Thundering through Con Hall last Wednesday night was Stephen Lewis’s booming delivery of a lecture that opened minds to today’s key environmental and social issues.

Lewis’s keynote address for the Natural City 2006 conference plunged headlong into key issues like AIDS and Kyoto. His speech, which criticized the complacency of political leaders and the general public alike, was not without some pointed digs at the U.S.

As director of the Stephen Lewis Foundation, a charity for AIDS sufferers in Africa, Lewis focused his speech around the pandemic of HIV and its detrimental effect on urban slums and environment-friendly cities-dubbed natural cities-internationally. The Natural City Conference, hosted by the Centre for Environment, ended last Friday.

Lewis, who also holds influential positions in both the United Nations and the World Health Organization, described vivid wastelands of human life with a passion that visibly moved his audience.

“How we can possibly provide natural cities in the midst of these slums is something which is almost a Herculean challenge for the world,” he said.

In recognition of this year’s conference theme, successful natural cities in Canada, Lewis emphasized the possibility of natural cities in the midst of urban slums are exactly what the world needs to consider.

And the difficulties before this goal are many. Compounded with the miseries of HIV and poverty in the developing world, the hands-down “scariest development on the planet” for Lewis is the apocalyptic damage threatened-and already wreaked-by climate change.

“I don’t understand the indifference of the world to [climate change],” Lewis said to roaring applause. “I think the single greatest mistake the federal government has thus far made…is the rejection of the Kyoto accord.”

The price the world will pay in rising sea levels, shrinking glaciers, and global warming is for Lewis as threatening and horrendous as nuclear war, but without an ‘off’ switch.

“You have this tremendous thrust of urbanization,” Lewis said of the rising industrial growth of China and India, “without the capacity to put in place the novel urban requirements, let alone to seek the harmonious, almost spiritual, dimensions of natural cities.”