Lately Earth Day has become the new Christmas, an annual holiday celebrated with zeal at schools across the country. During a spring assembly at my daughter?s Calgary elementary school, children performed skits celebrating the Earth and bemoaning humanity?s impact on the planet. It was the school?s way of sharing what the students had been learning about the environment. Now, I like to think that we, as a family, respect nature by recycling, donating used clothes and toys, occasionally buying organic and visiting national parks. But the intensity of this performance completely caught me off guard. Classes sang about switching to energy-efficient light bulbs and stopping car pollution. Children dressed as bees danced around the gym before falling down one by one to symbolize bee colony collapse. Kids donned masks of various Canadian animals?a fox, a bear, a wolf?and pleaded with the audience to save their habitats. ?I am the great loon!? boomed a student. ?Don?t drill for oil on my land!?
At the end of each skit, the kids looked pointedly at the parents in attendance and asked in unison, ?What are you going to do about your environmental footprint"?
On the way home, my husband?who was working as an oil and gas geologist at the time, and therefore was partially to blame for the great loon?s distress?attempted to answer this question. He opted for an ironic response, as is his wont when things annoy him: ?Gee, maybe we should sell our house and car, move into a mud hut a...