For environmentalists, Ojibway Shores 'needed to be saved'

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As Earth Day turns 50, COVID-19 offers valuable warning

DOUG SCHMIDT, WINDSOR STAR / Updated: April 22, 2020

Those battling environmental degradation and climate destabilization are pointing to the global community’s dramatic response to the novel coronavirus as offering valuable lessons on the way forward.

“The climate crisis is not stopping because of COVID and this pandemic,” said Citizens Environment Alliance co-ordinator Derek Coronado.

As Earth Day turns 50 on April 22, the air is cleaner, highways are less congested and animals in the wild are roaming more freely — just some of the positive collateral impact of the unprecedented measures implemented to combat COVID-19 that appear to be giving Mother Earth a bit of a breather.

But shutting down entire economies is unsustainable, and when the post-pandemic investing and the spending get reignited, so too will the carbon-fuelled challenges that existed before the world went into coronavirus lockdown.

“What we are experiencing now is just a little blip in emissions — our projections aren’t going to change because of a couple of months of reduced emissions,” said Karina Richters, the City of Windsor’s supervisor of environmental sustainability and climate change.

What COVID-19 has taught the world in a very painful way is “what can happen when you’re not prepared,” said Coronado. The novel coronavirus is a global health emergency, but so too is the environmental impact of accelerating climate change, he and others warn.

COVID-19 “really focused the mind on what a crisis can be and is,” said Coronado. Action on vital global challenges like climate change, he added, “is easier to do now than when we’re in full crisis mode and we have to act on the fly.”

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Earth Day — an annual celebration and call to political action and civic participation in support of environmental protection — had a modest local start.

The initial spark was literally that, when a welder’s torch accidentally ignited Detroit’s Rouge River on Oct. 9, 1969. According to U.S. federal officials, one industrial facility alone, Ford’s Rouge Plant, was discharging about 3,400 litres of oil per day into the river during the 1960s. The river fire begun at that location could merely be contained and had to burn itself out.

“There was not much media coverage. There was no national media coverage,” recalls Detroit Riverfront Conservancy board member John Hartig, a Michigan teen at the time.

“Most people accepted pollution and the river fire as part of the cost of doing business. We were an industrial town and industry provided decent paying jobs,” Hartig wrote in a guest column this month for Great Lakes Now on the last half century of Detroit River environmental activism.

But for some, including Hartig’s family, it was unacceptable. That year, the United Auto Workers formed the Downriver Anti-Pollution League, and on the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, boats loaded with autoworkers from both sides of the border met in the middle of the Detroit River and held a wake, “mourning the death of the Detroit River and Lake Erie,” according to Hartig. A floral wreath was tossed into the river but quickly retrieved from the toxic water.

What followed, wrote Hartig, was “an amazing set of accomplishments by people who spoke out for a clean environment in the place they call home.”

One of many key environmental victories that followed was the signing in 1972 of the U.S.-Canada Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, which has helped guide ongoing cleanup efforts. There is still much to be done, but, today, eagles and peregrine falcons, sturgeon, beavers and other wildlife have all made a local comeback.

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“There’s an enormous opportunity now to really ramp up the green economy,” said Coronado.

With so much disruption from COVID-19, he said people will need jobs and local municipalities will need senior government assistance in their recovery. For environmentalists, investing in green now is a win-win opportunity.

“Retrofitting buildings, retrofitting homes, renewable energy — that’s not work that can be shifted offshore, all that work has to be done locally,” said Coronado.

And Windsor has the blueprints ready for a greener recovery.

After declaring a local climate emergency in November, city council instructed administration to come up with concrete ideas, plans and timelines for action. Windsor was also one of the first Canadian cities to adopt a climate change action plan in 2012, and city hall has just completed the plan’s first update with prioritized projects.

Both reports were headed to city council in March when the COVID-19 derailed regular municipal business, with first the province and then Windsor and its neighbouring municipalities declaring states of emergency. Richters said a new date for presentation of the reports has yet to be set.

“Everything is now COVID, and it has to be, but there was real momentum, and we risk losing that,” said University of Windsor law professor Anneke Smit, co-founder of the Cities and Climate Action Forum. She said climate change and the dangers it represents if not addressed, like flooding and other extreme weather events that could become more frequent, must also be treated as an emergency and addressed by all levels of government.

“Although the threats from climate change are greater, they are less immediate,” said Smit.

Hartig, a visiting scholar with the University of Windsor’s Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research and a lifelong scientist, told the Star he sees “some good coming out of” the COVID-19 pandemic.

“People are valuing science again, the objective and verifiable search for the truth — that had been diminishing over the years,” he said, adding his hope is that “COVID is going to get us to refocus our priorities.”

COVID-19, and the sacrifices required to fight it after it was first allowed to spread globally, has taught the world that “an ounce of prevention is worth of a pound of cure,” said Hartig. It’s a handy lesson at a time of a looming climate-change crisis.

“How do we avoid the next tipping point?” Hartig asks.