Dear Editor:
June 5th is U.N. World Environment Day. The day was set aside in 1974 for celebrating our natural environment and creating an awareness of global environmental issues.Now 43 years later, unless your name is Donald Trump, its pretty hard to deny that were taking agiant step into a global climate crisis where the developed part of the world will get its just desserts and the undeveloped part of the world will get those same desserts.
Its obvious from the information that I get that carbon dioxide, CO2, (often referred to as just plain carbon), is the major culprit. Yet CO2 has been around since the beginning.
However, the measurable quantity has never been so high and is climbing. Earths balanced atmosphere has traditionally been a successful teamwork of forests and oceansgiving off oxygen and sequestering carbon dioxide voila, nice and easy.
So what has gone wrong?
The fact is that several decades of extractive capitalism have fueled extreme wealth, and democratic demise, and has brought us to the brink of ecological ruin, writes Chuck Collins, adding that while the great mass of people have already been programmed to be consumers and detached spectators.
And it sure is humbling to realize that our civilization has failed to protect the most important thing – the Earth itself.
The destruction of ecosystems should be a prosecutable crime. Currently there is no law to prosecute those who are destroying the planet. Climate campaigners do not have the support of the judiciary in preventing the corporate ecocide that is daily occurring under our very noses, writes Daniel Pinchbeck in How Soon is Now.
Over the the last few decades we have been disturbing the ecological equilibrium of our planet in a myriad of new ways. We congratulate ourselves on the unprecedented accomplishments of modernSapiens – if only to ignore the fate of all other animals, writes Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
And, green consumerism and going organic is not going to lead to our salvation, says Murray Bookchin, quoted in How Soon is Now.
Judging from the above it is easy to assign the guilt to corporate development front, back and centre; here, there and nearly everywhere. But not in the Jumbo Valley, because theres no development, per se – only the remains of a corporate failed try.
It was 30 years ago that Oberto Obertis Pheidias Development Corporation endeavoured to get a foothold there. And Mr. Oberti has been persistently awaiting the B.C.s governments permission to take a large corporate bite out of one of our most cherished, awe-inspiring, natural, complete ecosystems that just keeps doing its job of sequestering CO2 and sending out oxygen, along with sending clear, clean glacial water into the Columbia River system.
Hark, now isnt that the fat grizzly singing …
As Walkin Scott Massar said Keep it wild; Keep it free; Keep it for eternity; Keep Jumbo Wild forever.
Many years ago David Suzuki said that there should be no more developments in all hitherto undeveloped places on the planet. I agreed at the time and still do.
New from the powers that be: Oberto Oberti is still waiting on his judicial review against the previous Liberal governments Minister of Environments ruling of no substantial start.
And the Ktunaxa, and their supporters, are still waiting for a decision on their appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada to rule in their favour that a resort development is not suitable in their sacred Jumbo space, which will override the B.C. Supreme Courts decision that a resort, and a city nearly the size of Nelson, would not deter from Jumbos sacred qualities.
Rowena Eloise
Argenta
