Faith Meets Life: Stephen Lewis - The last prophet

Like a prophet straight out of the pages of the Old Testament, Stephen Lewis speaks these days on the environment, railing against western governments for doing as little as possible. Last week I heard him at a fund raising dinner for the Nova Scotia Nature Trust in Halifax.

Lewis may be best known in Canada as the once leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party. Or he may be best known as Canada's former ambassador to the United Nations, while there he was the UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. Or perhaps you went to one of the high schools named after him.

Lewis has spoken internationally, and here in Canada too, about the great human cost of AIDS. He still speaks about the heroic efforts of women in southern Africa, grandmothers raising their grandchildren orphaned by HIV/AIDS. Last week he spewed fire and brimstone as he attacked the systematic raping of women that is now rampant in the war zones of the planet.

But most of his thunder was directed at the environmental crisis gripping our planet.

In Lewis's words, we are headed towards the “apocalypse,” an “Armageddon.” The polar ice caps are disappearing - not shrinking, but disappearing. Very fast. Climate change will wreak havoc especially in those countries living on the edge even now. Having visited Africa a number of times, he is particularly concerned for the millions of people living in places where the climate is already hostile to food production.

Such populations are almost doomed according to Lewis. So are island states where rising sea levels will require that all their citizens be evacuated. Before much more of the current century is spent, the news will be filled with images of environmental refugees, those with nowhere to go because their countries will have been ruined by flooding or drought.

What needs to be done? Quoting the author of Heat, George Monboit, Lewis supported the idea that carbon emissions must be reduced by 90 per cent by the year 2030. He praised Tim Flannery, author of The Weather Makers, and other writers sounding the alarm and working towards solutions.

But, given our track record for reducing carbon emissions to date, the chances of dealing with carbon output are nil. We must move totally beyond that dismal record.

Quote of the day: “My fear is not that people will stop talking about climate change. My fear is that they will talk us to Kingdom Come.”
(George Monboit on his web site www.turnuptheheat.org).

Meanwhile, south of the border, the new mantra is “drill baby, drill.” And, as someone wryly said, it is now accompanied by a new Alaskan call of the wild, “mine baby, mine.”

Canadians of course would never stoop to such environmental insensitivity. Living in the vast and beautiful stretches of grassland and northern sky, Albertans are rallying to fend off — no, forget it.

We Canadians will resist to the end the products coming out of China manufactured with cheap and dirty coal energy and we will work tirelessly to wean our Ontario manufacturing industry off its dependence on car sales. We will produce instead mass transit systems and solar energy. We will get out of the recession that is turning Ontario into a have-not province (is that some snickering we hear from certain folks in the West and the East?) by employing people to replace oil refineries with wind farms. Not, well, at least, not without a real change in thinking.

The biblical prophets were not a happy lot at times. They warned the ruling elites that crushing the poor was earning them the anger of God who had a special concern for the latter. Last week, speaking in Halifax, Lewis was brilliant, and very funny at times, but his message was deadly serious. Prophetic: Change Now, in the little time left. Radically.

If we don't, Stephen Lewis may be the last prophet we hear before we fry.

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