Thursday, June 03, 2010

What if we don't care enough about the environment because our country is so big?

So I've been playing with IfItWasMyHome.com, which projects the oil spill on a map so you can see how big it is in comparison to an area you're familiar with. So I projected it on Toronto, and yeah, they're right, it's really big.

Then I projected it on London.

Holy fucking shit.

It is wider than ENGLAND! It's about the same size as Belgium and Netherlands combined! It could swallow Wales whole without leaving a trace, and they have their own language!

When projected on a map of Southern Ontario it does look big, It would swallow the world as I know it and then some, but that's just a tiny little corner of our country. Anything that would be lost if we disappeared is reproduced similarly enough in other parts of Canada and/or the US. But in Europe the same amount of land contains whole cultures with histories that go on for centuries (millenia?) beyond anything of which we can conceive.

What if this is making us too blasé about the environment? What if we're subconsciously less motivated to protect our land and water because we have so much of it? I never even realized just how much water we have in the Great Lakes (proportionately speaking) until I saw that the oil spill is a bit smaller than any one lake, but it's as wide as all of ENGLAND!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

An old family saying was that "you could drop Great Britain into Lake Ontario, and it would take them 15 years to find it."

Hershele Ostropoler said...

Down here, at least, a lot of people's political positions in general -- the environment being no exception -- are informed by the (now obsolete) notion of The Frontier. If things get too unpleasant, whether it's bad neighbors or pollution, you don't "whine about it," you pack up and leave (even though there's really been nowhere to go for the best part of a century at least).

If I center the spill on my girlfriend's hometown, it covers every place she's lived on the East Coast.

laura k said...

I think you're onto something there.