I feel a great connection to the University of Toronto and it is an honor to be asked to contribute a few thoughts to The Varsity’s Green Issue. There are some who might consider me a questionable choice to dispense advice but let me say in my own defense, my children have turned out amazingly well, and I take much of the credit for being a perfect example… of what not to do.

I am a sun lover. Perhaps this sentence is too mildly put. I am a sun worshipper. Maybe I should have been an Aztec. I could see making the sun my deity. So it seems odd that I would make the long trek from my home in Hawaii to court the cold of Toronto. But I love this town and I have a play that I have written with my friend Frankie to be performed at the Hart House in April. The play is called Bullet for Adolf. It’s a comedy. But this isn’t an article about the play, so I can’t rationalize promoting it anymore than I already have.

Hollywood always seems to be in the business of selling and I loathe the type of actor who can’t talk without promoting something. So enough about Bullet for Adolf (which opens April 21 and is hysterical). Directing a play is hard work. It leaves no room for leisure. I’m a good worker, a hard worker, but a world-class slacker and vacationer. Some people are born lazy and just kind of stay stuck there. I like to think I take lazy to new heights. So to compromise my leisure and the warm embrace of family and friends to suffer the cold…for a while I thought I had betrayed myself. The actors and crew are superior in ability but the weight of the production has been bearing down on me and I’ve been feeling the clock ticking toward the inevitable moment the fine folks of Toronto will be watching this play.

The weight of it all would have crushed a lesser man but in spite of my slouch, there is a little back bone in there, and I am bearing up. I have to admit, it’s weird living alone. I can’t seem to look after myself. I let the dishes stack up so high in the sink I had a genuine fear of them toppling. Still that didn’t motivate me to clean them. My clothes were strewn all over the place. Bottles, various paraphernalia, food, DVDs, magazines, etc. covered the floor. I was suffocating in my own debris. You know that experience when you open your fridge and you smell something that ain’t right? But you are in a hurry so you get what you need and move on. Then you come back to the fridge next day… oh it’s worse. But you are in a hurry. A week goes by. The smell intensifies, rivaling your ability to bear it. But I’m a hard case. Finally my assistant Kate took pity on me and offered to do a cleanup. I nearly wept with gratitude.

Anyway, this is the Green Issue of The Varsity and I don’t want to be accused of frittering away space in this esteemed periodical on unessential issues.

When I was eleven, I saw a documentary about ants in school (I know, bear with me, a point will be made). And with that supple gift of compassion that children have, by the time that doc was done, I loved ants. Well in Houston, Texas, you’ve got some serious anthills. One such anthill existed on the path from the school to the bus. This ant bed went three feet up a telephone pole. It was enormous, an inspiring work of ant architecture. So it was really fun for kids to stomp on that anthill as they walked past. I had done it many times myself. When school finished on the day I fell in love with ants, I was the first kid out the door. I ran down the path and stationed myself in front of those ants. And any kid who tried to step on that ant bed, had to face me. I got into three fights that day. And every day after was the same. I had become an activist.

My next foray into eco-consciousness occurred the very next year in the seventh grade when the teacher gave students a chance to improve their grade by writing a paper, subject of their choice. The paper was to be no more than five pages. Six pages wouldn’t better your standing. I chose to study the extinction of wildlife and wrote fifty pages. I was fascinated by the topic. I started thinking about the impact of man’s activity on nature. I began to realize that we are in the middle of a mass extinction, and we are the cause of it.

I was joking with my friend Jessie the other day and asked her why she thought America, which never seems to weary of war, had never attacked Canada. She responded “Well you have access to all our resources, no need for war.” And in that single sentence she summed up what is most wrong with my country. I like to think that people make the distinction between America the people and America the body politic. I don’t want to seem unpatriotic when I talk about my country. I love my country. But I don’t love my government. And let’s face it, with very little exception it can be confidently stated that politicians are businessmen working for bigger businessmen. And our interest in war is not to make the world safe for Democracy but to make it safe for Capitalism. All our wars are fought for resources or strategic positioning (you notice we don’t liberate Rwanda or Burma). In our present wars, our longest running wars, there was the pretence of weapons of mass destruction. For some other country to be using WMD’s, well it’s downright un-American.

In Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, our bombing campaign killed two and a half million people, mostly innocent civilians. Women and children constitute the majority of those killed in every war, the present ones being no exception. Our stated aim in Vietnam was to stop the spread of communism. Perhaps that is noble, though one has to scratch one’s head at a form of government that considers justifiable the murder of millions of innocents in order to bring the loving light of democracy into what’s left of their country and villages.

But I am going on about war when I should be talking about environmentalism.

You see, to me, the topics are inseparable. Because we are fighting those wars now for oil. If either of the recent environmental disasters – oil spill in the Gulf, nuclear reactors exploding in Japan, have taught us anything, it should be that we as a society need to release our grip on those industries that provide our energy. Or perhaps more aptly put, we need to release their stranglehold on us. Specifically oil, coal, and nukes.

As a kid I always looked forward to going to Galveston, the beach on the Gulf of Mexico. And frequently we would see hundreds of jelly fish washed up on the beach. They were there because of oil spills. As kids we just accepted that we weren’t allowed to swim, that was the way it was and we had fun running up and down the beach poking the jellyfish with sticks. When I was a kid, everything was play and I didn’t think about the atrociousness of the pollution caused by those oil companies. I didn’t think there was any alternative. But I’m an adult now (physically anyway) and I recognize that alternatives abound and that these oil companies are raping and polluting this earth on a daily basis, while our politicians grant billions of dollars in direct subsidies and billions more in tax breaks.

In fact, these industries that treat Mother Nature as a commodity; coal, oil, timber, mining, etc. constitute what I affectionately call “The Beast.” The Beast is the life-blood of our economy and is granted 600 billion dollars a year worldwide in subsidies to clear cut our forests, blow the tops off our mountains, pollute our oceans and rivers and skies and poison our food and drinking water. The Beast is the marionette behind our puppet politicians who send our young men and women off to fight for oil. Or in the case of Vietnam, where they told us it was about stopping the Red Menace, the Pentagon papers revealed great interest in rubber and tin. If we have learned anything from these recent disasters it is that we need to move toward what is sustainable.

But let’s bring our focus a little closer to home. In this country you could point to a number of pressing issues. The clear-cutting of beautiful BC forest, soldiers sent to fight an oil war, etc. But to me the most pressing situation is happening in Northern Alberta in a place they call the Tar Sands. This once beautiful, pristine, and majestic area has the misfortune of containing an enormous amount of oil and oil is, after all, the lifeblood of The Beast. It is now a disgusting, brutal monument to the industrial age, with smoke stacks, infrastructure, and thousands of trucks and traffic attending to the all-important business of making money. Presently it can claim the dubious distinction of being the chief supplier of oil to the US. It supplies one million barrels of oil a day. But for every barrel of oil extracted, three barrels of water are destroyed, so they are destroying three million barrels of water per day (and, by destroying I mean polluted beyond redemption.) The Tar Sands have also destroyed an area of Boreal forest the size of Greece and the plan is to expand this operation to four or five times its present size. There is a terrific documentary on this subject called Water On The Table following the efforts of Maude Barlow to stop this madness by declaring water a human right. This may seem obvious but, in a recent Free Trade agreement it was established that water is a tradable product. To quote Maude Barlow,

“There’s a mighty struggle taking place in the world between those who see water as a commodity, to put on the open market like running shoes or Coca Cola and sold to the highest bidder and those, on the other hand, who say no it’s a part of our common heritage, it’s a public trust, it belongs to other species and it belongs to future generations as much as it belongs to this one.”

Oil wars were predicted long ago. And if anything they were anticipated by the Carter Doctrine, which asserts that any interference with US oil interests in the Middle East be met with force. It is a near certainty that the most significant resource will soon be fresh water. Canada is home to three quarters of the world’s fresh water supply so I can only assume that unless water becomes a human right, any resistance by Canada to US oil/water needs might one day result in our invading Canada. I say this in jest but…

I’ve had an electric car for fifteen years; I’ve had a Volkswagen bug running off Biodiesel for twelve years. I live in a neighborhood where all the homes run off solar power. It’s not some far-fetched dream. You might say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. Hang on, I think I’ve heard that before. Many would argue that these things are not practical and are certainly not accessible to the average income bracket. But if you took the billions of dollars in subsidy or even just the tax breaks that they give to the other energy industries and applied them to alternative industries, everybody could live this way. These industries must change. They are dinosaurs walking the earth dominating every aspect of our economy and society. They are that bad smell in the fridge. So I can only hope we do everything in our power to bring about their extinction. It’s either them or us.

I don’t know if many people open their newspaper looking for a long rambling diatribe, but if you finished this article, I guess you’re out there, and God bless you. Anyway, I’ll sign off now, see you around campus.