A Few Notes On This Earth Day, April 22nd, 2014, from Doug Draper
“Where there is no vision, the people perish.”
I first learned of this wise old line in 1979, when I began a more than decade-and-a-half long odyssey as a full-time environment reporter for the then great, independently owned St. Catharines Standard in Niagara, Ontario.
This photo of earth from the moon, taken by U.S. space travellers in the late 1960s, inspired the first Eath Day. It taught us, or should have taught us that this wondrous planet in our solar system and beyond, remains the only place that is an oasis for life as we know it. We must have the vision to look after it, or we may lose it all.
The line was recited to me in an interview I did that year – a full nine years after the first Earth Day – with Sister Margeen Hoffman, a Catholic nun in Niagara Falls, New York. Sister Margeen, who was a member of the proud St. Franciscan Order of her church, reprised the line from Proverbs and from St. Francis of Assisi, an Italian Catholic frier from more than eight centuries ago who made a mark as one of the world’s first environmentalists.
The line meant all the more to Sister Margeen, who was a leader of an ecumenical group in Niagara County, New York that was helping families who found themselves living in homes built on top of a notorious chemical dump that became known around the world, by the time I started my environmental reporting, as the Love Canal.
There was no vision, only blindness brought on by the greed of land speculators and other profiteers, before those families unwittingly bought homes in Love Canal neighbourhood, and as a witch’s brew of dioxins and other poisons surfaced in their yards and basements, they were forced to flee and what was a seemingly typical suburban neighbourhood perished.
Over and over again, from that early experience covering the environmental catastrophe at the Love Canal, to covering other environmental messes in Niagara, Ontario and other regions of the Great Lakes, I thought about that line Sister Margeen shared with me, and I continue to wonder where is the vision.
It is almost as if, as intelligent as we humans can be when it comes to creating wonderful art and music, or developing the technology to send us to the moon and beyond, we can’t seem to address dangerous things we are doing to our life-support systems down here on earth until it is almost too late or until another catastrophe happens.
We need look no farther than the climate change issue today.
As far back as the first Earth Day in 1970s, scientists were warning that the continued burning of coal, gas and other carbon-based fuels were filling the atmosphere with greenhouse gases that could eventually alter our earth’s climate in ways that lead to a wild frequency of severe, devastating storms.
Unfortunately, these earlier warnings from the scientific community, and most of the warnings since from batteries of the world’s most eminent scientists, have done little to change our behavior. More often than not, we have been blinded by the petro-chemical corporate interests and the politicians they have bought in Canada and the United States to conclude that the climate change science is a bunch of bunk.
We have a federal government in Canada that feels that way and a whole bunch of people, who would rather not deal with any of the lifestyle changes or conversions to more renewable fuels we need to do, that go along with that government and its petro-chemical and tar sands commanders.
So I ask, as I wonder what kind of life my 22-year-old daughter will have by the middle of this 21st century, where is the vision?
Unfortunately, Sister Margeen is no longer here on this earth to offer an answer – if there is one in this world of corporate North America’s willful idiots.
Have a Happy Earth Day and Earth Week. Even if you don’t, I am sure you will get over Earth Day. For those of you tar-sands, carbon burning lovers, it must be comforting to know that there is only one Earth Day each year.
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