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Happy International …Day

July 29, 2021   ·   0 Comments

CONSTANCE SCRAFIELD
WITH YOUR PERMISSION

According to the Fergus Highland Games website, declaring the festival a digital event again this year, anyway: Tuesday this week was Happy International Scotch Whiskey Day. Sorry if I’m late with this news but I hope you imbibed, if only by coincidence.

So, I thought about the proliferation of Happy International Something Days and wanted to offer a few of my own.

How about Happy Stop Building Pipelines Day? They are still being built everywhere. The waffling and unpredictable American governments – both federally and in each state – are variously cancelling and allowing pipelines to go through, like a bunch of scatter-brained kids, playing street games. Millions of dollars down the drain of partly or largely built pipelines; millions of dollars poured into finishing (or maybe not when authorities changed their minds) pipelines elsewhere.

Still, the Canadian government purchased the Trans Mountain pipeline for $4.5 Billion, so, it for sure will press on to have the thing finished all the way to the Pacific Ocean. I have wondered how much the material going into constructing this (eventually) dirty and dangerous pipeline could be sold for scrap.

There is a tender little note in the “Trans Mountain” website where they wax on about their diligence in protecting the wildlife where the pipeline is being laid. Inspectors, environmentalists inspect and note the activity of the birds and point to the nesting places of certain hummingbirds and song birds, through the research done by those experts, on what they are pleased to call the “Pipeline Environmental Protection Plan (EPP).”

Positively an oxymoron.

Says the site: “If a nest is observed, appropriate buffers around the nests are marked and roped off until the bird has left the nest.”

Lots of words mark the passages about how they work with the Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) to protect wildlife, with particular attention to the safety of birds. Makes you all warm and tingly, doesn’t it? However, in spite of the pretense of safe passage for Western Canada’s wildlife, pipelines inevitably leak or burst and no amount of safety checks ever guarantees they will not. What about the wildlife and environment then – to the land and, even worse, to the water in lakes and oceans?

How about Happy Finally-Shut the G-D Tar-Sands-down-forever Day? Just stop shoving the sludge into those pipelines and really give the little birds a break. The birds, the land, our grandchildren, their air and water.

A bit too late, I’m afraid, but how about Happy Stop Burning the Amazon Forests Day? Why, really and truly, is Bolsonaro burning down the world’s “lungs”? Why would he intentionally be the last source to truly bring the world to ruination? And, why, oh why has the international community not actually stopped him from following this disastrous course?

All the calamities we have watched happen in “sovereign nations,” feeling – somehow – our hands were restrained from stopping a genocide, usually, or other serious misdemeanours governments were and are inflicting on their people but this killing off the Amazon forest – for what? Cattle? Bananas? Avocados, now a fad food?

It is not as though Bolsonaro does not understand the consequences. He does for sure. So, his motives are a deep mystery because it can’t only be about money and corruption.

Like Doug Ford selling off the green spaces and exposing our sensitive environment to danger, there must be a darker motive for such behaviour.

Our grandchildren – How about Happy Stop Surrounding the Earth with Space Junk, not to mention Space Junkies. Circling the planet at approximately 35,888 kilometres per hour is some 30,000 bits and pieces, each with serious destructive potential. Accidents do happen in that field of space garbage, causing debris to crash to earth or to disintegrate into fragments in space.

One day soon, according to many sources, it will be too dangerous to travel to space AT ALL, for fear of being hit by a morsel of a long dead satellite. The likes of Richard B and his competitor-for -attention, Jeff B, may well find themselves engaged in Battle with Galactic Junk during their next hop above the earth.

So much for plans for Mars or inter-planetary exploration: “We would have gone but there was too much space junk in the way and we blocked ourselves in.”

Hey! There is another excellent reason to stop the fossil fuels right now and clean up our sources of energy, poisonous agriculture, suicidal meat production, stop destroying our forests because we did our usual sloppy thing and cluttered our own outer space perimeters so badly, we stuck ourselves to stay on Earth!

How’s that for a joke? How’s that for behaviour coming back to bite us?

Greta, let’s push change with this in mind. They are not buying into “Care about us, your children.” I guess oil companies and the rest don’t care about their children but, within less time than it takes to finish building ships that could take us elsewhere, space will be blocked by our own dirty, lazy habits.

A neat bit of irony that is.


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