Re: Rain

["Macdonald Stainsby" <mstainsby@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> Environmentalism is as big in Canada as anywhere else in the world,
but
> is way behind Europe in terms of achieving political power. That's
> because the Canadian economy, unlike that of the EU, is heavily
> dependent on resource extraction and export. The barrier to
> environmentalist political power in Canada, which is less tangible
in
> Europe, is purely economic.

Bullocks, absolute. The population is not (even in coffee shops or
during chit chats on campuses) clamouring right now about which party
has a decent platform- let alone the best- on environmental issues. A
federal election, new evidence that Global Warming has started to
destroy parts of the very country, and yet it still is not an
electoral issue. That's the size of the Green movement here. The
tragedy is that people here believe that the "surplus" of undisturbed
land and space allows Canadians to wait longer before worrying about
such issues. The most common refrain I used to hear as a door knocker
for a pathetically mild environmental group was that "if we were in
Europe, yeah sure, but this is Canada. We have nothing BUT (insert
resource here)".

The environmental movements in Canada seem larger because their
visibilty is stronger, and the fights in the old-growth forests are
well covered. But their size, unfortunately, is not that remarkable.
Just much more visible (no one gets really powerful video clips when
environmentalists protest GMOs in England, for example).

Macdonald