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When I was a kid in the 80s in Ontario, the environmental movement took hold of the mainstream.  By that, I mean people start talking about it over the dinner table, on the nightly news, teaching about it in public school classrooms.  David Suzuki become a household name.   It became commodified; you could buy products that had slogans about saving the Earth silkscreened on them.  There was a burst of enthusiasm; composters became commonplace, and a recycling program began in my little village.

There were two very clear messages I took with me from that time; the first and most solid was the white men in suits who said, over and over until I believed that it was true, that alternative energy sources would never be anything more than a novelty act.  That you couldn’t draw serious energy from the sun, wind, anything.  We could recycle all we wanted, but our dependence on fossil fuels was forever.  Even to an 8-year-old, that sounded horrible, futile, depressing.  To know that I was so dependent on a resource that was finite and depleting fast meant my future was compromised; the horror of dystopian sci-fi seemed like true prophesy.

The second message was that Lyn Kelsey, my third-grade teacher and by leaps and bounds one of the most interesting, intelligent, and inspiring people in my young life, believed in the green movement.  Probably the only teacher who taught me a damned thing in Elementary school, Mr. K was a guy with a passion for history, for stories, for reading, and for individuality.  As I grew up, I realized that his historical perspective was what inspired his interest in the environment; he taught us that we had a place in time and space, and that we weren’t the centre, but we could influence the whole.  He could imagine a future where things that didn’t currently exist had been implemented, where our future was hopeful because we had the ingenuity to learn from the past and move forward in an unexpected direction, because he knew it had happened in the past. Read the rest of this entry »