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Tangled Up in Green

My goodness, but that was a long post on David Suzuki! Kudos to you if you made it through all that goo… (It was very good goo).

When did I get so green? Thanks to good luck in the marriage lottery, I have been exposed to many of the best thinkers on ecology and sustainability. Environmental issues do get me wound up, and it’s not just a function of their size and potentially catastrophic impacts. It’s also because climate change, perhaps more than any single issue other than nuclear war – or an invasion by ugly, laser-toting aliens with attitudes – speaks to what I have become convinced is the central challenge of the modern age.

It’s about UNITY, smarty! We are ever more conscious of the singularity of the planet we call home, and of the oneness of the human race. This seems to be the way of it: if we don’t move toward unity voluntarily, then the spirit of the age kicks us upside the head. So if there’s a silver lining to the threat of cataclysmic climate change, it’s this: it’s a problem we can solve only by united action. All the people. All the governments. All the time. “So powerful is the light of unity that it can illuminate the whole earth.” That was Mírza Husayn ‘Ali, in the 19th century. I’m listening. We’re learning, but my God it’s slow!

And because you’ve been so patient, and because I went on so yesterday, that’s all I have to say about that. Now we’re even. (You’re welcome!)

Through a Skier’s Eyes: Global Warming

There’s a good story in The Toronto Star today about the point where the ski wax hits the snow. Or doesn’t, as it happens…

Two of Canada’s best winter athletes, the alpine skier Thomas Grandi and his Olympic silver-medallist wife, cross-country star Sara Renner, have outed themselves. They are environmentalists. They have a broad social consciousness that may have been pricked by their chosen sports, but which extends far beyond the winter playground to a greater concern for the way we live, especially in the wealthy Western hemisphere.

Grandi’s World Cup season is in jeopardy because of a lack of snow. Snow-making (and preserving) equipment is now critical to international meets, though it was rarely needed two decades ago. Many of the world’s top cross-country ski teams train together now because there are so few places with reliable snow cover. Renner skied through a driving rain at a meet well above the Arctic circle in Finland this year. The United Nations even proclaimed it a few years ago: skiers may be an endangered species.

What’s encouraging about Renner and Grandi is that they see beyond their sport. Athletes are young and they are focused. Elite competitors often live narrow and self-interested lives, and may be required to do so by coaches and associations that insist on Olympian levels of concentration as a prerequisite to success. But here’s the thing: especially for athletes in the well-paid professional ranks, how do they fill the other 18-20 hours a day beyond their training and competition? How much X-Box can they reasonably be expected to play?

No problem for these Canadian stars. They’ve seen An Inconvenient Truth. Not only do they know who David Suzuki is, they’re working with him on a public- awareness campaign on greenhouse gases and climate change. Their sport, and the industry and municipalities that support it are threatened. But for Thomas Grandi and Sara Renner, it’s not just about sport, either. They work hard – biking, cutting household energy use, buying sustainably – to reduce their own environmental footprints, and they even purchase carbon credits to offset the greenhouse gases produced when they must fly or drive. It’s everybody’s air; it’s everybody’s water, they say.

Bully for them for saying it, and for walking their talk. Now, when Sidney Crosby starts to express public concern for the increasing difficulty in building an outdoor rink, or when LeBron James begins to buy back the carbon offsets for his basketball road trips, we’ll know that the jock world is waking up to smell the global warning. (It’s about Climate Change, smarty!)