Recently, on my neglected cycling website, someone commented on a story about my climbs in the Rocky Mountains. It included a footnote lamenting the rapid decline of the Columbia Icefield’s glaciers and fingered Alberta’s tar sands industry as contributor to their demise. They wanted to tell me that “glaciers have always been melting,” while repeating the usual industry talking points (see above).

I caught myself rebutting the argument, as I’ve done a thousand times — once on that very page, 9-years-ago. Then, I simply deleted the comment. I’m done engaging with these morally corrupt industry shills. A bit of sleuthing on my part soon confirmed the suspicion that my tormentor was indeed a cog in the machine ripping apart Alberta’s boreal forest.

In Earth Day posts past I’ve told of my friendship with Canadian scientist Digby McLaren. In 1992, McLaren was one of 1,700 signatories to the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity (PDF), calling on world leaders to avert our “collision course” with the limits of the natural world. McLaren spent his last years trying to alert the world to the interrelated environmental threats caused by overpopulation, profligate resource exploitation and climate disruption.

My last conversation with him was gloomy. He was not hopeful that we could turn things around, not in small part because there were people spending millions to confuse the issue. He pointed a finger at the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute, one of whose lead propagandists I’d interviewed months before while writing a series of magazine articles on global warming and the oil industry.

In her April 16 address to the European Parliament committee on environment in Strasbourg, 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg blamed our apathy towards the unfolding climate catastrophe on poor reporting, but, she added, “more importantly, [we] have not been told by the right people, in the right way.” In other words, the wrong people have won the “messaging” war.

Artist’s view of a sacrifice to Moloch in Bible Pictures with brief descriptions by Charles Foster, 1897

Around the world, including right here in British Columbia, where former Fraser Institute operatives hold key government portfolios influencing energy decisions,* wrong people threaten the security of present and future generations.

The capital of the province has, over the years (when time was already of the essence) supported a host of deniers, including the Times Colonist’s pet prevaricator Tim Ball and former columnist Paul MacRae (with whom I do battle in comments here). MacRae has now secured a post shaping young minds at the University of Victoria.

Despite hundreds of hours dedicated to countering such industry-sponsored wretches, I’ve lately found myself surrendering to despair.

Then Greta came along.

It’s impossible (for those with empathy) to ignore her grief, her sense of loss and her anger at those willing to sacrifice the sacred beauty of the natural world, not to mention our children, at the alter of Moloch. It is the same wilful destruction that my wife (who grew up amongst Africa’s wonders) and I mourn.

The voices of wise elders have been ignored or subverted. Tragically, Digby McLaren died knowing his message and that of his peers had fallen on deaf ears. David Attenborough, a friend of my wife’s family who was aided by her father, Theo Jones, in developing his original Zoo Quest series, hosts the ongoing NetFlix special Our Planet. It is at once a cinematic homage to, well, our planet, and a warning of what we stand to lose and what we have, in fact, already lost.

No Tar Sands No Tankers, Victoria, 2012

To be kind, the only explanation for the election of people like Jason Kenney is that voters have allowed the wrong people to drive the narrative … which explains why, the morning after the Alberta election, Global News hosted pundits, as they are generously called, linking rising gas prices at home to the lack of pipelines and tankers transporting Alberta’s dirty oil to Asia.

My despair stems as much from exhaustion as a feeling that my generation have failed to defeat well-funded deniers and their enablers in the media and to redirect society’s energies and financial subsidies away from fossil fuels to sustainable development.

I’m not given to prayer — results require action — but on this Earth Day dedicated to the preservation of species, my wife and I hope against all odds that the children will save the planet.

*Notably, the replacement of the previous unapologetic business-friendly administration with a putative left/green alliance has not altered such cosy internal arrangements in the least.