Recently, Parliament Member Glen Pearson of the Liberal Party of Canada gave a presentation on “An Inconvenient Truth,” the engaging lecture designed by Nobel Peace Prize-winning environmentalist Al Gore, on the dire climate changes occurring around the world.
Glen Pearson, Parliament Member, Canada (M): It’s increasing; you can’t deny it.
You can see that precipitation around the globe is going to increase in many areas. The two hardest hit areas are going to be Canada and Russia. During all of those 160,000 years hardly any species loss. And just in the last couple of decades, look what we’ve done.
VOICE: Glen Pearson and his wife recently adopted 3 children from Darfur, Sudan. He thus brought to the presentation first-hand information on environmental refugees based on his families’ frequent visits to the region.
Glen Pearson MP (M): This is Lake Chad. You see it starts in 1963. Just in that period of time it was gone. We were in South Sudan this year; we found 100,000 Darfur refugees who suddenly just showed up at our doorstep because they had no water. They weren’t fleeing persecution or war. They had nothing to live on.
VOICE: Following his speech, Mr. Pearson answered a question on curbing the meat industry to help reduce devastating global warming effects such as these. He stated that a main source of this solution lay in the voice of citizens.
Glen Pearson MP (M): The [meat] industry is so strong and the lobby is so strong, that’s where the real difficulty is coming from. I think people have been talking about this in Ottawa; we’ve been hearing about it. My wife became a vegetarian at the Earth Summit in 1992. Should we determine that these are things that we want to do something about, what political party is going to tackle that particular lobby group? If people come to us and give us these things and say, “We want you to take action on this,” this is how we know as a party we can’t get away with it.
For more information about Canadian Parliament Member Glen Pearson, please visit glenpearson.liberal.ca