London Free Press Editorial. Sunday May 27 007

From the most famous presidential loser in U.S. history, to the overnight darling of the climate-change movement, Al Gore has come far.

Just how far, Londoners will get a chance to see and hear for themselves Thursday, when the man behind the global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth speaks here at a $500-a-plate fundraiser to benefit local medical research.

Sure to attract longtime fellow travellers in the movement, the event will almost certainly also draw in the Johnny-come-latelies seduced by the Hollywood-style cachet Gore has given the issue.

Nothing wrong with that. The former vice-president has at least pulled off what many scientists who've warned of climate change for years have been unable to -- get tongues wagging about the issue, often by people who had never cared a wit.

A just-launched Free Press series, running in the leadup to Gore's London visit, modestly aims for a similar dynamic -- to get people to sit up and take notice of dangers lurking in our own environment.

The series, Dying to Live Here, probes the links between the region's higher than average rates of death and disease, and the environment.

The findings should wipe away the smugness of any Southwestern Ontarian who thinks our environmental woes can be laid at the feet of George W. Bush and those his critics lump into the same camp, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Consider:

- Southwestern Ontario is the province's smog capital, chalking up more bad-air days a year than anywhere else in Ontario. Proximity to the U.S. Midwest accounts for only half the problem. That leaves us equally responsible for the killer smog.

- Ontario's four coal-fired power plants, including one here, rank among the province's worst air polluters. The Lambton station near Sarnia is this region's worst offender and has been cited among Canada's Top 10 producers of greenhouse gases.

- Twenty years after the infamous "blob," a chemical mass found in the St. Clair River, the spills record by Sarnia's huge string of petrochemical industries along that river has improved. But the reputation of the Chemical Valley -- a nickname still synonymous to many with pollution -- endures, now with recent findings suggesting its toxic legacy may be altering the reproduction of some humans and wildlife exposed to the river.

- And what of the lessons learned from Walkerton? E. coli that seeped into the water system killed there, but sloppy human controls were also implicated. Now, with reports surfacing of elevated lead levels in the tap water of some older areas in large Ontario cities, including London, is anyone truly convinced another water disaster is impossible?

We need people like Gore to get the debate going. But let's not forget, we have some inconvenient -- even deadly -- environmental truths of our own.

-- Greg Van Moorsel

gvanmoorsel@lfpress.com