January 28, 1997

The Panther Prints

How Much Do You Care About Your Mother

By Carla Tonelli

(CUP) --- Ifanyone out there remembers the pandemo- nium and excitement that surrounded Earth Day 1990, you may be wondering what happened to all that good will and charity that went out to everyone’s commu- nal mom — Mother Earth.

Actually, Earth Day has been around since 1972, but in the late 80s and early 90s the media took hold of the environmental move- ment and squeezed a surge of life into it. Shiny new blue boxes sprung up on lawns across the country giving presence to a move- ment some feel is fading into the distant past. The question surfaces as to whether or not anyone still cares about the environ- ment, as so many apparently did in 1990.

Jennifer Good, infor- mation co-ordinator at Greenpeace, says environ- mental awareness appears low because most Canadi- ans are too busy worrying about job security and so-

_ cial services to be troubled

over issues like the federal Conservatives’ recent pro- tests over a bill banning the importation of the fuel ad- ditive MMT into the coun-

“In the 60s there was a movement to simpler liv- ing. People were able to be environmental activists be- cause they did not consider (material gain) as important as the masses do today,” Good said.

“Now that people are stuck somewhere inthe mid-

dle classes, and are seeing their material status chal- lenged, the environment slips down a few notches on their lists of priorities.”

However, polls con- ducted by groups over the past three or four years sug- gest declining concern over Earth’s destruction may just be a nasty rumour. Instead, it seems that an overwhelm- ing number of Canadians want to seestricter laws and more stringent enforcement when it comes to the envi- ronment.

Paul Muldoon, a law- yer with the Canadian En- vironmental Law Associa- tion, says the public is just as concerned today with en- vironmental issues as it has been in the past.

“T think it’s a false- hood that the Canadian pub- lic is less concerned. The media doesn’t seem to find the issues as interesting as they did in the early 90s, but it’s hard to do when there are so (many other issues) on their plate,” he said.

Muldoon’s point was proven last Oct. 25, when —as part of Toronto’s Days

of Action — thousands of

people gathered in front of the offices of the Ministry of Environment and Energy to protest the department’s gutting through provincial cuts.

Part of what may be sparking this renewed ac- tivism is the neoliberal eco- nomic philosophy becom- ing entrenched at both the federal and provincial lev- els, in which, among other

things, environmental pro- tection laws are being tossed aside to make Canada more competitive.

As a way to raise awareness about environ- mental concerns, Greenpeace is working to publicize the links between environmental issues and to- day’s more immediate con- cerns, such as health prob- lems. Good says, for exam- ple, that the high percent- age of children developing respiratory diseases like asthma corresponds directly to the poor quality of our polluted air.

Muldoon adds that Mother Nature, far from sit- ting idly by, is finding ways to punish her careless off- spring.

“You can’t cheat the environment. It’s like a pen- dulum that swings and if you don’t take care of it, it'll come back to you,” he said.

“People say things like, “Yeah, there’s global warming, so what? I like warm winters’,” said Good.

“What they aren’t re- alizing is that as a (reper- cussion) of this global warming, there are going to be all kinds of what they’ ll call ‘freak’ natural disas- ters, like flooding and (agri- cultural) mayhem.”