When I was younger, I was a bit activist for certain causes, among them environmentalism. I remember after one event talking to some people and the subject of golf came up.
They could not believe I was an avid golfer. 鈥淒o you know how bad golf courses are for the environment?鈥� they asked.
It was true. Golf courses traditionally use loads of herbicide and pesticide not to mention their copious fresh water consumption. They are generally also built on some of the best arable land available.
In short, a true environmentalist cannot also be an avid golfer without simultaneously being a hypocrite.
I was left with no answer really, except, 鈥渂ut I love golf.鈥�
Of course, any extreme philisophical, social or political position is rife with the danger of hyprocrisy and ultimately untenable for people living in the real world. Hats off to those who manage to walk the walk, but short of going completely off-grid, which also means abdicating most hope of influencing others, few can withstand the scrutiny of scepticism.
Just ask David Suzuki, whose carbon footprint is significantly greater than the average Joe not in spite of his activism, but because of it and gets roasted for it continually.
In any event, I never really was a true environmentalist, because I am not particularly sentimental about the planet.
I can remember my very first day of university. My introductory geology professor put a 24-hour clock up on the board that represented the 4.5 billion year history of Earth. On that clock, first life appears at approximately 4:00, single-celled organisms at 14:08, sexual reproduction (complex life) at 18:08 and dinosaurs at 22:58 p.m.
Think about that. Dinosaurs, perhaps the most successful Superorder of Animals ever, only appeared about an hour ago and, with the exception of the line that evolved into modern birds, were only around for about two-thirds of an hour. That includes likely tens of thousands of species that came and went over the 180 million years or so of the dinosaur era. And that鈥檚 not to discount the valid argument we are still in the dinosaur era considering approximately 10,000 species of birds exist in the world today. Even so, including birds still only covers聽 one-24th of the planet鈥檚 lifespan.
The wedge that represents humans鈥攏ot us specifically, as in Homo sapiens, but the entire Homo genus鈥攊s so thin it barely registers on the 24-hour clock. We, meaning all of our forebears dating back to the common ancestor with chimpanzees, have been around for just over one minute.
That single class was immeasurably profound to me, but it took me many years to train my brain to think in geologic time. Even now, I have to enter a near trance-like state to truly appreciate the vastness of time.
When you are able to do that, though, you realize we have a seriously over-inflated view of our importance in the big scheme of things.
Also, the planet environmentalists propose to preserve is almost as ephemeral as the species that ply its surface. At the end of the time of the dinosaurs (say, approximately 20 minutes to midnight), Saskatchewan was mostly under water and much closer to the equator. North America was actually three separate land masses at that time and sub-tropical.
Just 15,000 years ago (or 23:59:59.8), Canada was virtually entirely covered by ice.
Like I said, I am not particularly sentimental about the current configuration of our world, or humanity for that matter. The planet and its climate are in a constant state of change and we are less than a flash in the pan as species go.
I do deeply care about the infinitesimal time I have here, however, and about my family and descendants and my friends, and their families and descendants and, truth be told, people in general. Our individual and collective sentience is something special, I believe, however brief its manifestation. It is, after all, all we have and significant to us.
So, with respect to climate change, the question for me is not so much who (us) or what (greenhouse gases) is causing it or what the impact will be on the planet (insignificant) or other species, adaptation or extinction as nature sees fit) but how we going to adapt to it.
Interestingly, part of the opening ceremonies of the Olympics Friday was a simulation of what future coastlines will look like if the polar ice melts. That is not an outrageous scenario. It is happening at an alarming rate and, since many of the world鈥檚 great cities are on coasts, we are in danger of losing a big chunk of civilization鈥檚 cultural heritage.
There is only so much you can do with dykes and technology to protect against sea level rise and rising it is and rise it will, even if we were to shut everything down tomorrow, which is, of course, impossible.
Suffice it to say, there is going to be some inland migration. That might not be such a bad thing for landlocked Saskatchewan. Maybe we should start bidding on the relocation of MOMA or the Guggenheim. New Yorkton, we could call it.
Perhaps Regina could become the new Hollywood. Saskatoon has been called the Paris of the Prairies. The Louvre 2.0, anyone?
That鈥檚 if we survive the tornadoes, hail and flooding of course.
