B'rer Harper

From the comments and the far north, a letter from Katherine Cukier, who has, in her life had four parking tickets and an arrest for pointing out the obvious. More at the link and thanks to J Bowers for perking up Eli's ears. Oh yes, the image is for the weasel who thinks that things like mountain top removal leave the rest of the land peachy clean and anyhow if it screws up things for any of the bunnies, we can always sue. Here is a hint. These sort of things are owned by incorporated entities that are owned by conglomerates. When you sue and win the entities go bankrupt (they never really hold any money, but just pass it through) leaving the rest of us holding the bag.

Dear Prime Minister Stephen Harper,

I am writing to you because I want to thank you for clarifying some things for me. According to you, I am an extremist. I think it would be amusing and even useful for you to understand the heart and mind of an extremist like me. Indeed, I suspect the country you have been entrusted to govern is full of them... I mean us.

I was arrested last week for participating in a civil disobedience action in Ottawa. We were protesting your government's indifference to the dangers of climate change. This indifference is communicated clearly by your determination to expand the use of bitumen, the tar sands, a high emission, unconventional, fossil fuel.

To begin the clarification of my new identity, I guess I would say that I am an extremist first and foremost because I am a mother. My children are the centre of my world -- I suspect it is the one thing you and I have in common, other than our need for clean water, air and soil. You, too, know intimately that powerful parental love; it feels like an ache and a blessing at the same time. Like all maternal mammals, any threat to the habitat rouses my protective instincts.

And because I am a human being, I use my brain to understand those threats. Not only do I worry about my children and their future being impacted by global warming; I am forced to consider how my children's children will be affected by runaway climate change driven by our unabated and expanding use of fossil fuels. In 50 years, unlike you and me, our children, or at least our grandchildren, will feel powerless to do anything to protect their kids from the instability and economic consequences of a fragile if not collapsing environment.

I am an extremist, Mr. Prime Minister, because I have paid close attention to the science of climate change. The graphs prepared by climatologists fill me with far more emotion than those prepared for you by Syncrude. I suspect your reason is impaired in its capacity for sound judgment when you see graphs showing ever-increasing profit margins and GDP increases to be squeezed out of the Tar Sands. But because I am an extremist, unlike you, I have looked to those ideologically suspect fields of physics, geography and biology to further my understanding of the mechanisms and consequences of climate change.

Much more at the link....