BY HEINO MOLLS – No matter what we decide to do with the garbage coming out of Toronto and Southern Ontario, it will cause harm to the living standards of others.
It is irrefutable that, someone or some people, will always suffer from the negative impact of our decisions because there is almost never a perfect solution when it comes to our lifestyle or how we live. But when it comes to decisions that have no perfect solutions, don’t we have a responsibility to simply do the best we can? If nothing else, in our society today, shouldn’t that one thing be fundamental?
We must always do the best that we possibly can in every decision, including garbage.
We cannot eliminate garbage yet. We are working on it. Our governments are funding research on how to get rid of it. We are recycling. We are doing what we can. But the fact remains, wherever there are people there is garbage, and when you have garbage you have to deal with it.
Over one-quarter of all the people in Canada live in Southern Ontario. There is more garbage produced in this area than any other in the country. Until we reach a point of eliminating garbage, something must be done with it. Since there is no perfect solution, we should take the most environmentally responsible and the most technologically researched alternative action that there is available.
In Southern Ontario, the best alternative that exists is rail shipment of garbage to the former Adams mine site near Kirkland Lake, Ontario. It has a bedrock base. It can be technologically developed with the best science available today. It can all be prepared before we start dumping.
It is not a perfect solution but it will reduce environmental damage to the greatest degree possible. It would be the best that we could do.
But we have decided not to do that. We have decided instead to truck the garbage across South Central Ontario, South Western Ontario and the state of Michigan, causing environmental damage and harm to millions of people who live in the midst of the process.
There is no doubt that rail shipment and dumping at the Adams mine could also cause harm to the lifestyle of people who live in areas that are affected by the process. But when you add it all up, we decided to impact millions of people, instead of hundreds or maybe thousands. I am not sure that was the best decision.
So at the end of the day, we have to face the truth.
Our decision on where and how to ship garbage from Toronto was not based on science. It was not based on the environment. It was not based on technology. It was not based on any responsibility to cause the least amount of harm to the fewest people possible.
The people affected by rail shipment to the Adam’s mine said that they would lie across the railway tracks and confront police with vigorous protests.
The whole decision was based on the threat of television coverage and newspaper photos making the decision look bad. It had nothing to do with anyone doing the best that they could.
So that’s all in Ontario. What about the rest of the world? Maybe we ought to think about what drives decisions about bigger issues.
Like world poverty, logging forests, racial harmony, waging war, caring for our children, helping those in need and many, many other things. I think that we should realize that there are no perfect solutions to anything but in all things that we do, we should do our very best for
others.
If we based all of our actions on what we see on TV, we could be making a lot of garbage decisions.
Heino Molls is publisher of REM. Email [email protected]
By: Heino Molls
[email protected]
