BC's New Enviro Moment

I get the sense that environmentalism is back, having been away since the early '70s. Those were the days of the beehive burner, black liquor from pulp mills into rivers and the discovery that pesticides could be very bad news indeed.

It was the age of Rachel Carson who in 1962 published the blockbuster Silent Spring, a book that made us all look for the first time in wonder at pesticides such as DDT. It was the era when the ad "More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette" made us all think, "Good God! All those years medical men and women who were supposed to cure us and keep us away from bad things were giving themselves cancer! How come they didn't warn us about this lung cancer bit?"

That environmental era, with the consumer protection age along with it, withered but didn't die -- quite. But it went out of fashion.

For and against

Between then and now there was a lot of courageous action. In a time when the public started hearing terms like "eco-terrorist" for plucky people who were ramming illegal whalers (which they still do), saving old growth forests and marching for peace on the grounds that, amongst other things, nuclear explosions were bad for the environment.

Unfortunately, the right wing under the world leadership of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher dominated. I remember a day when, as Environment minister in the Bill Bennett cabinet, I was proposing some environmental initiative. Don Phillips, old leather lungs as he's become known for his filibustering in the legislature, banged his fist on the table shouting, "Damn it, Mr. Premier, I'm as much against the environment as the next person, but Rafe is going too far!"

(Don, a great guy that everyone liked, became famous for his malapropisms such as the day in the house when he shouted "Mr. Speaker, the NDP are the same old bunch . . . the leopard never changes its stripes!")

Fresh troops

The environment is back in vogue and of course that has much to do with global warming and the fact that the public have finally woken up to the fact that bad things are happening. But it's more than that. The demonstration last month of 1200 people at the Pitt Meadows Senior Secondary gym against the proposal to get power from the Pitt wasn't just the same old lefties.

Nor was the one last fall in the East Delta Agricultural Hall protesting the South Fraser Perimeter Road and other proposed environmental rape.

The demonstrations a few weeks before against putting the Sea-to-Sky highway over the top of Eagleridge Bluffs had some regulars all right but a hell of a lot of protesters until then would rather have been caught in a house of ill-repute than at an environmental rally.

The revival of environmentalism has caught the Campbell government by surprise. They were used to the days when they -- and other governments for that matter -- could point to protesters and say "same old, same old" and get away with it. They saw nothing dangerous politically by telling falsehood after falsehood about Atlantic salmon fish farms. After all. who would believe all that nonsense about sea lice for God's sake!

Lighting the green fire

As I look for reasons for the energetic revival of environmentalism, I detect several.

First, many environmentalist groups kept the flames flickering by pushing for parks, fighting the logging of old growth forests, and struggling to save salmon and so on. In B.C.'s case it may well have been the saving the Spatsizi and the tubing of Kemano II by the Harcourt government that signaled that there was a new batch of environmental recruits on the scene.

One has to give credit to the world-wide Green Party although it might be said that they reflected events more than causing them. They did, however, provide a home where the "soft left" and the "middle" felt more comfortable than they did in traditional left-wing parties.

Environmentalism got a considerable boost by the global warming crusading of former American vice-president Al Gore.

There is no question but that climate change opened a lot of eyes. Climate change started slowly but when ice packs started to melt, glaciers disappeared, and huge storms, much bigger than any even thought about before, began to happen, all but incurable Pollyannas and well paid PR people for the polluters took notice -- big time.

The Campbell government has made a terrific political mistake in assuming that if they appeared to be doing big and fancy things over global warming that the public wouldn't notice things like fish farms, bad logging practices and devastating rivers and streams.

In fact the very opposite happened as members of the public, seeing that global warming on the one hand and fish, water, and trees on the other were connected and that they could actually do something about the latter. They saw utterances by Premier Campbell and his ministers as being horse-buns such that few if any government statements are accepted at face value any more.

They saw the government fib when they said they wouldn't sell BC Rail, when they said they would never privatize BC Hydro, when they denied the huge stacks of independent evidence damning their policy on fish farms and now when they tell us that the private sector destroying wilderness is the way to get the power we need.

What does this mean in political terms? The growing strength of a renewed environmental movement in B.C. and beyond will help provide that answer.

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• Greening the Beaver
  How to strengthen Canadian environmentalism. A series.
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