Listen to
the wisdom
of youth
sive attitude to protect our status quo. We used such
words on union organizers in the thirties and all it left us was an
embittered group that to this day have not forgotten the abuse of the
“hungry thirties.” And that embitterment has cost our system
dearly in these times. Think about it. I have been a logger all my life
and I have seen the abuses we put our own people to, and the abuses
we put our land to, all in the name of progress. But I do not believe
that these abuses in a sense of malice, but rather through ignorance.
Hindsight is easy and those that cannot or refuse to relegate the past
to where it rightfully belongs – to a betterment of the future
– will only hit their heads against stone walls.
....The educational and media levels of
our world today have given people the strength to stand up and be counted
for, for their ideas, where they would never have stood in the past.
A handful of men sailed on a fishboat to protest what they considered
to be wrong – the testing of a bomb that could wipe out mankind.
Critics were harsh on them – but my feeling is that, when and
if the next bomb is tested, there will be more than one fishboat and
a handful of men. There are rights and wrongs in this world –
and all the grey areas in between cannot accommodate everyone. Someone
must stand up and be counted if he believes.
....But the critics say – “yes,
but why do they go so far? Why don’t they do it in the democratic
way? Write to their member of parliament” How nice if this were
the way, but the critics
....The
issues grow. There is always a new issue, and environment is its name.
The issues are large like the building of a Moran Dam on the Fraser River
– or they can be small like the smoke from a furniture fac-tory,
or they can be irreparable like the housing developments being built on
our rich farmland deltas. They are becoming countless – the issues.
....These are the days that our forefathers
looked to as only a dream – the days of more leisure and the unbending
of backs from 16 hours of clearing a piece of land to live on. They wanted
these days for they said that their children would have schools and would
not have to slave like they did. They worked for it by using their tired
backs and their tired muscles. And it all became a reality. The schools,
the wars to protect what they called their way of life, and the cities
and the factories and a truly new world of automation and speed.
This was all done by men – the fathers and the forefathers before
them. They came from old countries that they were happy to leave –
from famines, from religious persecution, from wars and from hunger. They
had no time to look sideways at their world about them – they kept
their heads down and they worked. They were caught up in the middle of
a fast moving society that was out-building and out-inventing materials
that man himself could not keep pace with. Forty hour weeks, paid holidays,
unemployment insurance, more and higher schools, and as centuries have
rolled by, there is now time – time to think time to look around:
media that spreads information faster than it happens, and an awareness
by the young that it might just be time for stocktaking. The young find,
and bring out the issues – and there are many – for we traveled
fast on that empire building trip, and we muddied some waters.
....The energy of the young is today
questioning the empires built by those fathers and forefathers. They
question whether a toxic spray should be used to kill brush, or repel
a defoliating larvae. They question how much forest land should be cut
and how much should be left in its natural state. They question the
smokes, the waste discharges from mills, and they question our established
policies of fisheries versus forestry. And they use their energy. Not
unlike the energies that emerged when unions formed to protect the working
man. And not unlike the energies that youth used in two wars to give
Canada one of the world’s finest armies.
....So what is so strange or wrong about
this burst of energy? Certainly, to the minds of many older people,
it seems at times directed in strange ways. The sight of long-haired
people in strange clothing parading a street with banners proclaiming
an abuse of the environment is difficult for some to grasp. But isn’t
it better than a parade of youth in khaki heading off for a war to kill
other youths in other lands?
....This energy of the young is one of
the most valued possessions we as a people own. After two world wars
and a dizzying race into automation, is it any wonder that the young,
with more time to think at their disposal than any youth has ever known,
have suddenly called for a stocktaking? Is there a critic of this youth
that at some time in his daily rounds doesn’t curse traffic jams,
the noise of new skyscrapers being built, the lack of quality workmanship
in manufactured goods, the price of local lettuce from the delta farms,
or the wild and so called irresponsible strikes that plague us today?
Think about these things, Mister Critic.
....I am annoyed when I hear the words
“fraud” and “liar” used by the leaders of our
system in management or government against the environmen-talists. I
see no sense in taking a defen-