Earth Day is a great idea but it's been subverted. Modern environmentalism has become like organized religion with its reliance on social pressure (better known as bullying) and guilt to force the population to follow its edicts.
To publicly oppose any tenet of environmentalism, no matter how ridiculous it may seem, is to proclaim oneself as an uneducated, unsophisticated boor who hasn't seen the light.
Some local residents will say with a straight face that they care for the environment because they recycle. They insist that Prince George needs a curbside recycling program. What they ignore is that Prince George has had curbside recycling available for years. Three local companies offered the service. Some provided bins. Some even went in the yards of their clients to get the recycling, so the customer didn't even need to remember to haul it out to the curb on a certain day of the week or month.
Yes, those residents who were customers of the three private companies paid for curbside recycling but the residents of communities with universal curbside recycling are also paying for the service. The first group pays a vendor directly while the second group pays the government through their taxes. An easy case could be made that the people paying for private recycling service are far more committed to environmental stewardship (because they have a financial stake in it) than the naive people who think they're getting it for free.
As David Suzuki has rightly pointed out many times, recycling is the last of the 3 Rs and the easiest one to follow. The ubiquitous recycling triangle with the arrows is misleading because it suggests that recycling is just as important as reducing and reusing but it's not. If people reduce their consumption and reuse what they do consume, recycling becomes largely irrelevant.
Furthermore, recycling also burns energy and creates new products, further contributing to the consumer economy. Reducing is first because it's the thing individuals can do that has the greatest impact but is also the hardest to do.
Unfortunately, a generation of Canadian children and young adults honestly believe they are "doing their part" for the environment by putting that plastic bottle of water in the recycling bin.
Much of the modern environmental movement has become a farce as idiotic as bottled water.
In the name of the environment, they say no to pipelines, even though a major oil pipeline runs through Jasper and Banff National Parks. They say no to pipelines even though one runs through the Pine Pass and connects with the Husky refinery in Prince George. Pipelines are as common and as essential to the Canadian economy as automobiles and cell phones. That's fine to question the safety and potential harm of a specific pipeline or the environmental record of a specific pipeline developer and operator but saying no to pipelines "on principle" should be as ridiculous as saying police officers and soldiers shouldn't carry firearms because guns are bad "in principle."
In the name of the environment, some seek protection for animals and ecosystems, ignoring how the health of species and habitats are in constant flux. In the name of the environment, they say that the activities of humanity are unnatural. Except for size and variety of the building materials, what is the difference between a modern home and a beaver dam or a rabbit warren? What is the difference between a skyscraper and an ant colony? What is the difference between a city and a bee hive?
All living creatures, including humans, make alterations to their habitat to support their survival and the continuation of their species. Sometimes, those alterations are made at the expense of other competing species.
The problem is not that homo sapiens are altering the entire global habitat. The real problem is that those changes could threaten not just the survival of countless species but the survival of humanity itself.
It's time for environmentalism to get back to common sense. On not just Earth Day, but every day, we should worry about taking better care of the habitat that sustains us and will do the same for for our children if we are careful with it. Recycling isn't the end of that process, it's the beginning.
If we're selfish about maintaining a healthy and livable space for human beings around the world, we're also creating a healthy and livable space for countless creatures to co-habitate with us.
Even the critters would agree that would be the right place to start.
