POLITICAL AND INDUSTRIAL LEADERS ISSUE ENDLESS REPORTS AND press releases about their attempts to balance the economic imperatives with environmental responsibility. But since all three major political parties in Canada believe in maintaining endless economic growth that is a direct cause of environmental destruction, none of them has seriously addressed environmental problems. What is needed is a grass-roots environmental movement so powerful that all of society, including politicians, will be transformed. Such a movement is indeed growing.
As we move away from an ecologically imbalanced way of living to a more harmonious relationship with our surroundings, the big changes will be in the minds of individuals and their communities as they redefine priorities, values, and lifestyles. There are signs that it is happening. Let me give you three examples.
In October 1989, Jeff Gibbs, a twenty-two-year-old student at the University of British Columbia, established the Environmental Youth Alliance (EYA) to link high school environmental groups. EYA connects groups through a newspaper featuring stories by students and invited experts. It also sponsors gatherings at environmental conferences and arranges trips to wilderness areas.
Gibbs’s own story is an advertisement for EYA. Raised as a city boy, at fifteen he experienced a fundamental shift in perception while on a canoe trip through the Bowron Lakes in central British Columbia. “Until then,” he says, “I always thought human beings were at the top of the heap. But out there, I was overwhelmed with the power of nature and how puny I was.”
The next year, in 1984, that spiritual revelation took him to the Queen Charlotte Islands, where “I realized that nature is incredibly complex and runs on its own agenda. If humans weren’t there, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference. I was blown away by the power, the mystery, and the beauty of it all.”
When a battle broke out over proposed logging on Meares Island off the west coast of Vancouver Island, Gibbs started an environmental group called the TREE Club (Teenagers Response to Endangered Ecosystems) in his school. About thirty students joined, and the first thing they did was to collect the names of every elected member of the federal and provincial governments. Each student then chose about twenty names and wrote a personal letter to each by hand, citing statistics and asking them to save the forest. Replies, including one from the prime minister, began to pour into the school. The students were able to tally those for and against logging Meares and focused their attention on the undecideds.
Later, the youngsters ordered three thousand buttons saying Save South Moresby, a contentious area in the Queen Charlotte Islands. The buttons cost 20 cents apiece and were sold for $1. Money poured in to supplement what was raised by bake sales and car washes, in all about $7,000. The TREE Club gave some of the money to the Western Canada Wilderness Committee to print five thousand newspapers about South Moresby, and the students then helped to hand-deliver them.
The TREE Club organized a slide show, which they showed to schoolmates, parents, and the general public. And it made more money! For two months, club members knocked on doors to talk to people about the future of South Moresby, covering over five thousand households.
This is power at the grass roots. EYA will link high school groups across Canada and encourage students to get involved by forming their own environmental clubs. After all, it is their world that’s at stake. This movement has swept the country and put a lot of pressure on adults. Listen to what students are thinking.
A Grade 7 class in Ajax, Ontario, wrote: “We’d like to know what will become of the world when we are adults. What will happen if nothing is done? How will we stop the carelessness?”
Vernon, British Columbia: “So far we’ve raised about $70 in a bake sale, and next Monday, a lady from our recycling depot is going to talk to us about sorting recyclables so we can get people volunteering at the depot. Did Nancy tell you about her idea of going to McDonald’s and either bringing china plates or asking for them?”
And from Concordia University in Montreal: “I formed, along with some other students, a recycling committee to try to create awareness about the severe garbage problem. I will be attending a meeting with the mayor of Montreal and representatives from the ministers of environment, communication, and transportation to listen to what they have to say so I can return to school and report the meeting to my fellow students.”
This is not a passing fad. These young activists are going to become more insistent and vocal in their demands. Interestingly, a large majority of EYA members and participants are girls. And women are leading the moves to change the way we live. Take Andrea Miller.
Miller lives in a West Vancouver high-income neighborhood. She calls herself an environmental homemaker, concerned about the problem of garbage. When she learned that Vancouver’s garbage was going to be exported north to Cache Creek, she was galvanized into action. She decided there would be no garbage crisis if there was no garbage. And she has been able to reduce her family’s garbage output to under a bag a month. It’s a heroic achievement that takes far more than just composting all organic waste and recycling cardboard, paper, glass, metals, and so on.
It requires a major shift in personal priorities, attitudes, and behavior. For example, she does not buy anything that has plastic wrapped around it, she carries her own cup everywhere, and she uses traditional cleaners like borax, lemon, and salt instead of detergents.
In January 1989, Miller began knocking on doors in her neighborhood and inviting people to come over to her place with a friend. She enthusiastically showed her guests simple ways to reduce garbage output. With less garbage, she reasoned, there will be less need for huge incinerators or dumps in other communities and all kinds of related benefits of saved energy, reduced pollution, and conserved resources.
To date, Miller has held dozens of coffee klatches in her home and now gives at least three talks a week to groups ranging from nurses to schoolchildren. She has inspired others who have formed a group called WHEN (Worldwide Home Environmentalists’ Network), which offers advice and help to people who want to be more environmentally responsible.
The third example of grass-roots change started when neighbors in a midtown section of Toronto began to meet and discuss the radio program It’s a Matter of Survival. Responding to the urgent message of the series, they invited all people on that block to meet. At that first meeting, fourteen people showed up. Calling themselves “Grass-roots Albany,” they quickly agreed to a set of goals: (1) They will work to clean up the environment around their homes and neighborhood. (2) They will enter into a vigorous and continuing correspondence with politicians at all levels of government. They will not be deterred by form letters and will persist with follow-up letters demanding dialogue. They will vote on the basis of environmental leadership of candidates rather than for parties. (3) They will pursue individual environmental goals with the support of the group. Some of the projects embarked on under this category are interesting. A university teacher will try to stop the use of styrofoam containers at his institution. A member will find out how clean the city’s water is and research the best filtration system. Another member is going to pressure the Board of Education to begin a massive tree-planting program on all school property to start reforesting the city, while someone else will compile lists of practical tips on how to live in an environmentally responsible way at home.
One of Grass-roots Albany’s recent projects is called “Preserving the Urban Forest.” If we think of forests as the complex communities of organisms in an untouched watershed, then “city” and “forest” seem a contradiction in terms. But urban trees can also be thought of as a different kind of forest that nevertheless plays an important role in our lives.
A couple of years ago, the great Haida artist Bill Reid suggested to me that environmentalists should hold a rally “to protest the clear-cutting of Kerrisdale” (an upscale part of Vancouver). While said playfully, he had a serious message that while we struggle to save old-growth forests, trees in cities where most Canadians live have also been falling to the chain saw.
Trees are a crucial link to our natural roots, reminding us of the changing cycles of life and providing shelter and food for birds, insects, mammals, and microorganisms. Of course, trees are an esthetic part of the cityscape, and if you’ve ever stepped from a hot concrete road into the shade of trees, you know they regulate temperature. Trees store water and transpire it into the air. They prevent erosion and do their bit to compensate for our excess production of carbon dioxide.
To be fair, some people may think of trees as pests that coat lawns and roads with dead leaves, crack underground pipes, push up pavement with their roots, and fall down during storms. But seen as a community of organisms that are quite beneficial, trees deserve to be noticed and accommodated by us.
Because they valued their “forest” and were worried that too many trees were being cut down, members of Grass-roots Albany decided to take an inventory of the trees in their community. They wanted to know how many there were, the age distribution, the species and their health, and whether trees were being planted for the future. How many of us really know this in our backyards? A proposal and modest budget (CDN $2,600) were prepared, and the four-block area to be studied was blanketed with flyers asking for cooperation. Notices were posted in local stores and on poles, stuffed into mailboxes, and delivered in person by volunteers. Response was gratifying—over 350 households representing more than 95 percent in the neighborhood agreed (most enthusiastically) to allow their trees to be examined and counted.
Forestry graduate student Marshall Buchanan was hired to do the formal work. Already involved in urban reforestation, including a project in the Rouge Valley in Metro Toronto, he was enthusiastic about the level of public knowledge, interest, and support. The only hassles he encountered were with people who thought he had come from Ontario Hydro to cut the trees down. In those few blocks, they counted more than 2,500 trees (their definition of “tree” was less stringent than the “woody plant with a single stem 2 meters [6.5 feet] above the ground” used by foresters). The citizeninitiated project provides a model that can be readily followed by any group that values the trees in its neighborhood. Initiatives like this are leading us down the road away from Rio.
Involvement is empowering, so choose a group and jump in