Cleaning up the mess.

• Author: Watson, Jack

"First, be thou void of these affections,

Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear;

Be moved at nothing, see thou pity none...

As for myself, I walk abroad o' nights,

And kill sick people groaning under walls:

Sometimes I go about and poison wells..."

--Christopher Marlowe, Volpone

We are told that there are more functional motor vehicles in North America than there are human beings. Accordingly, at over 300 million of those, it is a daunting thought to consider how much poisonous gas could be spewed into the world atmosphere just out of our section of the planet and just from those vehicles. With the continued industrialization of the so-called third world, the People's Republic of China, or the world's most populous democracy, India, could ultimately reach a similar proportion of vehicles to people. At present population levels, that would mean that there could be over 2,000,000,000 additional motor vehicles on the planet within the foreseeable future.

This is not to condemn motor vehicles or their use. There is nothing intrinsically wrong about progress, or about industrialization. It would be unrealistic, not to mention hypocritical by some, to think that the world could or should go back to some simpler time.

The world cannot be, in current reality, converted to a pristine Garden of Eden, with ancient simplicity, uniformly agreeable climate, and sparsely populated with consistently friendly, sensitive and generous people. The world cannot go back to those times because such times never existed on a world wide scale.

Even efforts to establish and maintain microcosm societies of that sort inevitably sacrifice freedom: ask the 1960s `hippies'. An effort to impose some sort of non-technological agrarian state on the world should not be pursued even if it were possible to try: ask the victims of the Khmer Rouge or the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

The starting point of discussion of environmental problems, therefore, should be realistic and forward looking. If there is incipient environmental disaster, we should contemplate how to deal with this in advance. We should take account of the sacrifices required in making the decisions necessary to prevent it. We also have, arguably, a moral duty to leave the world cleaner than it was before we got here, which was the philosophy of Alberta's illustrious Grant MacEwan. This is why efforts to set aside boreal forest and commitments to protect endangered species allow us to know...