Going Green in 2007: It’s Whatever You Want It To Be

In southwestern Ontario we are surrounded by water.  Most of us don’t think anything about going to the “lake”.  Whether that is St. Clair, Erie, Huron is immaterial.  This world we live in at this end of the province is a beautiful place.

Preserving this environment is paramount for future generations as we move ahead.  The “green” agenda has found resonance recently within the Canadian political arena.  With such beautiful waterways so close you might think that green political agenda might catch fire.

We’ll have to wait for the next federal or provincial election to find out.  However, it won’t take much to get it going.  Over a 20 year journalistic career “Wallaceburg water” has always serves as a platform for what can go wrong with the environment.  We are one spill away from another major local story on the constant environmental degradation of the St. Clair River.

In many ways the “green” issue is funny.  I can remember almost 20 years ago being in Ottawa working as a consultant for a group of Quebec economists who had a contract with Agriculture Canada.  While working there I befriended a political type with local connections who just so happened to be working for a cabinet minister.  When talking with her she’d often refer to “the environment” as the issue, which would define the next government.  Funny thing was, that was when Brian Mulroney was Prime Minister.  This environment thing has the longest shelf life I’ve ever seen.

So what does it really mean?  Is being green simply whatever you want it to be.  Or is it something else, packaged in a Canadian way to make us feel good about ourselves.

I think there is something to this, especially in the political sense.  However if you have been fortunate enough to travel overseas “being green” might have real resonance.  It is much more than whatever you want it to be.  Garbage strewn all over the streets, animals being slaughtered and their entrails floating across the road are only some examples of foreign places bereft of any greening consciousness.  Seeing what we can do in Canada about being green definitely has its upside.

Take littering for instance.  Littering in Canada makes you a social pariah.  It’s still here, but it’s rare. However, in other lands its very common.  I remember one time I got on a bus late night in Papeete Tahiti.  Unbeknownst to me on the bus was a guy drinking a big bottle of liquor.  After he consumed his alcohol, he opened the window and threw the bottle out the window.  I was aghast, not necessarily of what he was drinking but at his cavalier attitude about the bottle.  To him it was a very reasonable idea to get rid of the bottle and the best way was out the window on the street.

In Bangladesh, plastic bags have been banned completely since early 2002. They were found to have been the main cause during the 1988 and 1998 floods that submerged two-thirds of the country. Discarded bags had choked the drainage system.  An example of that attitude greeted me on an earlier trip to Bangladesh.  After eating an orange I wondered what to do with the peel.  There were no litter baskets anywhere.  A Bangladeshi women I had just met told me to “throw it on the ground, somebody would eat it!”

Some of you hard-core environmentalists might think of that as biodegradable sustainability, but I think of it as something quite different.  Simply put the developing world cannot afford to be green.  While we worry about having a modern energy efficient “green” refrigerator, they are concerned about getting any old refrigerator and the food to boot.

Case in point is the $30 million dollars giving this past week by the federal government with $60 million from the private sector and another $30 million from the B.C. government to help save the Great Bear Rainforest.  This area is the home of a white species of black bear known as the Spirit bear.  This area is in B.C.’s northern and central coast areas, lush and largely unlogged vegetation.  For Canadian politicians it’s all about being green.

Of course what does that really mean?  Is it the Tahitian green, the Bangladeshi green or the Canadian green?  That’s the tough question.  Some would argue that spending $120 million Canadian dollars to hire bureaucrats to halt development is pretty stupid about being green.  In 2007 in Canada being green is what’s good for you.  However, somewhere in the mix is the green, which actually improves this planet.