B.C. voters on May 14: Think of our planet & don’t choose a polluter
I urge all B.C. voters to think of the environment—consider climate change—when casting your vote in our May 14 provincial election.
The choice is easy: tankers and toxins, or conservation and care for the planet. If you vote for a Liberal or Progressive Conservative candidate, no matter where you live, you’ll support more liquid natural gas facilities, pipelines, fracking, and oil tankers on our beautiful coast. These practices not only exploit our limited resources and pollute our land and waterways, they add higher and higher levels of greenhouse gases to our atmosphere, helping to speed up our already disturbing rate of climate change and sea-level rise.
I’m not going to tell you to vote NDP or Green. Just don’t vote for a Liberal or Conservative or you’ll prop up polluters and those who refuse to heed the peak-oil warnings. We’re going to run out of oil. We cannot continue on our current economic paths without destroying ourselves.
In the Ecuadorean Amazon, logging and oil and gas companies continue to destroy the rainforest at twice the rate of all previous estimates. Every day, more species are going extinct. In British Columbia, where our rainforests have more species diversity per square kilometre than even in the Amazon, we do not want to become Ecuador of the north. We are home to the last intact coastal temperate rainforest in the world. Are we going to protect it or let industry make it disappear?
Having recently seen Rob Stewart’s wonderful documentary Revolution, which addresses environmental degradation in 15 countries, I feel strangely optimistic about our future. Although his movie highlights the dangers of ocean acidification, and how our lack of eco-awareness is causing food and water shortages, he reveals many youth activists from around the world who are passionate about saving our planet and changing how we grow food, live, and fish.
As long as enough people care about the earth, and are willing to take action to save it, we can have hope. As long as enough people vote tomorrow for those who want to preserve British Columbia’s land and waters rather than exploit them for profit, we can have hope. On May 14, vote to sustain the natural life of this province and our planet. You can’t separate the two.