It is interesting to see how the news everywhere (not just in the Sooke News Mirror) is being slanted on the clearcut logging being done on Ender Ilkay’s properties near the Juan de Fuca Trail. The gist of it is: poor Ender had no choice but to clearcut. After all, a man has got to make a buck, or five-million bucks, as the case might be. Apparently “bucks” are still the not-to-be-questioned bottom line when decisions are being made in our world. Have we not arrived, in a screeching head-on collision sort of way, at a point of realization that it is folly to think that it doesn’t matter what we destroy (atmosphere, our health, fresh and ocean water, the lives of displaced and poisoned people, song birds, fish, animals, bees etc.) as long as money is being generated?
At the precise moment when the amount of carbon in our atmosphere has hit an all-time high of 400 ppm (while humans have inhabited the Earth, that is), we are still not questioning making profit at the expense of leveling our dwindling forests of carbon-sequestering, oxygen-producing trees.
Why are we so quick to blame “environmentalists” for the destruction of these lands? Like a three-year-old who piles his cone with one too many scoops of ice cream and when it topples to the ground yells at his onlooking sibling “now look what you made me do” there seems to be a blatant and ultimately destructive tendency to place blame elsewhere.
There are always choices that do not involve wreaking havoc. What about selective logging? Donating the land for a park for a large tax receipt? Or (gulp) taking responsibility and acknowledging that land speculation and trying to amass a grand fortune is dicey business, and not trying to offload the effects of your poor call onto the already pillaged planet?
Jo Phillips and George McFetridge
Sooke
