blogcutter

Climate emergency. Homelessness emergency. Covid-19 emergency. Sometimes the instructions we are given to deal with an urgent, acute and hopefully fairly short-term crisis like Covid-19 may be counterproductive for long-term issues like climate change. Sometimes not. Let me attempt here to tease out and unpack a few of the major considerations.

Health care services and infrastructure have always relied heavily on disposable products to help prevent further spread of disease - gloves, masks, scrubs and other garments; hypodermic needles, gauze and other bandaging materials and so forth. Certainly some products can be recycled or even sterilized and re-used, but medical waste often involves some stringent disposal protocols. Conversely, environmentalists urge us to reduce, reuse and recycle as much as possible.

Aside from hospitals, clinics and other health care facilities, there are all the places food may be sold or served. Early on in the modern-day environmental awareness movement (perhaps the 1970s and 80s), around the time when blue boxes were being distributed to people's homes, we used to get a 3-cent discount for every reusable bag we brought to the grocery store (that, of course, was in the days when we still used pennies - copper, by the way, being one of the substances least likely to harbour the Covid virus for a long time, though that's another story). Then, once they decided enough people were ecologically conscious enough to deal with it, they got rid of the metaphorical carrot and substituted a stick, in the form of a 5-cent plastic bag fee. In the wake of Covid-19, there has been a movement back to disposables. Some stores are waiving the 5-cent bag fee and many are pre-packaging more produce to prevent virus-contaminated hands from squeezing the lemons and making Covid lemonade. Coffee shops, many of which are still open for take-out and drive-through, will no longer allow you to bring in your own cup. Beer stores no longer allow you to return your empties.

And speaking of drive-through, let's discuss private vehicles. Use of public transit is being discouraged, though not completely shut down. Where stations are open, gas is selling at bargain-basement prices, so that's not an incentive to conserve - though all the shuttered businesses and people working from home certainly might be! With social distancing the new reality, carpooling is presumably a bit of a no-no too. And what about intensification, which seemed to be the buzzword for the twenty-first century as public transit infrastructure expanded? If you're confined to quarters through quarantine or self-isolation, proximity to neighbours and use of common areas again becomes something to be avoided. And that doesn't even begin to address homelessness.

I'll finish with a few positives. Environmentally-friendly transit need not be limited to public transit. We can still walk, cycle, roller-skate, etc., depending on the distance to be travelled and our state of health. With weather getting warmer and more pleasant, people may be increasingly willing and even eager to use these options. And there also are a small number of electric and hybrid private vehicles out there as well. From what I've been reading, carbon emissions are already quite a bit reduced now that so many people are working at home and not going out much. The other thing is that the Covid-19 virus apparently does not like heat. That may be good news for snowbirds returning from Florida, for our own warm springs and blisteringly hot summers, and for the warming of our planet in general.

We're told to get used to the new normal. But how many people out there, regardless of how educated and intelligent they may be, really have a good grasp of what that will mean?

Back in 1976, I was living in London, Ontario, and studying to become a librarian. There was a bulk-foods store in town called "Grains, Beans and Things", where I discovered the joys of purple loosestrife honey.

Fast forward to 1992. I went back for a reunion and GB&T was still there (though in the process of moving to a new but nearby location). There was a sign in the front window exhorting customers NOT to feed the squirrels because they were a nuisance. And the purple loosestrife honey was long gone.

Some time in the 1980s or 90s it became decidedly politically-incorrect to be a fan of purple loosestrife. "It's not a native plant! It's an invasive species! It has no natural predators! It will choke out our wetlands and leave death and destruction in its wake!" So what did they do about this monstrous purple bogeyplant?

Well for one thing, they imported some beetles from somewhere in Europe and under cover of darkness, deposited them in purple loosestrife patches to gorge their little hearts out. Hmmm. I guess non-native beetles are okay as long as they are fightng the good fight against a domestic menace.

Now fast forward another twenty years. Turns out, purple loosestrife is still out there, but it's only about 5% or so of the wetland. And the other species that they were supposedly killing off are still out there too. Perhaps that's in part because they stepped in promptly with those non-native beetles and addressed the national epidemic, but the general consensus amonst scientists these days seems to be that rumours of a weed-induced apocalypse were gross exaggerations.

And you know, I really don't understand this "non-native species" argument. After all, Canada is largely a nation of immigrants. If anything, its probably the native populations who have been treated as second-class citizens - to the extent that they even accept the concept of citizenship as non-aboriginals have come to define it.

Is it any wonder that there are sceptics out there who don't buy into the dire warnings about climate change and global warming? Now don't get me wrong. Certain things are measurable and quantifiable and I don't dispute them for a moment. But the devil is in the interpretation - lies, damn lies and statistics as the saying goes. Average temperatures probably ARE going up over time. The polar ice cap probably IS melting at a faster rate than it was. That doesn't necessarily mean that they will continue to do so at the same or at an accelerating rate. A few decades is a relatively short period of time in the vast history of the planet and the universe. And even if things do continue on their current course, it seems to me that the real problem is whether climate change happens at such a rapid and unpredictable rate that we are unable to come up with good-enough adaptive or delaying tools and mechanisms. As humans, we do have a few points in our favour that the dinosaurs, for example, lacked.

In some respects, it might of course be a GOOD thing if the polar ice cap melts and the vast desolate swaths of northern wasteland become more habitable. Yes, certain species would undoubtedly die out. Over time, others would evolve to take their place. That doesn't mean we should bury our heads in the sand and avoid dealing with the problems as we perceive them at the moment. The pure and applied research that we do now, the innovations and inventions and just plain wild or bizarre ideas that we come up with - some of them, anyway - will no doubt be of SOME use for SOME purpose at SOME time!