One trend I’ve noticed in my thinking over the past year or two is that I have increasingly found myself agitated over the environment and governmental policies regarding it (amongst many other topics of which I will not talk about today). As a natural result, I have found myself elevating environmental stewardship to a major issue for myself, and I hope that my peers are seeing things the same way. I live in Ontario, where my premier and his party are enacting what I believe to be short sighted policies that ignore the necessity to protect our planet, not to mention attempting to blatantly enforce anti-environmentalist propaganda. To my south is the United States, who’s leader is… foolish, and who came to power at least in some part by promising to revive the coal industry. In my eyes, to deny that climate change is happening, to refuse to act in the interests of our Earth and all the life on it including our own, is an attack on our collective future.
Ultimately, it is incredibly hard to voice my frustrations with the provincial government I have. With their majority government, it is difficult to hold them accountable for the actions the perform. With a politically inactive populace, people don’t even care to hold them accountable. I must concede here that, even three or four years ago, environmental concerns were not the highest on my radar, and indeed the factors that have contributed to this fact may also plague others. In the past, I understood climate change to be an absolute truth, perhaps even an axiomatic fact of the way we as a species have changed the world. I did not question that others may not hold the same views. This naivete fostered my indifference towards climate change (perhaps this is paradoxical).
Given climate change as an inalienable truth, it must logically entail that efforts to combat it will happen right?
What I did not realize was the extant to which climate change denial exists, exemplified by the likes of Donald Trump and Doug Ford. These are characters that past me could only imagine as caricatures and farces of leaders. My dismay when Trump was elected was I’m sure felt by millions, repeated again when Ford gained power at Queen’s Park. These leaders have chosen to repeal regulations that would protect our environment and ultimately our children, and all of the sudden, the efforts to combat climate change that I had taken for granted truly was a fight that needed fighting for. Compound this with the numerous reports of how we are rapidly approaching the threshold for irreversible climate change, the increasing global multilateral agreements to cooperate on climate, and one begins to realize the severity of the situation we are in.