We’ve spent two months in the Smokanagan Valley along with other British Columbians elsewhere battling for our health, homes, livelihoods and the natural world. As I write this, the Air Quality Index rates Penticton’s air as only fair.
Fighting wildfires and other environmental disasters isn’t enough – that’s reaction.
We must stop funding and burning the fossil fuels that are choking us and drying, incinerating, and devastating our Earth in other ways. Petroleum can still be wisely used to create much of the material stock of the 21st century, but we must stop burning it.
Our lives depend on immediate legislative action. There’s no substitute for breathable air and destroying the complexity of the natural world is madness. We’re 60 years beyond the publishing of scientist Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 – the book that launched the environmental movement. That’s three generations ago.
Enough of climate deniers and climate action delayers kicking the can of change in our energy system to 10 or 20 or more years into the future. Always putting the economy and our current standard of living ahead of environmental reality will kill us.
We’ve mobilized to confront COVID-19 as we did in dealing with the Second World War. We can do the same for immediate climate action and embrace renewable energy, expand training for all the jobs needed, and provide the materials and infrastructure to make a liveable world a reality.
The federal election on September 20th lets us vote for a party with a leader who will act in changing our desperate environmental circumstances.
Merle Kindred