When it comes to painting everyone with the same brush, it’s sometimes hard to see things objectively.
So, when a motorboat speeds into a houseboat and kills a man, as it did this past weekend in B.C., there’s a danger to write off all motor boaters as speeding lunatics.
Of course, just as the majority of gun owners are good, responsible citizens, it’s safe to say that most speedboat operators are competent and, more importantly, sober when they take to the waterways for recreational pursuits.
However, if sweeping generalizations can be applied to a group of people, maybe boaters can be rightly labelled as polluters, those responsible for the toxic combination of fuel spills, fumes and rainbow tinged floating oil slicks in our waterways.  
Canoeists and kayakers may come off as a bit self-righteous when lauding the light environmental footprint of their modes of water transport. But at least they can sleep at night knowing that the marina dock they launched from, amidst the putrid smells of fuel and ghastly iridescent sheen of fuel and oil on the water, wasn’t their doing.
Source water protection efforts in the province have identified recreational boating as a problem, especially on a collective level.
“While boats and marinas may individually release only small amounts of pollutants into waterways, multiplying these amounts by the thousands of boaters and marinas that use them can cause significant water quality problems in lakes, rivers and coastal waters,” states the Ontario Source Water Protection Primer.
If boaters are concerned about the effects of their recreational habits, they can opt for four-stroke over two-stroke motors. The Federation of Ontario Cottagers’ Association indicates that one-quarter of the mixed oil and fuel fed to a two-stroke motor is released unburned through the exhaust system and ends up as air and water pollution.
Of course, modern-day pollution comes from many sources, urban and agricultural runoff, air pollution from vehicular traffic and industrial parks, and so on.
But there is a danger to downplay the cumulative effects of pollution from all sources, let alone one source in particular.
Andre Mele, author of Polluting for Pleasure, suspects that vast quantities of petroleum products used in recreational boating are leaked into waterways during operation and fueling.
“If you do the numbers, there’s (the equivalent of) at least 15 Exxon Valdez oil spills going on in America's waterways every year,” said Mele in the Environmental Health Perspectives report entitled the Environmental Pain of Pleasure Boating. “That’s a lot of fuel, and of course because it’s coming out of one little boat at a time, nobody really notices or cares to do anything.”
We may write of recreational boating pollution due to our inclination toward the dramatic, as crash-scene gawkers.
“It’s front-page news when an oil tanker breaks apart, blackening the ocean, killing wildlife, and staining coastlines. But more, albeit less spectacular, damage to the environment — a ‘death from a thousand cuts’ — may come from a much smaller source: recreational watercraft that put petroleum products, human and pet waste, trash, and potentially toxic metals into coastal waters, lakes, and rivers.”
Perhaps we tolerate these realities because of the economic implications for those who live in coastal communities, or recognize that the North American lifestyle is rife with negative environmental impacts, not restricted to one easy-to-resolve area.
But we’d all sleep better at night knowing that our recreational pursuits, economic systems and modern way of life didn’t result in irreversible harm to our environment and, ultimately, exact a toll on human health.
That is, unless our lust for the good life has compromised our common sense.