Adds voice to environmental chorus

The Farmer’s Almanac calls the full moon in November the full beaver moon. Historically this was because trappers and First Nations people saw it as a signal to set traps before the swamps froze to ensure a supply of winter furs.

That moon here in the Annapolis Valley on Nov. 24 was huge and it corresponded with some of the highest tides I’ve seen in a long while. Fortunately there were no high winds or storms to breach the dykes, but I can’t help thinking of that possibility due to global warming.

Maybe if you live in some built up urban area or on Sussex Drive in Ottawa, the inches that separate us from floods are not a tangible thing. We are less insulated from the reach of the water and the wind as Noel proved.

It was only last week Stephen Harper was in Kampala, Uganda brokering environmental issues within the Commonwealth context and representatives from other countries sought out the Canadian media to express disgust at our lack of leadership. Meanwhile a new United Nations study has stated that our country and other wealthy First World nations must immediately start backing their promises to combat climate change with tough action and hard cash.

The 2007 Human Development Report calls on wealthy nations not only to slash their greenhouse gas emissions, but also to provide $86 billion by 2015 to help the world’s poor adapt to global warming. In Ottawa, UN official Papa Seck of Senegal said, “we have less than a decade to avoid dangerous climate change. That doesn’t mean safe climate change, there is no such thing. It just means not a catastrophe.”

While in Uganda, Harper refused to back a summit proposal to set binding targets for greenhouse-gas reductions that would have exempted developing countries. He just keeps flailing away with promises to work toward undetermined aspirational goals on emissions, and yet our country is one of the worst at creating emissions.

Recently people across the province took to the streets to demand greater action on environment issues from the province. We need our leaders and our households to get on board. Now Dec. 8 has been designated globally as a Climate Call to Action Day.

When wind energy expert and writer Paul Gipe spoke at Dalhousie University recently on the energy crisis and advanced renewable tariffs, he suggested three areas that we need to consider more: conservation, improved efficiency and renewable energy.

Gipe says a helpful target for individual household energy use is 3,000 kWh per year per household. Get out your bill and check it, I practically guarantee you’ll be shocked. If as the recently appointed provincial energy strategy facilitator Bob Fournier says, the environment is the top issue for Canadians, then we have to not only trim our consumer lifestyle, but look at long term sustainable changes.

Dec. 8 has been set aside to mark the U.N. Climate Talks in Bali, which run from Dec. 3 – 14. Calls for world leaders to take urgent action are ringing out in advance of catastrophic destabilization like the breaching of our dykes. Add my voice to the chorus.

We feel that there is an overwhelming need to create a groundswell of global opinion to push for the urgent and radical action on climate change, without which we risk a global catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.