Feature Article June 17, 2004
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The Election and The Environment
by Gray Merriam
Environment mixed into political campaigns is likely to give us something like Envirolitics, unclear and difficult to sort out before we vote.
Although it almost didn't, environment has made it into this political campaign. The Kyoto Accord has surfaced in candidates' news releases and one other environmental issue has been raised, although no candidate seems to realize it.
At least two of the candidates for Prime Minister have indicated that cities should receive more Federal support. However, neither has indicated any realization that, although cities may be important economic contributors, they cannot exist without the environmental support of the rest of the land. Calculations called ecological footprinting have shown repeatedly that urban populations depend on the resources produced by areas 15 to 25 times the area of the city and often far away. Urban areas also cannot survive without exporting their waste and by getting fresh supplies of air from outside. If one dropped a big jar over a city and sealed it up, the city would not last long. Beyond these kinds of supplies of resources, urban dwellers also are dependent on rural areas for refreshing their spirits and their bodies. Many city folks would find life much less tolerable without the refreshing environments that we supply for them in our country landscapes. It is very surprising that the politicians do not realize that cities and the countryside around them are a single system and must be supported and protected together.
The other environmental issue that has made it into the current campaign -- the Kyoto Accord -- is the subject of politically glib statements that can mislead voters into thinking that one party protects the environment and some other party does not. Mixing discussion of the Kyoto Accord and air quality can easily be misleading. Kyoto focuses on gaining international attention to the addition and the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is not about smog in cities or bad air days. Kyoto may or may not be accepted by all the major carbon dioxide-producing nations -- certainly not by the U.S. But for simplistic news releases to say that our additions of carbon dioxide and their possible global atmospheric effects are unimportant is just a different kind of scandalous behaviour. Editorial writers who find a single or even two scientific papers with conclusions that do not indicate global warming, are fooling the voters by writing that the global warming from carbon dioxide is doubtful. That conclusion would require a complete review of all the scientific papers published about carbon dioxide and global warming. Be careful when you read such pieces while trying to decide how to vote. If the writer previously was a campaign organizer for one of the competing political parties, you should have doubts. If the writer is poorly trained and cannot understand that one cold winter is not evidence that global warming is not happening, you should have doubts.
You should also have doubts about the understanding of parties or candidates who trumpet their attention to the environment but are looking only at what we might call public utilities such as garbage dumps, treating water for drinking or keeping poisons out of the air or the water. Real attention to the environment would also need to include managing the amount and the quality of habitat for wild species. There would be a guarantee of habitat for endangered species wherever they live, not just on federal land as in current legislation. Real political attention to the environment would also include stewardship goals for the landscapes where we live -- those same landscapes that must provide food for the spirits of all those urban dwellers. And the promises would have real targeted objectives with timelines and amounts and sources of funding attached -- not the kind of promises we are seeing in some platforms which have no clear goals, no deadlines and probably can be funded only by taking funds away from Environment Canada to compensate for lost revenues.
