A commercial developer has already received permission to build 1200 new houses in our community. When completed, three out of four residents will be newcomers.
        Currently, the developer wants to build another 400 houses and a marina with storage for 200 boats, along the waterfront.
        With some other residents, I'm trying reduce as much as possible any negative impact all this new housing will have on the quality of life we enjoy in a small rural community.
        But I wonder sometimes why I bother.
        The proposed developments won't particularly affect me, in my small corner of this small corner of the world.
        I live on a short cul de sac, that connects to a dead-end, off a road that's too steep for school buses to travel on.
        Most of the development will happen over a kilometre away from my home. I won't see the development; I probably won't hear it. Most of the occupants will work in Kelowna, 20 kilometres away. The torrent of cars heading into the city every morning, and back out every evening, will not pass near my house.
        The marina itself will be almost three kilometres south.
        Because my house is up the hill from the waterfront, the noise from additional traffic on the water will be somewhat muted by the time it reaches my deck.
        Granted, I won't see the stars shine as brightly. Light pollution will almost certainly spill across the night skies. But I don't stay up very late any more anyway.
        So I don't expect much change in my lifestyle.

Responsibility to speak out
        Why then should I bother resisting a developer's desire to make as much profit as possible, regardless of the effect on local lifestyles?
        Because I remember the words of Martin Niemoller, a pastor and theologian in Germany, before World War II, during the rise of the Nazi regime. He wrote:

When they came for the communists,
    I did not speak out;
        because I was not a communist.
When they came for the trade unionists,
    I did not speak out;
        because I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews,
    I did not speak out;
        because I was not a Jew.
When they came for me,
    there was no one left to speak out.

Please don't tell me I quoted the poem incorrectly. There is no definitive version of this text. Niemoller himself used several variations in his post-war speeches, and countless paraphrases have inserted each writer's own favourite axe-to-grind.
        Besides, the important thing is not the words, but the message. If you don't speak up for others when you're not personally threatened, you can't expect others to speak up for you when you are.
        I don't expect to need someone to speak up for me. By the time construction is completed, I will probably be too old to miss the trails through the woods, the hush of an autumn evening, the lapping of waves along a deserted shoreline.
        But someone needs to speak up for future generations.