Article content continued

It is a planet-saving cri de coeur from this country’s finest minds — a call for global renewal, which, as a document, will stand in time with other landmark productions of humankind. Somewhere, ages and ages hence, people will look back on the Leap Manifesto and — after noting its tributes to Mao, who put the Leap in Leap, and Marx, who for two centuries put the stamp on quality manifestos — see it stands, nobly, with those other urgings that have marked the rise and salvation of the humankind.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or

How could it not? When you combine the minds of some of its signatories, we see a concentration of intelligence that will leave you aghast. When you harness the intellect of Pamela Anderson with the always-soothing prose of catastrophist Naomi Klein, yoke them to the misty musings of Alanis Morissette and the rhapsodizing of Canada’s climate-soothsayer-in-chief, David Suzuki, call in Neil Young to strum it dolefully into the tormented ears of the world, the result is what historians sometimes call a world-shaking bleat.

I have not time to detail my appreciation for its many, many sublimities, but it’s thorough: it damns capitalism, likens austerity to the plagues of yore; spurns every energy source larger than a propeller, trashes the West and elevates recycling to sacramental status.

Universal NIMBYism — the key to the new social order and a way to put paid to all those prophecies of the end of our whirling, warming world.

But to go to the core of its message, we have to pay notice to its one, outstanding axiom; the one ringing declaration that captures its very core principle and the planet-shaking breadth of Leap Manifesto’s vision: if you wouldn’t want it in your backyard, then it doesn’t belong in anyone’s backyard. And who will not say amen to that selfless prayer? Why it’s the Sermon on the Mount, all of Malthus, and dear saintly George Orwell’s pleas for a better world put in a nugget of the deepest wisdom. Zen masters will faint before its terse profundity. Bubble gum manufacturers of days gone by would have wrapped their product in it.