EARTHFUTURE by Guy Dauncey

There is something wonderfully zestful about most two-year-olds. For the first year of their life, they have been cuddled, indulged, loved, fed, washed, diapered and generally been the centre of their parents’ attention. Quite reasonably, they expect life to continue this way. This is the world of YES. There is only one rule, which says you get everything you want.

But then they enter the world of NO. Put that down! Stop hitting your brother! No, you can’t have those sweeties. I mean it! New rules are appearing everywhere.

The child’s instinctive response is to push back. Life was far better with just one rule, so let’s keep it that way. If the parents have their wits about them, they will resist. This might lead to some screaming, foot-stomping tantrums, but far better this than a child who grows up to believe it can get its own way without accepting the household rules. If you doubt any of this, watch Supernanny on TV. It is only when the child begins to accept the household rules that peace and sanity prevail.

Now think about us humans in our home, Planet Earth. For most of our evolutionary existence, we have behaved like one-year-olds. We wanted the fish? We just went out and grabbed them – the bigger the boat, the better. Want the forest? Clearcut away! Need topsoil for farming? Just roll out the tractors. Wetlands to drain for housing? Send in the engineers.

We’ve behaved like a one-year-old with our wastes, too. The ocean, the rivers, a hole in the ground, the atmosphere – who cares? Let Mama clean up the mess. That’s not our responsibility.

Things change, however – and now look at the mess we’re in. We’re still grabbing, pushing, and dumping our wastes, but there’s precious little left to grab. If everyone on Earth grabbed as much as we do here in the west wing, we’d need three additional planets.

Ninety per cent of the large fish in the ocean – the tuna, cod, sharks, marlin, swordfish, halibut – are gone, grabbed by humans in just the last 50 years, and the remaining 10 per cent are rapidly heading the same way. When will we stop demanding more fish? Will we wait until there is just one per cent left? What use will a tantrum be when there are none left at all?

The story is the same whether we look up to the atmosphere, down into the landfills or inwards to our own bodies. The average newborn baby has 230 toxic chemicals in its blood, 190 of which have been linked to cancer. On some primitive level, we still believe that Mama will give us a kiss, clean up the mess and make it all better again.

We’ve become terrible two-year-olds and we throw a tantrum each time we don’t get what we want because the old days were much better and we don’t want to submit to the household rules – the rules of ecology. The word “ecology comes from the Greek oikos (meaning “household” or “family”) and logos (“study” or “rationality”), meaning “rational household behaviour.”

Earth’s household rules – what could be more straightforward? Clean up your mess. Put things back where they belong. Share. Don’t grab what isn’t yours. Sit together at the dining table and talk.

We have political, corporate and religious leaders who don’t know what the carbon cycle is.

We have graduating MBA students who don’t know how an oldgrowth forest works. We have schoolteachers who don’t know how the pollution from pesticides and household cleaners enters their students’ bodies.

It is urgently necessary that we pause and learn Earth’s household rules.

Every would-be teacher, engineer, architect, CEO or candidate for public office should be obliged to take a mandatory ecoliteracy test and not be allowed to progress until they pass. We do it for driving because we accept that unsafe drivers are a public hazard. How much more of a hazard are our planetary leaders if they don’t know Earth’s household rules?

Guy Dauncey is president of the BC Sustainable Energy Association (www.bcsea.org) and author of Stormy Weather: 101 Solutions to Global Climate Change. www.earthfuture.com