So How Do We Make a Difference?

In all the periods humans have inhabited the planet, no time has seen more rapid changes to lifestyles and the environment than the past hundred years. We've gone from "taming nature" to "capitalizing on nature" and now to struggling to provide ourselves with nature's bounty while more and more of our natural resources dwindle. We struggle to become sustainable and it is a race with time.

We humans are an industrious species. I have often thought ants, in their incredible hills of activity, were tops when it came to being industrious. When I look at the creativity we've used to build dwellings of comfort and luxury, the modes we have developed to travel around the globe, cure disease, I realize we've even outdone them. At no point do I believe humankind set out purposefully to strip the earth of her beauty or bounty. Our desire to create and master our environment against all odds outstripped our knowledge of the impact this would have in time. Would the first automotive or airplane designer ever have dreamt of the revisions and advancements made on their simple inventions? How about the inventor of the wheel, maybe we could blame this person for greenhouse gases and climate change, after all, no car or plane would function without one?

Blame is a futile gesture. Being accountable and feeling as an individual that we do have an impact and can make a difference are more productive ventures. After all, each vote adds up, each purchase we make supports some ones efforts. Lately it has been said that the individual as a consumer has more power to effect how a country runs and evolves, than as a voter! Big businesses will only remain that way if they are supported and if we support environmentally friendly products, that is what they will produce.

Another avenue to change social practices, to protect our health and the environment, is through the courts. In the mid 1990s, beginning in Massachusetts, US lawyers began to take tobacco companies to court. They claimed cigarettes were causing health care costs to escalate due to increased numbers of cancer cases, and they won! Despite the mounting evidence, even in the 1990s, there were always a few doctors who remained adamant that smoking had no adverse effects on a person's health.

Now, twelve years later, as politicians fail to get a handle on greenhouse gases from increased burning of fossil fuels, and climate change is wreaking havoc on the world's population in the form of rising oceans, heat waves, droughts, violent hurricanes and an increase in malaria and other diseases, insurance companies reel under the claims after natural disasters like hurricane Katrina.

At the World Economic Forum in Switzerland last year, climate change topped the agenda of the business leaders. So where is all this going? US lawyers are now gearing up to file suit against polluting industries and help win the battle against climate change.

With claims to introduce, within the next ten years, strict measures that will reduce climate change, large legal firms may accomplish what environmentalists, scientists and politicians have not been able to. We have seen, up to this point in time, that the lure of substantial financial gain has not enticed businesses to reduce emissions. But what the legal society has noticed is that businesses are most afraid of lawsuits that will point to them as responsible for global warming. In the early 1990s ninety percent of people still weren't convinced smoking caused cancer, but thanks to the publicity around the increased health program costs the truth was made obvious. Now, for the first time since 1930 when statistics were kept, the States has seen a significant drop in deaths from lung cancer and the number of adults who smoke is less than half those smoking in 1965.

Now large legal firms, backed by scientists in the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, view that at least half the current rise in temperatures has a direct link to human activities and, with new research from climatologists, feel there is strong grounds here for a legal case. Backing them are the facts that the destruction from hurricanes and tropical storms has doubled over the last 35 years. Oxford physicist Myles Allen explains that the warming ocean temperatures increase the power of the hurricane. Ocean temperatures of 26°C create hurricanes. When hurricane Katrina developed the Gulf's water temperatures were 31°C!

Who will be the plaintiffs in these cases? Insurance companies who are increasingly suffering major losses and have been voicing their dismay over climate change related events for more than five years will be the plaintiffs. Seven of the ten most expensive hurricanes have happened in the past two years! From the lawsuits will come new rules and regulations that will form future legislation that will protect our health and that of the environment. Some of Canada's Cabinet ministers recently agreed to have levels of toxins tested in their blood, and heard the results with horror. Further testing is planned of 5,000 Canadians with the hopes that first we can understand what we are unknowingly taking into our bodies and second, reduce or eliminate that which is harmful.

I look around me, within this community, and see us all struggling with change. I meet people who are foresters, teachers, writers, truckers, business people and we all have family, a desire for food and shelter and quality of life. We all also need to adjust to change. The change is coming rapidly and seems much extreme at times. I think that what we need to realize is that we are in this together. Together we can reduce and clear away the obstacles, provide each other with the courtesy of respect. Each and every one of our lives is being impacted by all the simple, daily actions, from how long a shower we have, to how much garbage we put out for the landfill. Next then, we think beyond our community, to the country and continent and then the whole planet, because even if we have enough water, milder temperatures with no hurricanes, the ripple effect of the four billion displaced people from rising ocean levels will impact us eventually. So as we work on ourselves, within our individual actions like reduce, reuse and recycle, we also keep in mind this is a world-wide effort of sustainability.

- Marg Evans, Coordinator, Cariboo Chilcotin Conservation Society

About Us • Public Education • Species at Risk • Projects • Other Activities • Membership

Marg Evans

So How Do We Make a Difference?

December 2006

About Us • Public Education • Species at Risk • Projects • Other Activities • Membership