There is a toxic relationship between the fossil fuel industry and too many of the world’s powerful people who protect a business model that has reaped billions of dollars in profit at the expense of the rest of us.
I have been living in Squamish for 40 years and thankfully for many of us here, there has been a huge shift in our thinking about environment and our connections to it. Our trust in corporations has been broken. I am thinking about the contamination of Howe Sound from the mine, the mercury from former chemical plant, the filling in of large portions of the estuary and the loss of herring populations, to name a few.
It is not just about the carrot of jobs and taxes anymore. Many of us realize that we are all actually on a spaceship called Earth and that it does have life-support systems for which we are responsible.
As Gordon Wilson has said so eloquently in The Common Sense Canadian (Nov. 4, 2013) about liquefied natural gas (LNG), “The most compelling reason to be concerned about relying on this golden goose is the fact that the markets we are told will buy all we can supply may not materialize as we think, and even if they do, the price they are prepared to pay for our product may be well below what is anticipated.” And he also said, “The impact of an expanded hydrocarbon economy will certainly speed up global warming and cause us to build a dependency on a revenue stream that originates form processes that are poisoning our atmosphere.”
It is both a personal quandary and a global systemic catch 22. It is next to impossible for you and I alone to lift ourselves out of the global warming quicksand by our own bootstraps. We will need some bigger hooks, at the local, provincial, national, and international levels, and an adherence to the teachings of David Thoreau and Gandhi in order to push back the LNG assault.
Lynn Wilbur
Squamish
