Indifference is a more comfortable option than confronting environmental reality. Of course, some people are denied such a luxury. The summer of 2007 has bestowed serious droughts on the United States, particularly Florida where the desiccated bed of Lake Okeechobee actually caught fire. India and China have been pummelled with extreme storms. Southern and Eastern Europe have been cooking in temperatures above 40° C — Italy has been battling fires that have chased tourists and residents into the sea to avoid incineration. England, as if to be different than Europe, has been flooding under unprecedented monsoon conditions — political and public conversation is attributing this extreme weather to global warming.

Other people are denied the option of indifference because they are too close to information. Scientists are getting increasingly strident and tense in their environmental concerns. And then there’s Severn Cullis-Suzuki, the daughter of geneticist, broadcaster and environmentalist David Suzuki. In a character profile (Born Green, Globe & Mail, July 9/07), her young concerns can perhaps be explained by her proximity to her father’s values.

As a 12 year-old speaking to the first United Nations’ Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, she expressed her concerns with the simple clarity of a child: “I am afraid to go out in the sun now because of holes in the ozone. I am afraid to breathe the air because I don’t know what chemicals are in it. ...Did you have to worry about these things when you were my age?” The frank honesty of a perceptive child brought tears to the eyes of many delegates and she received a standing ovation.

Fifteen years later, as a poised and educated young woman — she is finishing her Masters Degree in ethnoecology at the University of Victoria — her ideas are more complex and nuanced. Free from the direct influence of her father, she is now an adult speaking in her own voice. But her words still bite. They still inform. And once more, they resonate deeply, perhaps because they express a reality that older people have been reluctant to acknowledge: the legacy being left to children and to young people like Severn.

“I feel angry,” she confesses in an interview where she is otherwise calm and composed, “that I have been born into a society where, by no choice of my own, by no agreement, by no actual decision, I am inherently complicit in the destruction of the world. It is hard to do the right thing. You have to be militant. You have to be an activist. You have to be branded green to do the right thing.”

With a few simple words, she has once again come to the core of an issue. Her awareness of the planet’s dire environmental prognosis has stolen her innocence, forced her as an ethical human to personally bear the weight of the world’s ecological health. She didn’t ask for this burden. She has inherited from her elders a materialistic and technological culture that is — by the best of measures — unsustainable in its present form. Under the circumstances, given the hopefulness and idealism of youth, the urge to do “the right thing” places her in a dilemma: she can either be an indifferent member of society and contribute to the escalating problem, or she can become an activist and a militant, a person who must be “green” if she is to respect higher ethical principles.

Her dilemma is everyone’s dilemma. Anyone who begins to understand the structural defects that haunt our global civilization and tries to weigh the magnitude of the problems they present, is forced toward an activist and militant position. Concern and then involvement are necessary responses to a rough measuring of our situation.

Connect the dots. Vancouver and the Fraser Valley narrowly missed a horrendous flood this spring. A confluence of circumstances, all linked to anthropogenic climate change, nearly brought disaster: abnormally high snow fall on interior mountains, rapid melt caused by record warm temperatures, and fast run-off produced by diminished forest cover due to the mountain pine beetle disaster. A reasonable person would conclude we have to eliminate the root cause of this risk, namely rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels. An ethical person would be radicalized by the cause-effect relationship that implicates our errant behaviour.

Locally, Campbell River residents decided enough was enough when their beloved estuary was going to be defiled by a Wal-Mart monolith. Then they arose to object to a multi-story downtown condominium that was going to scar their treasured view. Meanwhile, the Campbell River Environmental Committee (CREC), has been demanding that Quinsam Coal stop polluting the area’s cherished Quinsam watershed. The latest threat is Cornerstone Gas, an opportunistic assemblage of Louisiana investors partnered with Hillsborough Resources (the owner of Quinsam Coal) that wants to drill for coalbed methane in about 25,000 acres between the Campbell River airport and the Quinsam River. This project would likely add to the litany of mining disasters that continue to haunt the Campbell River and Comox Valley regions. So an association of locals, Citizens Concerned about Coalbed Methane (CCCBM), has been formed to ask hard questions and demand clear answers — so far, none of the answers are clear.

Like concerned citizens everywhere, the public tone is shifting from asking to demanding. Severn Cullis-Suzuki might call this the rise of activists and militants. Actually, it’s just ordinary people getting involved and expressing their growing concern about the health of the world around them. They are becoming environmentally informed and they are becoming engaged, trying to do the right thing for themselves, their children and a beleaguered planet.