I was reminded this week of a scene in the movie Erin Brockovich, the story of how a feisty legal clerk from a small law firm helps to secure one of the biggest class action settlements in legal history. The wells in Hinkley, California had been contaminated with hexavalent chromium by the Pacific Gas and Electric company. Their lawyer, Ms. Sanchez, had been downplaying the severity of the community’s medical concerns. As their meeting progressed, she was about to drink a glass of water when Brockovich told her, “By the way, we had that water brought in specially for you folks. Came from a well in Hinkley.” Ms. Sanchez declined.

I kept wishing that Erin Brockovich had been there at the table with Brian Kynoch, president of Imperial Metals, as he proclaimed that the water downstream of the Mount Polley tailings pond spill “already almost meets drinking water standards.” I wish that same water could be served up at a roundtable of all the industrial CEO’s who are extracting and profiting from Canada’s natural resources. To all of the Ministers of the Environment. To our municipal leaders as they meet with developers. And especially to the Federal Caucus and the PMO.

I’d like to tell them: “It’s almost drinking water quality. We had it specially brought in for you folks from Hazeltine Creek.” Ah, perchance to dream.

We could just as easily have brought in water for those folks from Lake Erie where 400,000 people in the City of Toledo were held hostage by blue-green algae blooming in the effluent of agricultural fertilizer and manure run-off into a warming Great Lake. Or anywhere downstream from the industrial tar sands development along the Athabasca River watershed. Or the Kalamazoo River where the Enbridge pipeline burst. The list goes on.

It usually takes that perfect storm of circumstances to wake us up. Whether it is a record salmon run threatened by a toxic spill, or the drinking water of the city of Toledo, we suddenly sit up and take notice for a few days, at least until some celebrity’s death takes it off the front pages.

Sometimes people are just greedy stupid. Others would argue that our Canadian environmental regulations have been so severely gutted by “Our Government™” over the last nine years that something similar could easily occur with Keystone XL or Northern Gateway or Enbridge Pipeline 9. The people whose watersheds are adjacent to those projects know it all too well. And they don’t usually make up the 1% of the population who approves and profits from those projects.

In the twenty-first century, we have suddenly realized that we are all downwind and downstream of everything that happens on this planet. These disasters remind us daily that the environment is everything that surrounds us, everything with which we interact, everything that we are. To paraphrase a former political campaign manager, “It’s the environment, stupid.”

It is time to wake up, to get the full attention of our elected representatives and industrial leaders, and to demand that the quality of our water, air, and land is protected before a major ecosystem collapse changes the happy ending we are promising our children.

There was no fairy tell ending for the town of Hinkley, currently a ghost town in the making, and I doubt there will be a Hollywood ending for the salmon heading to Hazeltine Creek.

In the end, we are all swimming upstream just hoping to get home safely.

Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, has declared current Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to be "a beacon of light for Conservative leaders in the world", much like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were for the generation of Conservative leaders before them. Abbott had the unfortunate experience of working with former pre-paleolithic Australian PM Kevin Rudd who obviously distorted his judgement. He even imagines Harper to be a "centre-right" politician. Wow! It takes a big stretch of the imagination to picture our Conservative Reform Alliance Party leader anywhere close to the centre of the Extreme Far Right, let alone the actual Centre of the political spectrum.

Abbott, whose policy direction changes so quickly that he is known as "the weathervane" of climate change discussion in Australia, seems to be a good match for Harper, whose climate change denier credentials are solid among conservative world leaders. Yes, Stephen, you are truly a beacon of light, much like the ones that used to guide ships onto the rocks so they could be plundered by the pirates of their day. And no, Tony, those severe droughts in Australia have absolutely nothing to do with accelerating climate change. Just ask Stephen.

*****

Skid Crease, Caledon

I still remember my first Earth Day as a young teacher. The year was 1969 and the original Earth Day was on March 21, the Vernal Equinox , as proposed by John McConnell – my class spent the day at our Forest Valley Outdoor Education Centre. John McConnell passed away on October 20, 2012. The Vernal Equinox lives on. 

In 1970,  I was in my third year of teaching, now a full fledged-member of the profession, as it was known in those days, after my two year initiation. An idealistic politician named Gaylord Nelson asked an equally idealistic young law student named Denis Hayes to lead the first Earth Day marches in the United States on April 22. Gaylord Nelson passed away on July 3, 2005; Earth Day lives on. Denis did not go gently into that good night, but continued both his law studies and his support for the concept of Earth Day.

Denis Hayes lead the event for the 20th Anniversary in 1990 and told a depreciating "lawyer joke" from his son ("You see a long slim body lying in a ditch – there are no skid marks prior to the impact point – is it a snake or a lawyer? Answer: a lawyer; if it had been a snake, there would have been brake marks.) Environmentalists, even environmental lawyers, as Robert Kennedy Jr. knows all too well, get no respect.

On April 22, in 1970, my class joined in the new Earth Day celebration from our community in Flemington Road P.S.  We were not part of the 10%, as it was known in those days, the fortunate few, now 1%. We were speaking out for social justice and environmental sustainability. A children's crusade? Most certainly. Only youth has the strength to speak truth to power. My students had nothing to lose but their future.

For the next  44 years I taught and lectured and practiced living lightly, spending quality time outdoors, buying from ethical companies (you are what you buy), introducing trash tallies, litterless/boomerang lunches, and ethical procurement policies for school boards, supporting efficient technologies, developing environmental literacy in the school curriculum, lecturing on the polluter pay/precautionary principle in politics and policies, and to no real improvement. Lip service, greenwashing, and business as usual.

I visit schools in 2014 who are discussing garbageless lunches as a totallly new concept and wonder where the last forty years went.; school boards continue to purchase from the most convenient supplier and bulid their schools to far less than LEED Platinum standards; and The College of Teachers in Ontario ignores Environmental Studies as a subject teachable thanks to Mike Harris. The Darwin Award is alive and well in the School Boards of our country.

Our current government in Canada boasts that the Keystone Pipeline is a "no-brainer"; politicians mock globally respected scientists and ignore and distort the reports of UN scientific climate change organizations; our Prime Minister believes that accelerated global climate change is a "socalist plot". And the final approval for the Northern Gateway Pipeline rests with him. More Darwin Awards.

If this blog site is ever discovered in the future, I apologize to the survivors – you'll need a new strategy. The Easter Island Syndrome is alive and well. In the meantime, I'm going out to clean up my community from the barbarian hordes, plant yet another native species garden, and never give up!

*****

Skid Crease, Caledon