An environmental email list became more public than intended after Salmon Arm’s mayor rebuked the writer.
Jim Cooperman, president of Shuswap Environmental Action Society, posted on the SEAS list on June 22 a comment above an unrelated article he was sharing with area environmentalists. The mayor and a few reporters are also on the list.
It said: “Had enough rain yet? Do you see the irony of climate change fuelled floods in the “Oilberta” city full of Canada’s climate change deniers and wealthy oil soaked climate change causers?!”
Writing as Salmon Arm’s mayor, Nancy Cooper chastised him, saying she was shocked and dismayed by his response to a disaster.
“You express no concern at all for the people and what they are going through. Is that what you are really like?”
She closed by saying she had cc’d her comment to the Observer “and if I read something like this in your article (Cooperman writes a column in the Shuswap Market News) I will write a very strong response in reply to it.”
Her comment generated a number of replies on the SEAS list – many urging political leadership around climate change – as well as coverage by CBC Radio and a couple of newspapers.
Wrote Greig Crockett: “Jim might have expressed more sensitivity toward innocent individuals. But his exasperation upon recognizing how lack of action by Alberta’s political-petroleum complex exacerbated a natural phenomen goes to the equally valid expectations of political integrity and accountability. Had the climate change and 2006 Flood Mitigation Report deniers responded appropriately to the warnings, the Alberta Flood might have been reduced from disaster to spectacle. Jim’s demonstrated sympathy for individuals, communities, society, and planetary species, through years of environmental education, deserves applause.”
Cooper asked to be taken off the email list. She told the Observer people could copy her on constructive conversations, but she’s not interested in rants. She said she wants to learn more about climate change.
“I don’t disbelieve there is climate change, I need to learn more about it. I have to learn from the professionals.”
Cooper said she was pleasantly surprised when four people on the email list gave her a hug at an evening event.
“Isn’t the Shuswap great?” she laughed.
Cooperman told the Observer he would not have used those comments to the public, but the list is for environmentalists – and others are there as observers. He said the focus is brevity and he tries to use a little humour. He added: “It’s getting very frustrating for environmentalists because we’ve been warning people for decades and now we’re reduced to saying, ‘I told you so.’”
