The Citizen, 2009-10-08, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2009. PAGE 5.
Bonnie
Gropp
TThhee sshhoorrtt ooff iitt
It seemed like such a great idea.
Inspirational, really. Landscape gardener
Raoul Surcoul, and physiotherapist
Richard Spink, both dedicated environmental
activists, had spent four years laboriously
preparing a very special polar expedition that
would feature solar panels and a cutting-edge
wind turbine. Purpose: to achieve the first
carbon-neutral crossing of the Greenland
icecap in the history of the planet.
Last April they set sail – pardon me – they
carbon-neutrally chugged – out of Bristol
harbour, England in a welter of whirring TV
cameras and media microphones.
Twenty-five thousand British schoolchildren
eagerly monitored their progress on line.
Two days out of Bristol their boat
foundered. Raoul’s and Richard’s dream went
to the bottom of the sea; happily, their sorry
butts were saved by a passing ship.
If nothing else, the abortive expedition kept
one staunch human tradition alive. Whatever
other challenges we face, we humans know
that in the field of Environmental Screw-ups
we as a species have no equal.
Back in the late 1800s a New York
philanthropist had an inspiration: wouldn’t it
be glorious if all the wondrous creatures
mentioned in the works of Shakespeare could
find a new home in North America?
Brilliant! He would start with…let me
see….Yes! That beautiful iridescent bird of the
English countryside – the starling. In 1890 the
philanthropist arranged for 100 European
starlings to be released in Central Park.
Today the starling population of this
continent has grown to more than 250 million.
The bird’s become the bane of other bird
species and of North American agriculture, not
to mention North American windshields and
park benches.
We never learn. Years ago, some Aussie
thought it would be fair dinkum to have rabbits
Down Under, so he imported a few pairs.
Australia got rabbits alright.
When I was a kid in Toronto, Canada geese
were as rare as Stanley Cup parades. Forty
years on, many parks in Hogtown are all but
unwalkable, thanks to goose poop. Downtown
traffic regularly grinds to a halt on Lakeshore
Boulevard to allow waddling caravans of
geese and their gosling broods to cross the
road.
The only force likely to knock the Canada
goose off its perch is its avian cousin, the
cormorant. The snake-necked bird also used to
be a rarity in the Great Lakes but no more.
Cormorants have taken over – and pretty much
destroyed – many swatches of the Great Lakes
tapestry, including Middle Island in Point
Pelee National Park, Lake Erie.
Cormorants crap a lot. Nearly half the
island’s trees have been killed by a blanket of
cormorant guano. The very chemistry of the
soil has been changed. Can the island be
saved? Park superintendent Marian Stranak
has her doubts. She told a Globe and Mail
reporter, “This is a dying island with a dying
population of plants and animals.”
Want to guess which species bears
responsibility for the cormorant explosion?
Decades ago, freighters and tankers from
Europe introduced a whole new foodstock for
the cormorant when they accidentally released
scads of imported alewife fish from their
ballast tanks into the Great Lakes.
American fish farmers completed the
smorgasbord by introducing farmed catfish in
the cormorant’s wintering habitat.
Ironically, we often do worse by trying to
Do Good. Remember when the Everglades
alligator faced extinction a few years back?
U.S. lawmakers sprang to the fore, banning
hunting of the creature and the sale or even
possession of alligator hides.
The ‘gators have rebounded nicely and are
now picking off an average of a dozen humans
a year.
Remember when South Africa declared a
moratorium on ivory merchandising back in
the mid-90s? The elephant population of
Kruger National Park has now doubled and
they’re running out of food. Looks like the
park elephants will soon face a grim choice:
starve or be culled. ‘Culled’ is a weasel word
for ‘shot’.
And let’s not forget our own plains bison.
Human rapaciousness almost wiped out that
magnificent beast a century and a half ago.
Hadn’t been any in the Grasslands National
Park area of Saskatchewan since the late 1800s
(about the time Central Park was last starling-
free).
Recently, 130 bison were reintroduced to the
park and they’re doing splendidly. So
splendidly that parks officials are already
worried.
“The area can only support so many
animals,” a parks spokesman says. “If there are
more…they will graze the grass down to the
dirt (until) there is actually nothing growing.”
Trouble is, we’ve pretty much run out of
suitable habitat to relocate the bison…
Robbie Burns said it well – the best laid
plans of men, and all that.
Remember that intrepid duo of
environmentalists who sank their boat trying
to become the first humans to complete a
carbon-neutral crossing of the Pole? Guess
what saved their bacon when they were
bobbing, shipwrecked in the north Atlantic.
An oil tanker. Carrying 680,000 barrels of
crude.
Arthur
Black
Other Views It ain’t easy being green
Dalton McGuinty keeps churning out
more laws to protect residents than
any previous premier, but some do not
do their job well and others raise the question
why he took so long.
The latest very much in this category is a
ban on motorists using hand-held cell phones
while driving, except to call 911 in an
emergency. The Liberal premier says that will
come into effect Oct. 26.
The premier’s road to this has been painfully
slow, almost total gridlock. The Liberals began
mulling over the idea of banning motorists
using cell phones in the mid-1990s. This was
when cell phones became omnipresent and a
nuisance on streets and in stores, restaurants,
buses and trains, and a danger in cars,
because they distract drivers from focusing on
roads.
Some Liberals had kind words for a
Progressive Conservative backbencher, John
O’Toole, in the late 1990s, when he introduced
a private member’s bill to ban cell phones
while driving.
O’Toole could not persuade his party, then
in government, to support him, because
Conservatives particularly have tended to see a
man’s car as his castle.
Examples include a Conservative
government being reluctant to force vehicle
occupants to buckle seat belts until it was
reduced to a minority in the 1970s and a later
Conservative premier, Mike Harris, scrapping
photo radar, in which police checked drivers’
speeds from unmarked cars, which a New
Democrat government had brought in to
reduce speeding and accidents.
The Liberals under McGuinty have been in
government for six years and say they have
been delayed by wanting to fine-tune their
legislation.
But this law has had more experts looking
under the hood than a new model Rolls Royce.
Research has shown drivers using handheld
cell phones are four times more likely to be in
a crash than drivers who focus totally on the
road.
Police, road safety organizations and the
insurance industry have long supported a ban
on using phones while driving.
But politicians generally are reluctant to get
between residents and their cars and
McGuinty is increasingly wary of introducing
legislation that encourages the Conservatives
to accuse him of creating a “nanny state.”
In the debate on the cell phones law, one
Tory, Peter Shurman, complained it put
the province on the slippery slope to
nanny-statism and another, Ted Chudleigh,
charged that the Liberals want to ban
residents from doing everything Liberals
disapprove.
A far-right Toronto newspaper also labelled
the premier Gauleiter McGuinty.
This may be a reason McGuinty is hesitating
to bring in other laws to protect residents
whose desirability has been well proven. One
would require adult cyclists, not just those
under 18, to wear helmets.
MPPs of all parties have approved private
members’ bills and motions requiring cyclists
of all ages to wear helmets three times in
recent years.
The New Democrats in government
approved such a law in the early 1990s and
even set a starting date, but Conservatives who
defeated them changed it to apply only to
under-18s.
John Milloy, now a Liberal minister, when a
back bencher obtained support for a private
member’s bill requiring all cyclists to wear
helmets, after MPPs of all parties told
poignant stories of adult relatives and friends
killed or injured because they were not
wearing helmets.
Several municipalities also have called on
the province to require adult cyclists to wear
helmets, but none of this has prompted
McGuinty to act.
After a 13-year-old boy was killed when he
fell and hit his head on a tree while skiing,
McGuinty said he quickly bought a ski helmet
and started wearing it.
The premier urged all skiers to wear
helmets, but his government has made no
move to make them compulsory.
The Canadian Cancer Society, Health
Canada and Liberal and New Democrat MPPs
have called tanning beds many use to give
them a healthy looking glow an extreme
danger and urged restrictions, but McGuinty
has not acted. This is a premier keen to protect
people, but increasingly concerned about
protecting himself.
Eric
Dowd
FFrroomm
QQuueeeenn’’ss PPaarrkk
‘The weather’s fine, wish you were
here.’ To the idealist this familiar
phrase conveys a sweet sentiment —
that of paradise being lessened by your
absence.
Cynics know better. Yeah, right, they think,
the absence of any mere mortal is going to ruin
someone else's simple and carefree sojourn. To
them the comment is instead a picture-perfect
postcard rubbed in their nose. Oh, perhaps not
intentionally, but it’s a good, solid rub
nonetheless.
Last Saturday, a family member and her
spouse headed out on their annual pilgrimage
south. In preparation for a long and miserable
winter they store up some extra hours of
summery sunshine with a month-long stay at a
condo in Florida.
They are good family, understanding the
need to keep us informed of what they’re doing
and where they are. So it was no surprise when
I received an e-mail telling me they had arrived
safely in South Carolina the first day of the
motor trip.
It was the second one, however, that inspired
a wry smile from me and took my thoughts in
an unexpected direction. They had now arrived
at their destination uneventfully. Good to know.
Temperatures, they continued to say, were in
the 80s. For brother-in-law the fish were biting
like crazy and Sis was busy spending her time
reading in the sun.
Ummm... also good to know. Couldn’t be
happier for them.
Especially as I looked out my window to
another dreary grey day, felt the chill in each
brisk swish of a falling leaf and each brittle
splash of rain.
Not that for one minute did I ever suspect
their intention to be anything other than
sincere. It was an update, nothing more,
nothing less, for people who are and should be
interested in how things are going with them.
Had a ‘wish you were here’ been added, it
would have without a doubt been heartfelt as
they have asked us to visit time and again.
Unlike times in the past when Mom forced my
presence upon them, I know they actually kind
of like baby sister tagging along now.
So the e-mail was viewed with proper
sentiment. They were having a good time,
enjoying this blessing that was in no way
diminished without me, but would be increased
in pleasure should I be able to join them.
With that thought, and as a glance out the
window revealed it was still raining enough to
blight the healthiest of minds, I knew it was
going to have to be enough for me, however,
to soak up the rays vicariously through their
updates. I know that my happiness for them,
that they can now enjoy the rewards for decades
of 9-5, truly does far surpass any remote
possibility of envy.
But then one of life’s little twists
sardonically corkscrewed it way into my
musings. Isn’t it ironic, I pondered, that the
weary workers soldier on, often in desperate
need of a break, while folks on permanent
vacation can actually take one. Retirement
provides an opportunity to get away from it all
when there’s nothing to really get away from
anymore.
It’s just another of those imbalances that
follows us from here before to nevermore, just
as all of the energy, all of the risks are there for
us when we are too young to know what to do
with them, or as we work when our children are
small and stop when our house is empty.
I admit, I’m kind of looking forward to the
next of these though when the only difference
between real life and a vacation is venue.
The phones ban took forever
Wish you were here