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The most important thing to understand about an environmental concern is that it is infinitely malleable. It has Play-Doh’s or putty’s wonderful power of accommodation, to take whatever shape, for the moment, might be called for.
Because the environment is, by definition or tautology, everything that is around us — there will always be something “in” the environment on which to hang an objection, mount a protest or, as Samuel Johnson, ever elegant, put it, “to point a moral, or adorn a tale.”
Thus I was not surprised that when the debate on pipelines recently shifted from oil flowing west to oil flowing east, someone raised the fate of the “endangered beluga whale.” We may not have known specifically that it was going to be the beluga, but we surely knew that something was going to be endangered — smelt, toad, turr, or the infamously myopic blundering owl.
The precise animal doesn’t matter; we knew it would be something. I think, in fact, it was probably — there is a batting order, so to speak, in this business — the beluga’s turn.
I should be explicit, I suppose, and declare there was no intention of putting belugas in the actual pipeline, a self-defeating project for all concerned. (Check Wiki, under “plugs.”) Rather, the alarm was raised over the building of a terminal for the pipeline at Cacouna, Que., and immediately on hearing that siren the company proposing the pipeline, naturally, stood down.
The environment is a generous giver in this regard. For the fully tumid green mind, nature is but a catalogue of always-imperilled creatures whose purpose is to end up on a Greenpeace flag protesting the incursions of ever-meddling man. This perspective was alluringly lodged in the memory by the great hymn work of an ardent 18th-century Anglican missionary — Neil Young in a fancy hat and with a taste for organ music — one Reginald Heber.
In a work that would radiate the cockles of every budding Rachel Carson’s heart, From Greenland’s Icy Mountains, Heber chanted of a world “where every Prospect pleases, and only Man is vile.”
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