Farmers shouldn’t fear environmentalists.
And when they hear the greens raising issues that involve farming, such as endangered species protection and global warming, they shouldn’t assume farmers are being made to look like the culprits, says the executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada.
“We don’t want to penalize the people you most want to have helpful,” said Elizabeth May in a recent interview.
The environmental group Sierra Club supports animal agriculture such as family-run hog farms, but has campaigned against large-scale hog barns, which it claims are environmentally dangerous.
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It has pressured the United States government to open national forests to bison ranchers, whose animals its says help preserve the health of the environment. But it has objected to overgrazing and to clearing forest land for livestock grazing.
May comes across as the embodiment of the middle-of-the-road environmentalist, combining traditional green values with a professional approach. She backs up her arguments with facts and statistics, not the spiritualist rhetoric employed by more extreme environmentalists.
But nor does she assume the slick appearance of a business professional. With her careless hairstyle and colorful, loose-fitting clothes, she is more typical of the young environmentalists who support the Sierra Club than the government and business leaders with whom she
often meets.
Environmentalists and farmers have had an uneasy relationship for years, as the average farmer’s desire to operate as freely as possible has clashed with the environmental movement’s call for more controls over land use.
Relations between the two degenerated further over the proposed federal endangered species legislation, Bill C-65.
Farmers and environmentalists also often find themselves in opposite corners over global warming, the theory that says the earth’s average temperature is being dangerously raised by the overuse of fossil fuels.
Blame and punishment
Many farmers were upset when cows were identified as a major source of methane production. Others didn’t like the suggestion from some in the environmental movement that fuel taxes be raised to discourage consumption.
But May, who was in Saskatoon to give a speech about global warming, said even though agriculture produces methane and other greenhouse gases, it isn’t the target of groups like the Sierra Club.
“The biggest chunk of methane in Canada is not agriculture,” said May.
Livestock and manure produce almost 30 percent of Canada’s methane emissions, but these sources aren’t easy to control.
“I don’t think that’s a problem we can deal with,” said May. “It’s a natural process from the flatulence of animals.”
What groups like the Sierra Club don’t see as a natural process are the garbage dumps and oilfields that together produce almost 60 percent of Canada’s industrial methane emissions, according to Environment Canada.
May said if people composted food scraps the main source of landfill methane would disappear. Composting, if done right, does not create methane.
Also, better oilfield technology would capture many of the gases that now escape during extraction and in flares, May said.
As to global warming, May said farmers should be worried because any change in weather patterns will have a huge affect on them. Swings in temperature and sudden storms happen more frequently, May said. Fires, floods and droughts could become more common.
“Farmers are not major culprits (of global warming), but they are major future victims of it,” May said.
By working more closely, farmers and environmentalists should be able to find solutions to prevent the worst environmental problems, May said.
This is already being done with endangered species legislation. May said her group and ranchers’ groups have been working to find a mutually acceptable way to protect endangered species.
The government is currently putting together new endangered species legislation.
