LETTER

Editorial on the planet and individual roles 

Having read Lily Ryan’s editorial thrice now, I am still confused as to the point she is trying to make, as well as to the wording used in support.

To begin, the content.  I gather she claims that “small, individual acts” have no bearing on the damage inflicted on the environment and that we should focus on the big polluters. So, based on that, should we infer that our North-American way of life has nothing to do with the situation we’re currently faced with? That seems short-sighted. 

The editorial sounds like a free pass to pursue our energy-demanding habits, such as driving our cars everywhere or consuming goods we don’t need. It seems obvious to some of us that these individual actions, in aggregate, are the reason why the US and Canada are some of the worst polluters per capita. By minimizing the impact of our daily actions on the environment, the author instead appears to put the blame essentially on the so-called “big polluters”. Fellow citizens, keep your gas-guzzling SUVs going, just blame it on the “big polluters”! 

 

And the argument that a party’s name (Conservatives) should reflect its attitude towards a problem (i.e. the environment) is not a well-founded argument. If the Conservatives truly want to ‘conserve’ the environment, as she says, they should start by walking the talk. What the likes of Ford, Scheer, etc. are actually doing is the opposite. 

Finally, with regard to form, several sentences of this editorial make me question whether the text was even edited. For example, the author states that “the NDP may have the toughest crowd to convince considering their fear of losing jobs”: Whose fear? Who is “their” here?  Moreover, many vague terms used would have been worth unpacking. For example, who are the “world’s major climate influencers”? And what about the so-called “big polluters”? Who are we referring to?

Martin Pelchat

Aylmer