CHARLES TELLS IT STRAIGHT
Royalty and its often idle pursuits are not something I have been inclined to warm to. My view has long been that royalty doesn't fit any genuine democracy, and ought not to be revered by one.
Not that Canada is what you might call a total democracy, of course. For one thing, we have a Queen, a member of an historically non-democratic institution, though a modern-times "reformed" and "symbolic" one; for another, and completely aside from the question of royalty, we have in our country electoral laws that rarely produce democratic representation (a fact I have discussed in the past and will do again in the future, but not in this piece).
I am now forced to admit, however, that my jaundiced attitude toward monarchy has lately been tempered by a noteworthy entry into matters of the common good by Prince Charles. He has shown, as he has in past offerings, that he accepts a positive public role and will not shrink from delivering rather arresting, even non-establishment, opinions to the world.
And I would say he has earned special credit with his latest offering in acceptance of the position of president of the World Wildlife Fund-UK. He has been an environmentalist for a long time and has used his position of fame to further the goals of the WWF.
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IN HIS SPEECH TO THE WWF, HE USED some of the most dire words that have been heard by his members concerning human use of nature and its resources, even warning as possible the extinction of humanity if it doesn't change its ways.
Of special interest to Canadians was one sharp caution on global warming, and it's consequences for Canada's arctic, referring to the "terrifying" possibility of an ice-free Arctic Ocean. If it happens to the Arctic it will happen in the Antarctic, as well, he intimated, and we will have horrendous global warming.
Although that Arctic warning didn't, from what I've seen, draw particularly large space in the Canadian news media, the rest of his speech drew great attention and coverage internationally.
The UK's Guardian, for example, showed intense interest in the prince's "impassioned plea for humanity to safeguard the natural world for future generations." And the Daily Telegraph provided extensive coverage.
All media were taken, as they should have been, by Charles's claim that the world is already in the "sixth extinction event," faced as it is with global threats of climate change, rainforest destruction, widespread droughts and loss of fish stocks.
"History will not judge us," said Charles, "by how much economic growth we achieve in the immediate years ahead, nor by how much we expand material consumption, but by the legacy we leave for our children, grandchildren and their grandchildren.
"We are sacrificing what is rightfully theirs by sacrificing long-term progress on the altar of immediate satisfaction and convenience. That is hardly responsible behaviour."
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AFTER HEARING OR READING ABOUT the Prince of Wales's speech, how many of us are of the opinion that the world's industrialists and resource-extractors, and political leaders, will take more urgent action than they have, so far, to head off the environmental consequences of what is happening in the pursuit of consumption -- or over-consumption, mostly in the so-called First World?
Deep environmentalist concern has been sounded frequently for years about such things as:
-- The massive output of chemicals, and their entry into the environment, with lack of sufficient knowledge about their effects on humans and the environment, with not much political angst about it.
-- Control over and elimination of such toxic substances as plastics (to be found in almost every corner of the globe, and polluting the oceans by the millions if not billions of particles).
-- Still inadequate limits on carbon emissions.
-- Corporate resistance to environmental controls, and at times actual denial of any global warming, positions taken out of more concern for balance sheets than for the health and survival of humanity.
-- The weakening of the soil and the oceans as buffers against global warming, according to recent European studies.
-- Continued threats of lowering ozone levels. (Just wear lots of sunscreen, you say? Well, it ain't that simple, bub. For example: The U.S. department of Agriculture on Aug. 30, 2011, worried about a possible 10 per cent drop in soybean crops as a result of ozone reduction.
-- And then there's the longer-range environmental issue of what's to be done about safe storage of nuclear wastes from the worrisome expansion of the nuclear-power-generating industry.
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YET, IN SPITE OF THOSE PROBLEMS AND CONCERNS, we have great, greater and greatest threats to the environment, and to humanity's future, still confronting us.
Now, I'm not an expert on the environment, though I do try to keep track events and issues in that field. But I don't have to be an expert. Prince Charles is authoritative when he speaks of the environment, because he has been a champion of the need to clean it up for many years. He has, I have no doubt, studied it well, and has the best advice from some of the best experts there are.
I am therefore confident that the environmental facts are what Prince Charles says they are, and I'm not going to fault him for making his case in as dramatic a way as he wishes. My confidence, in fact, grows greater with the knowledge that another high-profile personage, UN secretary-general Ban Ki Moon, is on the same message. A couple of months ago he warned the UN Security Council that human-generated climate change, as one headline declared, "threatens world peace." He put it this way:
"Extreme weather events continue to grow more frequent and intense in rich and poor countries alike, not only devastating lives, but also infrastructure, institutions, and budgets -- an unholy brew which can create dangerous security vacuums." Thus, he found, concerted actions worldwide to counter climate change are vitally essential.
All of the above quite definitely makes me more environmentally concerned, and supportive of environmental-protection efforts, than I may have been in the past.
And I would like to add that I believe I will have to rethink my previous attitudes toward British Royalty (which is really Canadian royalty, too) -- and must offer thanks to Charles, Prince of Wales, for the work he is doing on the environment. He is a credit to that often-controversial institution known as royalty.
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