Twenty Years

I will be 27 years old this year, so perhaps my scope is a bit small, but when I think about the passing of twenty years it seems to me to be a long time. A lot can happen in a day, much less a year; and being only 26 years old, I’m well aware that much has changed in my lifetime. Twenty years, in terms of our planet, is a drop in the bucket; but in terms of the way we humans change our world, and change the way we interact with it and with each other, twenty years holds an awful lot of change. Or does it?

Reading a book from 1990, I came across a section on “The Ecological Crisis.” I was continually surprised to find the dates of references to be no later than 1990, because they read like today’s newspaper. Twenty years ago, we faced the same ecological issues we face today, including climate change, water and air pollution, threats from non-native species that lack predators in their new environments, overflowing landfills, and the extinction of as many as two dozen species per day, to name but a few. We’ve come so far since then in technology, human rights, health, and many other areas; why hasn’t the headline changed for ecology?

That’s not to say that we’ve done nothing. In 1990, when I was six years old, there were only two ecological problems that I was aware of: acid rain, and the hole in the ozone layer. Both of those issues have, to some extent, been solved by new technology. But what hasn’t changed at all was the real cause of those issues: human consumption of fossil fuels, and the over-use of chemicals. Since 1990 our culture has changed dramatically, our access to information has never been better, and our connectivity to one another and the rest of the world is almost beyond belief – yet when it comes to the environment, we’ve merely replaced one chemical with another rather than change our behaviour. And these are for our environmental successes: there remain the issues of deforestation, destructive mining practices, extinction of species, and of course climate change, that we’ve hardly begun to address.

Since 1990 we have seen some improvements in the way we think: attitudes about things like recycling and smoking have changed dramatically. Green has become chic. But attitudes and actions do not always go together, and if we want to live responsibly in this world, they must. I don’t expect human behaviour to change as quickly as technology, or even as quickly as attitudes; meaningful trends take longer to develop than fashion or technology. But what if we didn’t wait for the trend to develop, and instead were intentional about making a change, as individuals, as communities, and as a nation? If we set our minds to it, there doesn’t seem to be much that we can’t accomplish in a very short time. Let’s make the next 20 years count.

Jeff Wheeldon