To the editor;
One day a year, just one day, is set aside to think about this beautiful planet on which we live.
One day to champion the Earth’s natural wonders and remind ourselves what we can do to protect our home.
One day to consider what we can do, both as individuals and a society, to protect the natural world for our children and grandchildren.
One day, but it was too much to ask for an editorial coming out in favour of the environment. Instead, we got a fearful, poorly written and researched, backwards-thinking diatribe from columnist Tom Fletcher (‘Here are some inconvenient truths for Earth Day,’ April 22).
The inappropriate hubris of using “inconvenient truth” in the title of Fletcher’s editorial.
This is, of course, the title of the 2006 film about climate change by Al Gore, a visionary and courageous production that broke the silence on climate change.
Today, climate-change deniers are thankfully as few as Holocaust deniers, though arguably just as heartless, as thousands of people have died already from climate change-induced weather events — and millions more will perish.
Does Fletcher have big shares in Big Oil?
How else can one explain the argumentum ad antiquitam with which he begins his column?
“Vancouver should be an oil port because it has been an oil port for a long time.”
This logical fallacy would be laughed out of court, but it isn’t quite as funny appearing in print on Earth Day.
Next, “natural-oil seepage in oceans is the same as oil spills — or worse.”
So, the destroyed coastlines in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, the thousands of fisheries and tourist destinations destroyed by the Exxon and BP spills, the millions of oil-coated birds and animals resulting from a spill on the ocean surface — that’s the same as natural seepage?
Fletcher needs to spend more time on research before spilling this garbage.
It gets worse.
Fletcher guesses that many people used candles during Earth Hour, then postulates that all those burning candles are significantly contributing to greenhouse-gas emissions.
It would be funny if it weren’t such dangerous, fear-bound thinking.
He then goes on to pat the provincial government (and, in doing so, himself), on the back for the carbon tax.
The carbon tax may help. It isn’t enough. The planet is in danger. Climate change is a real threat.
The Alberta tar sands and the oil industry are causing out-of-control damage to our green home. Bees are disappearing. The oceans are full of plastic and acidifying.
Happy Earth Day.
Don’t be afraid to love this planet, to say so and to do what you can to protect it.
“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.” — George Orwell.
Katie Welch
Kamloops
