Last week, I was honoured to be invited to speak at AWARE’s “Party for the Planet.” Celebrating Earth Week and the 30th anniversary of our local environmental advocate with a silent auction fundraiser and some great beats from DJ Foxy Moron, a bigger reason for coming together was to acknowledge the need to continue and extend AWARE’s work on behalf of the environment.
I kicked off my talk with a story first recalled as comic anecdote, but which, in hindsight, had changed my life enough to find me now addressing a crowd on why it was important to speak up for the environment, why it was also important to speak up for science, and how to support these missions in Whistler.
Back in the late ’80s, my younger brother’s Grateful Dead tribute band asked if I’d speak at an Earth Day concert they were playing. Aa a doctoral student in zoology at the University of Toronto, I was clearly the only environment-adjacent person they knew. It wasn’t my area of expertise but I’d agreed, thinking I only had to deliver a few lines about frogs being canaries in the coalmine of consumerism in one of the dingy bars they typically played.
It turned out the gig was at Toronto city hall in front of 10,000 people. I got up on stage, and the crowd went quiet. Being Earth Day, folks doubtless anticipated some serious pitchforks-and-torches call to action—not the musings of a nerdy student focused on a molecules-and-microscopes study of chromosomes totally bereft of the kind of big-picture thinking expected. I don’t remember what I said, but it was something like “Earth good, industry bad,” and laced with the newly minted portmanteau “biodiversity” that had quickly attained buzzword status (that original cachet didn’t pan out in the long run, but that’s a whole different story).
People clapped a few times so I didn’t totally bomb. Nevertheless, I came away from that humbling experience with three lessons: First, people really wanted to understand the importance of the environment, how we’re connected to it, and what they could do to save it. Second, my arcane lab-based research needed more ecological context and big-picture thinking—a shift that would affect my scientific perspective to this day. Third, I needed to learn how to communicate all of this, which, to shorten a long, convoluted story that also involves a lot of skiing and moving to Whistler, is how I became a science-environment writer for whom every job clarifies why it’s important to speak up for the environment.
The answer is simple: the environment is everything. Nothing—not ourselves, not the much-lauded economy—exists without it. By way of example, I like to share the little-known fact that photosynthetic ocean plankton produce 50 to 70 per cent of Earth’s oxygen. Meaning that at least every second breath we take relies on a healthy ocean, from which, despite being land-dwellers, we have no more than one degree of separation.
When you consider our careless treatment of the ocean—warming, acidification, plastic pollution, overfishing etc.—it makes you wonder over our priorities as a species. And, of course, we know these things because of science. Being environmentally aware means being scientifically aware, such that speaking up for science is speaking up for the environment.
The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei once said: “Everything is art. Everything is politics.” It’s a great T-shirt slogan as is, but he could also have added “Everything is science.” Certainly, science plays a bigger role in our lives than people tend to recognize. The microphone I spoke through that night—physics; my shirt—materials science; the beer I was drinking—microbiology and biochemistry; the snowmaking that supported my skiing earlier that day—tons of science!
Beloved astronomer Carl Sagan liked to point out that science isn’t just a way to find out things but a way of thinking—a form of inquiry aimed at the universe. A learning conversation with the environment that literally defines humanity and its progress. In that sense we’re all scientists, forever asking questions that refine our world view. And when scientists change their mind, it’s not because they’re wrong, but because they’ve learned more. Science tells us what is—not what we want things to be. And that’s something that breeds diplomacy, counters division and enables democracy.
This last point is important with science currently under serious threat in America. Along with the demolition of human rights, international aid, health oversight, medical research and protected areas of all kinds, the greatest science agencies on Earth like NASA, NOAA, NSF and NIH—those most responsible for our understanding of the planet—are being recklessly dismantled, throwing a quarter of a million highly trained individuals out of work, most early career scientists like I was when I addressed that Earth Day rally in Toronto. I can’t imagine what would have happened to my life had I gone to my office one day back then and had someone say, “Oh, your grant has been rescinded—you have no salary, no research funds. You’re done.”
Unlike what the U.S. government would have you believe, this isn’t a search for “efficiencies.” It’s an attack on knowledge. Suppression of truth. The very face of fascism. I mentioned this in my AWARE talk because Canadians were going to the polls within 12 hours and we have two parties who would happily enact the same attacks on science and the environment here. In fact, the Conservative Party of Canada already did so under the government of Stephen Harper—muzzling scientists, cutting climate research, throwing data into dumpsters. Moreover, the need for such reminders was clear when, the next day, some eight million Canadians voted for them to do it all again, somehow unaware that an over-concern with money and crime (literally the only thing conservatives talked about at the Whistler all-candidates meeting—with a detour into sportfishing entitlement) fully abandons the environment and with it, every aspect of our shared future.
All of which devolved to a final point: why it’s important to act locally. Basically, because it’s how we can achieve the most direct results. And it all starts with voting. Whether for mayor and municipal council, a member of B.C.’s Legislative Assembly, or a representative to sit in federal Parliament, each occasion is a chance to vote for action on the environment. We’re lucky to have seen action from our current reps at all three government levels—and beyond lucky to have dodged the bullet-to-the-head of conservatism that would undo much of it.
Locally, there’s also abundant opportunity to have public input into municipal environment-related projects and policies. You can participate in things like community cleanups or become a rabidly good recycler who actually removes forever stickers from their fruit and vegetables and takes the frickin’ lids and caps off of bottles and jars. You can also get involved by volunteering or attending the events of local environmental organizations like AWARE, the Whistler Lakes Conservation Society, the Whistler Naturalists, the Fire & Ice GeoRegion Society and the Sea to Sky Invasive Species Council, to name a few. You can support local print journalism like Pique and Mountain Life that run environmental stories, get connected to the environment through local photography and films that tell environmental stories, or support events that do so (the recent talk by renowned wildlife photographer Paul Nicklen and current Ed Burtynsky “Coast Mountains” exhibition at the Audain Art Museum are excellent examples).
In the end, I might still be a nerdy scientist, but most of what I know about the local environment has come not from books, but from these organizations—something I hadn’t quite yet learned when I addressed that first Earth Day crowd.
Leslie Anthony is a biologist, writer and author of several popular books on environmental science.
