Green-Weenie Rage

I am a Green-Weenie - as one friend of mine sardonically calls environmentalists - and I look at everything through the lens of my environmental values. You would think that would be a good thing, but I'm not so sure.  I sometimes feel as if I am in a perpetual state of Green-Weenie rage.

Of course, living at Pacific Gardens, where those values are nurtured and encouraged, has only made it worse, and being a former hackette, it is the media coverage of the environment - or lack of it - that really gets me going.

For example, the CBC has been doing news items about the melting of the sea ice in Arctic - but only to extol the economic benefits of exploiting the oil and gas deposits now more readily available, the boon to the tourist industry, and the profits to be made from shorter shipping routes through the Northwest Passage.

Nothing about the release of methane from the melting permafrost, nothing about the destruction of the fragile ecosystems in the north, or the traditional way of life for the Inuit, or the effect the loss of ice will have on levels of global warming.

Then there's the deliberate refusal of the Globe and Mail and the CBC to cover the Green Party of Canada's national convention.  I could understand that happening when the Green Party had no MPS, but now that the leader of the party, Elizabeth May, has been elected, what is their excuse?

This year's convention, held in Sidney, B.C., had Ronald Wright, Massey lecturer and award-winning author, former prime minister Stéphane Dion, and independent MP Bruce Hyer, as speakers - all articulate Canadians with newsworthy ideas.

Is it too much to ask that our national media take the threat to our environment seriously, as do newspapers in the UK,  where I once lived?  Are the threats to the environment not going to affect us here in North America as much as in Europe? You would think so, looking at the way they cover what will be the major news story of this century.

And that makes this Green-Weenie angry.

Kathryn