A Full Moon in Vancouver

Gary Lund, OP Contributor

 

s I journeyed home one recent
Friday night, I encountered a
number of situations that I

found disturbing. The moon must have
been full, and the spirit of Transylvania
was settling upon our city.

As I rode the up escalator at the New
Westminster SkyTrain station, several
drug-dealer thugs and a woman addict
with sores decorating her face were loiter-
ing halfway up the stairs—the thugs
glaring at others and looking menacing,
the woman looking dazed and desperate.
(The day before, there was a man posing
as an obstacle, sitting in the very centre of
the sidewalk, facing the bottom of the
SkyTrain escalators, eating a meal.)

In Vancouver I got off the train at
Granville Station and walked over to
Seymour St., with Half Price Computer
Books my destination. A block from Half
Price, I noticed a young man in the shel-
ter of a store entranceway, carrying a large

backpack. He wore small headphones and
was holding a Walkman. As I approached
to walk past, another man came up to
him, snatched the walkman out of the
young man’s hands, swung his arm in a
citcle to maximize momentum, and
slammed the radio onto the sidewalk with
all the raging force he could muster. I’m
not sure what expletives he used, the visu-
al effect dominated. Then he turned and
stomped off, past me. The victim left the
shattered radio behind, crossed the street
silently, and glided away without looking
back.

When I arrived at Half Price, the store
was empty, closed down. All that drama
for nothing. So I headed back to Granville
to see if the Granville Street Book
Company might have the computer book
I was looking for.

On the way, I found the entire
Seymour-Pender-Granville Street route to
be a teeming zoo of thugs, punks, rockers,

beggars, and other creatures of the night.
A few “regular” looking people were
mixed in. After not finding what I wanted
at the book store run by an Avery
Schreiber look-alike, I made my way over
to Burrard Street, where everyone, or at
least almost everyone, seemed to be regu-
lar, purposeful people on their way home
from work. It was a sharp contrast in only
a few blocks, and a place where I felt more
relaxed and at home. On the way, though,
I ran the gauntlet of a herd of bicycle
zealots on Howe St., ringing their bells
and shouting their political slogans:
“We're not blocking traffic—we are the
traffic!,”’ and “Do you love your car? Do
you love your car?”

Thus, in one evening commute, I
crossed paths with criminals, the pathetic,
the apathetic, a raging tantrum, and pollit-
ical protest. Only the werewolf was
missing.

 

The Important
Takes a While

atching television news today,
it seems our attention spans
have dipped to near zero and

the networks are more than happy to give
us our fix. In the past month alone, the

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media’s roving eye has swung from such
earth-shattering events as Martha
Stewart’s jail release to the Michael
Jackson trial. In between, we learned of
celebrity scandals and breakups, television
ratings, and opening weekend grosses for
movies.

Recently, in the midst of all this, came
two new studies on the effects of climate

April 6/2005

change. They barely made a blip on the
media radar, but their implications are
quite profound. According to these new
studies, even if we stopped burning oil,
coal and other fossil fuels immediately, the
built-up emissions in the atmosphere
rom our activities will continue to cause
temperatures to climb, and sea levels to
rise, for at least the next hundred years.

The studies, conducted by the US
National Center for Atmospheric
Research, looked at a problem that had
never before been quantified—the
delayed response of the oceans to climate
change. Water heats up more slowly than
land and also cools down more slowly.
This “thermal inertia” means that warm-
ing oceans will keep putting out heat long
after we’ve reduced or even stopped
pumping heat-trapping emissions into the
atmosphere.

A second concern with the oceans is
“thermal expansion.” When water is heat-
ed, it expands. Researchers estimate that
thermal expansion alone will result in a
global sea-level rise of about ten centime-
ters this century. Again, that’s even if we
stopped putting out heat-trapping emis-
sions today. This increase does not
include any additional water resulting
from melting glaciers and polar ice caps.
Had these factors been included, the
researchers say, sea level increases would
likely double.

So, climate change is happening now
and it will continue to happen for at least
100 years no matter what we do. Those

opposed to reducing the
heat-trapping emissions
that cause the problem
will undoubtedly
pounce on these studies
as “proof” that plans
like the Kyoto Protocol,
designed to reduce
emissions, ate useless
because the planet will
keep heating up anyway.
Such an attitude is
dangerous and misguid-
ed. The Kyoto Protocol
alone was never meant
to stop global warm- .
ing—just to get us started on the right
path that will enable us to shift to a clean-
energy that prevent
dangerous climate change. Choosing to

economy will
do nothing will put us on a path of con-
tinued rising emissions, which will make
the problem much, much worse.

Climate change, and big environmen-
tal problems in general, don’t fit into our
short-term flavour of the week (or day)
mindsets. Environmental problems often
occur gradually over time, building up like
slow-moving catastrophes. A changing cli-
mate, the gradual loss of ancient forests,
and the constant creep of species extinc-
tion have little shock value in the short
term. Certainly, long-term projections for
these issues, and even some medium-term
projections, are quite shocking, but we
seem unable to look ahead and plan for
the future.

 

Planning ahead pays off. When scien-
tists told us we were damaging the
atmosphete’s protective ozone layer with
harmful chemicals, the international com-
munity worked together to ban them.
That was over 15 years ago, and the ozone
layer still has not fully healed. In fact, it’s
taking longer than expected to recover—
but it is recovering.

Solving our environmental problems
will take time. It will take patience and
foresight. The longer we put off taking
action, the worse these problems will
become. Celebrity scandals and pop cul-
ture may be distracting and fun in the
short term, but the really important things
in life take a while. For the sake of our
future, we need to get started on them
now.
Take the Nature Challenge and learn
more at www.davidsuzuki.org

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