President Obama recently designated a national monument in the San Juan Islands, proclaiming the archipelago “a refuge of scientific and historic treasures and a classroom for generations of Americans.”
Unfortunately, like our own Salish Sea National Marine Conservation Area off Victoria and Vancouver, neither national designation protects the fragile marine environment from oil tanker spills.
Few can imagine, metaphorically speaking, permitting the routing of the likes of the Exxon Valdez through other national treasures like Yosemite, Yellowstone or Banff national parks, so why do so in our shared waters?
Surely the Creator must have indeed been either emotionally distant or scientifically asleep at the helm when creating this beautiful blue planet, not realizing that the soon-to-be dominant human species would so grossly discriminate against (even turn to acid) all the great seas.
That is, unless we were made to never evolve to shed our ancestral gills, climbing the beach to the land.
The planet’s oceans would have fared better if the great whales had received the opposable thumbs and we the blow hole.
Prime Minister Harper, Obama and our soon-to-be new premier have the power, and hopefully a Darwinian prescience of intellect, to realize what now truly needs to be done to save us all, before we all end up a thin fossilized layer in future oily shale.
Ignore the money-and-oil-addicted collapsitarians: kill the tankers, not the seas.
Howard Breen
Victoria
