Columnists
Far away places with strange sounding names
So Wellington got hammered again by the wicked wind from the west—and lived to tell the tale. Still, those big, beautiful old trees that we lost won’t be replaced by trees of equivalent stature any time soon. The truth is that we are probably pretty lucky in the County that our most adverse events are not usually life threatening. We definitely wouldn’t want to be living in eastern Australia or northern California right now. The climate is inflicting its revenge upon all of us.
Is there any positive spin to put upon that? What I came up with immediately isn’t particularly compelling. We could say Wellington’s wind offers free blow drys and walking in place experiences. We could offer insight into how to manage without Netflix for 12 hours, or how to quickly befriend someone with a generator. Nothing earth-shaking there.
But after some reflection, I can come up with one positive, which I have to get to in a roundabout way.
At the same time as our weather is doing us in comes the news that more than 11,000 scientists— not counting Mickey Mouse, whose name briefly appeared on the list—have endorsed a letter published in the journal Bioscience by Dr. William J. Ripple and Christopher Wolf of the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society at Oregon State university. The letter reiterates “clearly and unequivocally,” that planet earth is facing a climate emergency. If we don’t step up the pace of our efforts to conserve our biosphere, there will be “untold suffering.” The climate crisis, we are told, is related to “excessive consumption of the wealthy lifestyle.”
This past weekend’s Globe and Mail, perhaps not coincidentally, published a lengthy piece on environmentally responsible travel. It suggested travel to resorts in the Caribbean and South Pacific that have gone carbon-neutral or are doing interesting things with air conditioning.
But the elephant in that room is air travel. What’s the good in burning up airplane fuel to take you halfway round the world to save dishwater when you get there? Better to go for bigger environmental savings and stick closer to home. Dr. Ripple and his 11,000 followers clearly have the need to reduce air travel in their sights when they speak of the “excessive consumption…wealthy lifestyle.” The Guardian states that reducing air travel is the number one step individuals who fly frequently can take to reduce their carbon footprint.
The Ripple letter includes a chart showing that the number of passenger flights per year has increased from less than one billion in 1980 to over 4 billion projected in 2020. According to a table in the Globe and Mail, a plane produces 285 grams of carbon dioxide per passenger per kilometre, whereas an average car only emits 55. Go by train, and you reduce the output to 14 grams. It’s true you can purchase offsets —a cross country return trip by air would maybe add $40 to your bill— but your trip is still emitting carbon dioxide, which it wouldn’t if you didn’t take it. It’s no accident that teenage activist Greta Thunberg made a point of sailing from Europe when visiting the United Nations.
So what I’m getting to is this: the County could pitch itself to would-be visitors in the dragnet of urban centres of Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal as the environmentally responsible vacation destination, because it is not a far away place. Just how many tonnes of carbon dioxide are produced by parking your car at a bed and breakfast and tooling around on a rented bike for a few days? Hardly any, of course, compared to the alternative. And we can offer lots of strange sounding names, like “Demorestville” and “Waupoos” to make people feel that tinge of excitement.
Besides, we can point to a factor that already adds to our exotic appeal—the number of francophone tourists who visit us. My own non-scientific survey of licence plates in the parking lots at Sandbanks suggests that almost half of our visitors are from the province of Quebec. What better way to convince anglophone visitors that it is not necessary to visit the Seychelles because you can bond with a francophone making non-carbon footprints in the same stretch of sand?
Of course, to promote the environmentally sustainable lifestyle with any conviction, County residents would have to be beyond reproach in our own practices. No more plane jaunts down to Arizona for the winter. No more orange peels in the garbage instead of the compost. No more sneaking into fast food restaurants to order illicit burgers to supplement today’s spinach dinner.
Lots of communities, including our own, have declared climate emergencies. Few of them offer the possibility of being seen as a local substitute for a far away place with a strange sounding name—a gift handed to us by climate change. But if we are going to tout our environmental advantages, we had better be prepared to up our game and walk the environmental talk that so easily springs from a columnist’s computer. Mickey Mouse would demand no less.
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