Last week I was lucky enough to take the beautiful train journey across the Rocky Mountains from Edmonton to Vancouver. This was a journey of contrasts. My journey started in Edmonton, a place where the economy is based primarily on the oil industry. The roads are frighteningly wide and the cars frighteningly big, probably due to the low gas prices in Alberta made possible by the tar sands to the north. Public transport is evidently not a well-known concept and walking was made so unpleasant by the huge roads that I hid in my hotel room for the night, waiting to catch the train in the morning. The striking image of the sky scrapers emerging out of the flat prairie lands was a reminder of how much the world has changed in the last three hundred years.
The train journey itself took me gradually into wilderness of the Rocky Mountains. Towns and villages becoming scarcer as the journey went on. By the time the light was fading the train was winding through snow covered forests, seemingly untouched by the outside world. I was struck by the vastness and mystery of this place. Coming from England, a place where cities melt into each other, the size of this magical world was incomprehensible. It was comforting to see that places like this still exist but it was also a reminder of what could be lost if we let over consumption and irresponsible development continue. It felt like a place where life behind the trees was still timeless, still undamaged from the outside world. However, our actions have an impact everywhere. That is the nature of global warming; there is nowhere in the world which is not affected.
As the train pulled into Vancouver I couldn’t help but think there is some way that people can live in harmony with the natural world. The calculations and theories behind sustainability are possible, we just need to lose our apathy and adopt them.
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