We're putting nature in peril - Keith Roulston editorial

The other morning, as I did my exercises (the price of living to old age), I was entertained by a rabbit hunting food under some nearby cedar trees on our country property and some blue jays seeking material to build their nest.

 

Later, a turkey vulture took a break from scanning the ground for something to eat by landing on the old farm silo just off our property and a red squirrel stole feed I had intended for birds when I put it out. Such are the pleasures of living in a rural area.
It’s becoming an increasingly rare experience. Our federal government is welcoming 400,000 new residents to Canada every year, most of whom settle in a relatively small number of large cities – many in Ontario. Our provincial government recently announced a number of new super-highways north of Toronto to let the city expand. 

 

This was cheered by one Globe and Mail columnist who thought the more city people the better. Meanwhile, one of the farm newspapers delivered to my mailbox stated that between 2000 and 2017, more than 72,000 acres of Ontario’s prime agricultural land had been lost for urban development, 83.5 per cent of it in Central Ontario, 12.1 per cent in Southwestern Ontario. So we keep expecting more people to move into Ontario, but eat just as well from the equivalent of 600 fewer of the original 100-acre farms – and that’s just what we lost in 17 years!

 

That Globe and Mail columnist I mentioned didn’t see any problem with this. We are producing more on each of the remaining 
farm acres in the province, so why shouldn’t we be able to feed more people on fewer acres?

 

At the same time,  climate scientists tell us that farming must use less energy. One of the biggest changes since I was young is the increased use of artificial fertilizers to boost crop yields. Fewer farmers also cover more land using larger, fuel-guzzling equipment. We’re going to need to grow more food with less artificial fertilizer and less petroleum. Can we? At this point, we don’t know.

 

But our increasingly urban population becomes more cut off from nature every day. When I was a kid, even most urbanites were only a generation away from the farm. 

 

Today, we have fewer food producers and more people who never get closer to the earth than a little bit of soil on a root vegetable at a city farmers’ market or watching farmers at work as they zip by on a highway on the way to a cottage.

 

There are a limited number of cottages, of course, and most urbanites don’t enjoy winter at the cottage, so more and more people (including our local residents) are heading south to resort areas in Florida, Mexico or other warm southern spots, burning gasoline for their cars or jet fuel in their airplanes as they go. And then, of course, there are those who choose the cruise ships. Recently my wife told me about a cruise ship that will be stopping on Canada’s east coast this summer, carrying the equivalent of the population of Goderich on each trip.

 

And all these travellers feel this vacation is their due. After all, two years of COVID-19 have kept them suffering at home without the chance to travel!

 

But if we don’t meet our climate targets, if we continue to see the Arctic and Antarctic ice melt, wildfires and floods threaten life in vulnerable areas like California and British Columbia and we see islands completely disappear because of rising ocean levels, most of us won’t blame ourselves. Instead, we’ll punish the government for somehow not having solved the problem. Oh, and we’ll grouch if the cost of gasoline goes up, too.

 

Look, if our grandchildren are to enjoy life on this planet, we all must be willing to pay the cost – especially urbanites who seem to think that it’s up to others to change in order to solve the problem. People my age have a responsibility to people just being born – let alone the rabbits, squirrels and birds that depend on the natural world – to use less. Go back to the 1950s and hardly anyone flew in an aircraft. Today, hardly anyone in North America and Europe and, increasingly in Asia, doesn’t.

 

We’ve just come through a pandemic that, conservatively, killed more than a million in North America and six million worldwide. At least part of the reason is that we travel so much we quickly spread this disease – yet many see one of the biggest problems from the pandemic is that it cramped their travel.

 

That’s asking a lot, of course, from people who now take travel as a right. I’m showing my age again when I say I remember when people who went south for the winter stood out as unusual. Now, most of my retired relatives spend at least part of the winter down south.

 

My generation won’t pay the maximum price for our environmental blindness. Our grandchildren will.