggest isn’t rocket science and will probably be rejected by most because when it comes right down to it most people are just too damn greedy. My suggestion? We in the affluent West, have got to willingly accept a standard of living that no longer strains the capacity of the earth to support us.
As for the amount left over, it should be invested in impoverished Third World countries to raise their standard of living to a level approaching us.
In doing this, the world would become more agrarian and less industrial and the wealth that Mother Earth has provided so generously to us for eons would be spread around more evenly. In such a world, ambitious, hard-working people could still become rich – but not obscenely rich – as so many do now. And there would be fewer children starving in the Third World and dying by the thousands desperately trying to get to America or Europe.
And the real bonus in what I’m suggesting is that with a more agrarian and less industrial world, skies would be bluer, the water cleaner, the forests greener and the air fit to breathe. Who can argue with that?
But they will.
– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist who believes Western civilization will pay dearly for its profligacy.
