Speech by Campbell Stuart at the Annual General Meeting of the Green Coalition, May 6, 2010

GORILLAS IN OUR MIDST

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Green Coalition and distinguished guests: good evening.

This talk is entitled “Gorillas in our Midst” and is intended to be first and foremost a call to the awareness of our true strength; and second to the deployment of that strength. It will reveal some facts about the scandal that is the plan to develop Meadowbrook. And it will conclude with this open question: “Who really is the 800-pound gorilla today?”

First: the awareness of our strength. It is my conviction, as a community activist and politician, that there is a fundamental shift happening in the hearts and minds of ordinary people everywhere. I believe that we are crossing a divide right now in the politics of environmental change. It is partly a generational shift in values, and partly fear. Environmental change is a fact and everyone knows it. The only open question is just how bad we will allow our children’s future to be.  We know, in our heart of hearts, that someday our children will ask the equivalent of “What did you do during the war Daddy?”

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