Memo to Steve: Just Shut Up.

A brief pause from dating paradigm updates to inform all and sundry that it's time for another eco-rant. Us coyotes are feeling out of sorts and heavily slimed, this morning.

I have just heard the PM's flat voice invoke words from Wallace Stegner's Wolf Willow in a say-nothing statement to an environmental conference in Bonn, claiming his government is all hot on protecting this country's wilderness. Huh.

Stegner, before he became a writer's writer, was an American homesteader's kid whose family retreated back to the US after the Dirty Thirties' dust storms blew the farm to hell.

So I gag because Wolf Willow's setting has made it a staple classic of Canadian prairie literature. I love that book. It is a history/memoir written in prose as pure and honest as the south Saskatchewan air, in which Stegner lived the life that became the book. Purity that is, in my view, the exact opposite of the policies of a government that pretends to care about environmental stewardship only so far as this is likely to get it re-elected. Preferably with a majority. I hate that Harper has taken a beautiful thing and publicly mauled it with crude, oily mitts. Protecting Canada's wilderness? Tell the ducks that just drowned in tar sand tailings. Tell the next generation about the way Kyoto was dumped because it interfered with short term 'smart-money' (an oxymoron if ever I've heard one, and I've heard a lotta morons in Ottawa....) economic goals.

Pretending to care about the planet to dodge inconvenient questions about his recently fired foreign affairs minister has to appeal to Harper. He also may have enjoyed the semiotic irony of quoting Stegner, an American, writing about saving the Canadian wilderness. But for all his strategic posturing on the world stage, his government is doing pretty much squat.

Steve. You lying bastard. Stop embarrassing us all. Just shut the fuck up. Seriously.

Photo: Wolf willow, near Calgary, by ocean.flynn on flickr