Day One headline: Global Warming Threatens Earth
Day Two headline: Global Warming Still Threatens Earth
Day Three headline: Global Warming: No Change to Earth Threat
Day Four headline: Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting in Nude Celebrity Photo Hack
We’re not good at slow-speed crises. Haven’t got the attention span.
Give us an overwhelming, inexorable, but snail-paced calamity like climate change, one where the story line never changes, and our focus tends to drift.
Which is why Victoria’s Joseph Boutilier jumped on a unicycle and spent the past 5 1/2 months riding it to Ottawa.
The 24-year-old felt Canada was losing the plot, so decided to do something to get us back on the page.
No, he had never ridden a unicycle before, but he figured a simple bicycle wouldn’t garner the kind of attention he wanted to bring to climate change, so one wheel it was. He set out in March, more than 5,000 kilometres ago.
As it turned out, the pace was perfect for meeting Canadians as he camped and couch-surfed across the Great Wide North.
“Everywhere I went, I got support,” he says, on the phone from the nation’s capital. In Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a guy gave up all his change to buy Boutilier a coffee. A rancher from Maple Creek, Sask., toured him around the Cypress Hills, anxious to share a place he loved. A woman insisted on driving him into Brandon, Man., because lightning was in the forecast. “It was the best way imaginable to see the best in people.”
Not a bad way to see the worst in riding conditions, either. Snow, wind, heat, bugs. Grinding up mountain passes on one gear was tough but the crosswinds were worse. The sketchy road from the Sault to Sudbury was freaky. A black bear got way too close to Boutilier’s tent in Parry Sound, Ont., until he popped the stopper in his air mattress, scaring it away with the sound.
East of Winnipeg, he was lashed by the same deluge that caused Armageddon flooding in southern Manitoba, forcing him to walk the unicycle along the soft shoulder for a couple of days as 18-wheelers thundered past, blowing wet grit in his face. When the downpour stopped, mosquitoes queued up for a shot at the juicy bits. “If it wasn’t for the cause, I probably would have turned back then.”
Right, the cause.
We are told climate change is happening much faster than was forecast just a few years ago. “The effects we’re experiencing now, globally, are worse than what was expected,” Boutilier says. There are more examples of extreme weather more often, from California’s drought to Calgary’s flood. The ramped-up pace of ocean acidification is being blamed for everything from the decline of coral reefs to the die-off of 10 million scallops at Qualicum Beach. House flies buzz base camp at Mount Everest, 17,600 feet up. You can do the backstroke through the Northwest Passage.
Our response?
More than 300,000 people, including Boutilier, marched through the streets of New York City last Sunday — 4.4 million fewer than watched that day’s New York Yankees game on ESPN. The apocalypse might be coming, but Jeter is retiring first.
It’s not that most people don’t care about, or believe in, climate change. (Though note that the Conservatives — the ones who are actually driving the bus without appearing too bothered about its fuel consumption — were the only major party not to make a big deal about Boutilier when he rolled onto Parliament Hill.)
But how do you stay focused on a problem that seems as terribly inevitable, yet at the same time so far off, as your own demise? Greenhouse gas emissions might eventually send us flying over a cliff, but in the meantime, we may as well raise the speed limit to 120 on the Coquihalla.
“One of my goals was to get climate change back in the news,” says Boutilier, and it’s true that he did get a fair bit of coverage. But it’s also true that Hitchbot got more media attention crossing Canada this summer than did Boutilier. We are as easily distracted as a golden retriever.
Never mind. Boutilier’s trip might be over (“I plan to put a sheet over my unicycle and never look at it again”) but his journey has just begun.
You can check out his campaign at unityfortheclimate.ca.
