Up in Ontario

What We'll be Remembered For

Is it just my selective points of observation or is there a growing momentum around the meme of our imminent environmental collapse as a planet? My points of observation are as follows:

• Jared Diamond's book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, tracing the origins of societal collapse back to environmental causes and conditions
  
• Richard Wright's extraordinary book based on this year's Massey Lectures A Short History of Progress, a trip through our 10,000 year-old experiment called civilization and where it is leading us
  
• An article by Heather Mallick in this past Saturday's Globe and Mail about the impact of the airline industry, how the cumulative air pollution created by passenger jets is larger than the cumulative air pollution of India
  
• A report from a few years ago now on how 90 percent of the large predatory fishing of the oceans have disappeared in the last 50 years as we have strip mined the seas
  

When our children and their children and all the coming generations of people look back on our time in history, if they can look back and we have not fouled this planet to a point where we exterminate ourselves, what will we be remembered for? More and more I believe we will be remembered as the last generation to have a chance to stem the tide of global environmental degradation.

I don't mean to sound too pessimistic about our chances. I mean to sound realistic and reasonable. If we continue the way we're going we'll slowly poison ourselves. When we talk about environmentalism we're not talking about saving just whales and trees and baby seals with photogenic black eyes; we're talking about saving ourselves. As George Carlin has pointed out, the earth will do just find without us. It may be better off. We are the parasite.

Just in my lifetime I've seen bottled water and filtered water become a habit of everyone. I've seen air pollution alerts become part of a standard summer weather report. Asthma diagnosises have ballooned. If a whale of seal dies today off the west coast it is considered a toxic waste site because of the concentration of toxins in its body, collected at the top of the food chain. I read today that cancer now causes more deaths than heart disease.

So what to do?

I once had a wise friend who said to me that projects don't succeed or fail in chunks, they succeed of fail every day, day by day, bit by bit. I'd like to propose that any approach to environment accountability succeeds or fails in same way: day by day, bit by bit. Our habits determine our impact. There's no shortage of tools to find out what each of our own habits contribute to the world every day. But it's hard to change.

So again, what will we be remembered for?