How do we get natural law back in our hearts?
There are laws we know, but learn to ignore. Laws like this: if you cut down trees to build new neighbourhoods, you decrease your own oxygen supply and sequester less carbon. If you build suburbs on the Niagara Escarpment or on dwindling farmland, you tamper with water flow, reduce woodlands and grow less food. I’m not making up these laws. They’re nature’s laws, how things work.
“The natural law prevails,” Seneca Faith keeper Oren Lyons once explained, “regardless of what any … tribunal may decide. The natural law, in its most basic form, is simply that if you do not eat food, you will die; if you do not drink water, you will die. So will a dog, a deer and anything that lives. We are all bound by this law … That is why it is important to understand that when a government develops laws to rule the people, it must develop those laws in accordance with the natural law; otherwise, the laws will fail.”
Somehow, nature’s laws have been removed from our hearts and twisted by government bylaws and business legislation. If you buy land rezoned by new laws like Bill 23, the rules that protected trees remaining in the Greenbelt supposedly no longer apply. If the Ontario Land Tribunal rules that you can interrupt the water flow, as in AIMCO’s proposal to build warehouses over the source of Ancaster Creek, you can disregard the laws of water. It doesn’t matter if you crunch a marsh’s ability to filter water or our ability to grow food close to where we live — if the law says you can, you disregard what you know.
The CEO of AIMCO’s online bio says he’s “a dedicated cyclist, skier and a voracious reader. He has two adult children.” If he reads, if he loves the outdoors, and he has grown-up kids, presumably he cares about the life of creeks and how important they are to his grandchildren’s future. So what removes these natural laws from his heart?
You’ve got to wonder the same about the owners of TAAC Construction, Rice Group, Flato Developments, Paletta International, the Cortel Group, and DiCenzo Homes — our news media tell us that the owners of these companies are family people, many of them philanthropists who give money to hospitals and political parties, and they live in the GTHA. Yet they own companies that bought land in the Greenbelt, hoping it would skyrocket once the Ford government’s Bill 23 made it legal to build on these previously protected areas. Don’t they know in their hearts that these sensitive lands are essential to their own grandchildren’s future ability to drink clean water, breathe pure air, and eat food not trucked from California?
As a society, we Canadians have somehow replaced what we know in our hearts with the posted rules. Then we figure out ways to use the posted rules to twist what we know to be true. We’ll say that it’s not that we don’t care about the Greenbelt; Bill 23 is just swapping out some lands for other lands (though it’s still a large reduction of protected land). Or we’ll say: we’re just addressing the housing crisis (despite reports that say there’s lots of room for housing in the current city boundaries).
The new posted rules are actually loopholes in our hearts. We don’t need legislation to tell us water flows downhill: what you dump in at the top contaminates everything downstream. If you build houses and parking lots on farmland, you can’t grow food there. If you bulldoze thousands of acres of trees and farmland for Highway 413, more traffic will increase the carbon in the air.
There’s no law anywhere, whether posted by the feds, the province, or the city that can create loopholes in nature’s rules. We need to get these rules back in our hearts, because the rules are the rules, regardless of what the official posted laws say.