Alan Pickersgill - The View From Here

(June 2) - Tomorrow is Clean Air Day. City buses will be fare-free zones for most of the day. We are encouraged to leave our cars at home and find other ways of getting around. Walking, cycling, rollerblading, public transit, car pooling.

It’s all part of National Environment Week. It will be good fun while it lasts, but on Thursday we’ll get back to the dirty air days. There’s a lot more of them. If you take out tomorrow, Earth Day, your birthday, and nine statutory holidays, you’ll have 12 relatively clean air days every year. That leaves us with 353 of the other ones. Or 354 in a leap year.

What will it take to reverse these numbers? The first and surely most obvious answer is that we have to change our thinking. Just as an experiment, we should all take the bus to work tomorrow. Or maybe just half of us. We’d all clock in long after the starting buzzer goes off. There aren’t enough buses in Guelph to move us all around.

If we want cleaner air, we need governments that will put more resources into public transit. Light rapid rail systems between cities, more buses within cities.

The province has to get away from the foolish notion that we need bigger, wider and faster highways. Not because no one will be using them 20 years from now, but because too many of us will be. Nature abhors a vacuum, and traffic hates an empty highway.

When I began commuting to Toronto almost 20 years ago, the 401 had two lanes from here to Mississauga and back. They were always congested every morning and afternoon. By the time I stopped 10 years later, there were three lanes each way. They were still congested.

Let’s make every day a clean air day. It won’t happen tomorrow and it won’t happen by having hyped up feel-good days a couple of times a year. It will happen by doing little things like stopping the Laird Road cloverleaf and moving goods over long distances by rail instead of trucks. If we do these things well, there will be a lot fewer children in Guelph suffering asthma attacks.

Speaking of the Hanlon, there was a flurry of excitement a couple of weeks ago. Someone found a salamander with genetic evidence that a purebred Jefferson might be in the area. The one they found wasn’t pure. It was a hybrid. There’s nothing wrong with a hybrid salamander. The more the merrier, we all say. A large number of them is a good indicator that the land is healthy and the waters are clear.

Hybrids are not up to the task of thwarting development of a business park. That’s a job best left to the Jeffersons. They are protected by federal and provincial species at risk laws. You can’t kill them, or pave over their homes. But what if the biggest threat to the Jefferson salamander isn’t the bulldozer? What if it’s the impure hybrid?

In order to stop the Jefferson family tree from losing its leaves, we need to find at least two purebreds. Sal and Sally Jefferson. When the lights go down and the hormones go up, we’ll have to keep them away from all the randy little hybrids who cruise the wetland looking to blow off a little steam. It’s not going to be easy.

Clean air days and save the salamander societies are great ways to raise awareness. Activists have been doing that for 40 years. These days you can’t find anyone who doesn’t love the environment, but the damage keeps getting worse.

How do we figure that one out?

# posted by Alan Pickersgill @ 6:19 PM