Activist Anglican new leader of Green Party.Elizabeth May, Order of Canada recipient and prominent environmental activist, is the new leader of the Green Party Green party, any of the political parties established in various countries to oppose the destructive environmental effects of many modern technologies and the economic systems and institutions that drive them. Many Green parties also advocate pacifism and strongly support human rights; the parties are typically grassroots leftist in their political orientation. of Canada. Ms. May, 52, won the leadership at the party's convention in Ottawa on Aug. 26 and announced later that she intends to run for a Cape Breton seat in the next federal election. Ms. May, an Anglican, was executive director of the Sierra Club for 17 years; she became active in the environmental movement in the 1970s when she led the legal battle to put an end to insecticide spraying near her Cape Breton home. In 2002, she participated in a 17-day hunger strike hunger strike, refusal to eat as a protest against existing conditions. Although most often used by prisoners, others have also employed it. For example, Mohandas Gandhi in India and Cesar Chavez in California fasted as religious penance during otherwise political or economic disputes. An ancient device, the hunger strike was revived in England in the early 20th cent. on Parliament Hill to focus attention on the plight of residents near the contaminated coal tar coal tar (k  l)n. ponds in Sydney, N.S. Environmentalism environmentalism, movement to protect the quality and continuity of life through conservation of natural resources, prevention of pollution, and control of land use. The philosophical foundations for environmentalism in the United States were established by Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. In 1864, George Perkins Marsh published Man & Nature, in which he anticipated many concepts of modern ecology., she once said, is "fundamentally a spiritual issue." A viscous black liquid containing numerous organic compounds that is obtained by the destructive distillation of coal and that has many uses including as raw material for many dyes, drugs, and paints. Staff |
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