Optimistic Environmentalist

R. Boyd David

Description

Yes, the world faces substantial environmental challenges - climate change, pollution and extinction. But the surprisingly good news is that we have solutions to these problems. In the past 50 years, a remarkable number of environmental problems have been solved, while substantial progress is ongoing on others. The Optimistic Environmentalist chronicles these remarkable success stories, from saving endangered species to creating national parks that conserve land and resources. A bright green future is not only possible, it's within our grasp.

Sujets

• Environment

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 17 septembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781770907645
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Yes, the world faces substantial environmental challenges—climate change, pollution, and extinction. But the surprisingly good news is that a remarkable number of environmental problems have been solved, while substantial progress is ongoing on others.
The Optimistic Environmentalist chronicles these remarkable success stories and suggests a bright green future is not only possible, it’s within our grasp.


The
Optimistic
Environmentalist
Progressing Towards a Greener Future
David R. Boyd
ECW Press


Also by David R. Boyd
Cleaner, Greener, Healthier: A Prescription for Stronger Canadian Environmental Laws and Policies (2015)
The Right to a Healthy Environment: Revitalizing Canada’s Constitution (2013)
The Environmental Rights Revolution: A Global Study of Constitutions, Human Rights, and the Environment (2012)
Dodging the Toxic Bullet: How to Protect Yourself from Everyday Environmental Health Hazards (2010)
David Suzuki’s Green Guide (with David Suzuki, 2008)
Unnatural Law: Rethinking Canadian Environmental Law and Policy (2003)


For Meredith and Margot


Optimistic: “hopeful and confident about the future”
— Oxford English Dictionary
“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
—Arundhati Roy
“Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.”
—Louis D. Brandeis


Introduction
The Importance of Being Optimistic
I’M AN OPTIMISTIC ENVIRONMENTALIST. Unlike open secret, jumbo shrimp, or working vacation, that’s not an oxymoron. But I want to be crystal clear: our society faces serious environmental challenges, including climate change, toxic pollution, and the declining diversity and abundance of plant and wildlife species. The scientific evidence is irrefutable. But, based on humanity’s track record over the past 50 years, the ready availability of effective solutions, and the potential of future innovations, I also believe that today’s environmental challenges can be overcome. From air pollution to safe drinking water, from greener cities to renewable energy, we’ve made remarkable but widely underacknowledged progress. If you feel overwhelmed or exhausted by the onslaught of bad news about the planet and are looking for some genuinely good environmental news, then you’ve come to the right place.
I’m not the “bury your head in the sand and pretend everything is hunky-dory” type like Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg or American writer Matt Ridley. Lomborg is a 21 st-century snake oil salesman who has made a lucrative career out of downplaying the world’s environmental challenges. His 2001 book, The Skeptical Environmentalist , manipulated data to suggest that scientists and activists had systematically concocted or inflated every environmental problem in the world. Ridley followed suit in 2010 with The Rational Optimist , arguing that the dangers of acid rain, falling sperm counts, the ozone hole, and desertification are nothing but “eco-exaggeration.” But why would almost all of the world’s millions of scientists engage in such a complex and convoluted conspiracy? The answer is beyond my imagination. Despite their absurd arguments, Lomborg’s and Ridley’s books have been best- sellers. Apparently there’s a large appetite for good news, even when the underlying premises are false.
I’D BEEN THINKING ABOUT WRITING a book like this one for years, but my daughter, Meredith, provided the spark that propelled me to action. At the wise old age of seven, Meredith came home from school one afternoon and told me about her day. She’d learned about something called global warming and described it to me like this: “Pollution is melting the ice in the Arctic Ocean. Habitats are disappearing, and the animals don’t have anywhere to live. Polar bears are dying.” Tears welled up in her big blue eyes. She’s had a soft spot for polar bears since getting a big stuffed one as a gift from her Grandma Grace. “Species are going extinct,” Meredith said, beginning to cry.
As kids do, she watched my reaction closely, looking for subtle signals in my body language or facial expression. I’d been dreading this moment. Having worked as an environmental lawyer for more than 20 years, I was painfully aware of the world’s converging eco-crises. There’s climate change—rising sea levels, super-storms, droughts, and ocean acidification—caused by our reckless burning of fossil fuels, clearing of tropical rainforests, and industrial farming methods. There’s the planet’s sixth mass extinction, the most devastating since Tyrannosaurus rex and other dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago. The bodies of everyone living in the industrialized world carry a toxic burden of plastic, pesticides, and hundreds of other industrial chemicals. There’s even a new word, Anthropocene, signifying the end of the Holocene epoch and the beginning of a new geological era in which a single species, Homo sapiens , has planet-wide ecological impacts. The sheer volume of bad news about the environment can be overwhelming.
I was torn between conflicting instincts. On the one hand, I value honesty and steadfastly avoid lying to Meredith. On the other hand, I want to shelter my daughter from the worst of the world’s news until she has the emotional maturity and intellectual ability to cope with these issues. So very carefully I said, “It’s true that humans are causing environmental problems. But we’re also pretty good at solving those problems, and millions of people all over the world are doing their very best to help prevent pollution and extinction.” Searching for an example that she could understand, I told Meredith the story of sea otters, a charismatic creature that’s recovering nicely from a human-induced brush with oblivion.
First I had to clarify the difference between sea otters and river otters, because we only see the latter where we live on Pender Island, between Vancouver and Victoria on Canada’s west coast. River otters forage for food in the ocean but make their homes on land, unlike their marine cousins. They’re smaller than sea otters and I don’t think they’re as cute, though that opinion comes from someone who has involuntarily shared his house with these malodorous creatures. Once when Meredith was a toddler, we were out on the deck at night looking at constellations. A pair of otters began mating loudly and enthusiastically below us, leading Meredith to say, “Papa, the stars are singing.” River otters loved spending parts of winter in the warm, dry crawl space beneath our house, covering it with a ghastly combination of shell-filled excrement and a diabolically putrid mucous-like excretion used to mark their territory. They were unbelievably bad housemates. For years, the otters outsmarted our attempts to evict them. Several years ago, we had to build a concrete perimeter foundation as part of a major home repair project, and that has finally kept them out.
Sea otters, happily for human residents of the west coast, spend their entire lives in the ocean, diving to the sea floor to find marine invertebrates like crabs, clams, and sea urchins. They float on their backs, eating and resting in rafts that usually number 10 – 100 animals, though super-rafts as large as 2 , 000 have been reported. Only rarely do they venture onto land, and they’ll never invade your home. Sea otters were long targeted for their luxurious fur, hunted at sustainable levels by Indigenous people prior to the arrival of Europeans, and then in a ferocious fur-trading frenzy that didn’t stop until there were no sea otters left on the Canadian coast. Despite an international protection treaty negotiated in 1911 , the last Canadian sea otter was killed near Kyuquot, on Vancouver Island, in 1929 . The global population was slashed from between 150 , 000 – 300 , 000 sea otters to 1 , 000 – 2 , 000 individuals. In 1978 , shortly after the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada was created, sea otters were among the first species in Canada to be officially designated as endangered.
I’d never understood the attraction of fur, until one day I went behind the scenes at the Vancouver Aquarium, viewing items that are not put out for public display. I almost passed on the opportunity to handle a sea otter pelt, based on a lifelong aversion to the idea of killing animals for their skins. But the fur was handed to me by a young aquarium employee, who explained that sea otters have up to a million hairs per square inch, a mind-boggling figure. As I stroked the fur, I was shocked to find atavistic desire flitting across the edge of my consciousness. It was so soft! Some primal part of me didn’t want to give it back. The sea otter’s coat compares to a total of 20 , 000 hairs on the average human head (and far fewer on mine). Even domestic cats have relatively sparse coats compared to those of sea otters, with 60 , 000 hairs per square inch on their backs and up to 120 , 000 on their bellies. In other words, even your favourite feline, whose soft coat you love to pet (when it permits you to do so), is effectively bald compared to the sea otter, a feline Bruce Willis to the otter’s Troy Polamalu.
Fortunately, some sea otters survived in Alaska. After an absence of half a century, Canada asked to borrow a few animals to start a recovery program. Between 1969 and 1972 , 89 sea otters were flown or shipped from Alaska to Vancouver Island. Meanwhile, scientists were learning about the critical role that sea otters play in the marine ecosystems of North America’s west coast. Sea otters are a keystone species whose absence threw entire systems out of whack. Otters eat up to one-quarter of their body weight daily, and one of their favourite foods is the purple sea urchin. When sea otters disappeared, the sea urchins went wil