A very old guy with snow-white hair and snow-white beard fishes the ocean for weeks without catching anything. Finally, he catches a mighty marlin, but sharks eat it before he can get it to shore.

Tough luck. Stuff happens. Move on to the next story.

That’s a likely Internet simplification of Ernest Hemingway’s classic The Old Man and the Sea. A quick scan. No details. No context. No messages. No learning. The kind of thinned out, often inaccurate, stories we see on social media sites every day.If you went to a library and read the book you’d discover the full story and its valuable messages. The main message being that life is a struggle with an inevitable end, but perseverance and dignity can help us through it.

Sadly, many of us don’t go to libraries or get our information through print sources. We scan and skim smartphones, tablets and PCs for news and information on which we base our opinions and decisions. Brief, incomplete, often manipulated stuff presented as fact.

The majority of people living in the developed world now have fingertip online access to just about all factual information that exists. Yet we are moving farther away from consuming complete, balanced, factually-based information needed to help solve the many difficult issues facing today’s societies.

Research has found that individuals instructed to find specific information online found it faster than others using printed encyclopedias. However, the online searchers were less able to recall the information accurately.

A New Zealand university study concluded back in 2014 that online reading has a negative impact on people’s cognition. The study, titled Is Google Making Us Stupid?, found that concentration, comprehension, absorption and recall rates were much lower when people read text online.

Research shows that the digital age also is reducing our attention spans. Some experts say the attention span of a learner now averages 20 minutes.

So, when we skim and scan online we go through more material, but comprehend it less than if we had read it on paper. That’s not good news considering that we face major issues that demand action supported by thoughtful and accurate information.

The move away from reading printed newspapers, magazines and books has happened astonishingly fast and is increasing. U.S. newspaper and periodical revenue has fallen 40 to 50 per cent in the past decade, and Canadian figures are believed to be similar.

A Canadian Book Consumer Study says19 percent of Canadians borrowed a book from a public library in 2021. Also, The Canadian Pediatric Society has said that while 20 percent of adolescents never read a book, almost 50 percent frequently read blogs. 

Print has tried to fight back by offering their products digitally, with little success. Many newspapers, for instance, are offering skim and scan headlines that encourage one- or two-minute reads that don’t come close to giving readers a full sense of what is happening.

Nothing is gained in bemoaning this change in society. We are living through a Digital Revolution, also being called the Third Industrial Revolution. Digital life online is here to stay, shrinking the importance of print.

The goal now should be to build the benefits of online reading while restricting the detriments. Young people especially need to learn how to avoid the negatives of online reading and increase concentration and absorption.

How can that be done? Good question but few solid answers.

There are suggestions like doing more online reading on a large screen, rather than a cellphone. Taking pencil and paper notes during online research is another suggestion.

The Internet is only 30 years old and there simply has not been enough research on how time spent on computers affects cognitive development, especially in children. More research is needed to find practical ways to ameliorate the detrimental impacts.

Libraries perhaps hold part of the answer. They are places where print and digital share space, offering the advantages of book learning and online learning.

Libraries also are great equalizers. Many people who can’t afford books or a digital devices get access to information, print or digital, with a library card.

 There are signs that the animal kingdom is fed up with us and beginning to rebel. 

Two-ton killer whales are ramming yachts and fishing boats. A sea otter has been stealing surf boards from surfers on the California coast. Sharks are terrorizing people on the east coast and alligators are mauling people in Florida. 

Closer to home, coyotes are more visible and bolder, while groundhogs are devastating vegetable and flower gardens. Wire mesh fencing hasn’t stopped them from consuming my wife’s parsley patch.

News reports of animal rebellion now are so common that the shouts of the rebelling animals in George Orwell’s 1945 novella Animal Farm are echoing in my head.

“Four legs good, two legs bad,” Orwell’s animals shout during a rousing speech by Old Major, a big old boar, calling for a revolution. 

“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing,” Old Major says, urging the animals to take control of their lives back from humans.

Relating the current animal behaviour to Orwell’s Animal Farm is perhaps an overreaction. However, something definitely is going on with the world’s animals.

Since 2020 there have been 500 reports of killer whales ramming boats off the coasts of Portugal and Spain. Several have been so badly damaged that they sank.

Last month a whale attacked a yacht off the coast of Scotland. Pods of whales have appeared off the east and west coast of North America and there is concern the whales will start attacking boats there.

Alligator attacks in Florida have increased 66 per cent in recent years. And earlier this month a 69-year-old woman walking her dog in South Carolina was attacked and killed by a gator.

Shark attacks also have increased. 

Globally an estimated four dozen people have suffered shark attacks this year, six fatally. The number is on course to exceed last year’s total of 81 attacks. The annual high for attacks is 111 in 2015.

On the July 4th weekend a 15-year girl was attacked by a shark at a New York beach. She survived.

Coyote populations have grown, as have sightings in human populated areas. Researchers say coyote density in some parts of Canada has risen to as high as 2.3 coyotes per square kilometre. 

There have been two noteworthy coyote attacks in the last few weeks. A nine-year-old boy was mauled June 24 in the North Kildonan area of Winnipeg. One week later a four-year-old child was attacked in the same neighbourhood. Both children were treated in hospital for non-life threatening injuries.

Some people believe that increasing wild animal-human interactions are caused by growing wild animal populations. Others say human populations spreading into animal territories is causing conflicts.

Climate change also is said to be a factor in increasing wildlife-human conflicts. Global warming is melting sea ice in the Arctic, causing polar bears to spend more time on land and creating more encounters with humans. Earlier this year a mother and small child were killed in Alaska by a polar bear.

Whatever the reasons, strange animal behaviour is another sign of Nature trying to tell us something.

Nature is a wise grandmother who can teach us much, if we are willing to listen. (The numbskulls who continue to toss Tim’s coffee cups and beer cans from car and truck windows obviously are not).

One of her important lessons is for us to abandon the human ego that makes us think of things in Nature as either useful to us or useless in general.

Everything in Nature has a purpose and is useful even if it doesn’t benefit we humans in some way.

As has been said many times by many writers: Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.

We are Nature, albeit only one part of it. So when we spit on Nature, we spit on ourselves.

Perhaps our poor understanding of Nature and the way we mistreat it is the reason the animals appear to be rebelling.

To quote again the rebellious Old Major in Animal Farm:

“There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word– Man.”

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Thumbs up to my little sister. She can turn mud pies into chocolate cakes. Or, a bad experience into something helpful to others.

She was bike riding with her daughter recently in eastern Ontario when her bike’s front wheel hit a crumbled piece of pavement. She was thrown over the handlebars and landed hard, breaking her arm.

She was immobile on the road’s edge with her daughter trying to help when a car approached. It didn’t stop to help. It didn’t slow down and it narrowly missed hitting them.

When told the story I went into my “world gone crazy” outrage. It’s a sick, sick society when a driver races past an injured person lying on the edge of a road.

My sister had a different take. She told how some nice people came out to help from a nearby house, arranging for an ambulance, trying to make her comfortable etc.

Then came the hospital story, one much different from what we so often hear these days.

The emergency room was packed, as many are these days. But instead of taking my sister’s OHIP card and telling her to take a seat, a nurse immediately set her up with a comfortable sling, gave her pain medication, then had her take a seat.

She didn’t complain about having to wait to see a doctor because the sling and pills made it easier to bear.

My sister is a person who believes people who do their jobs thoughtfully and with kindness should be thanked and told how their work truly helped. So, she called the hospital communications department to have her appreciation passed on to ER staff and the one nurse in particular.

There she stepped into the madness of our computer-controlled world. She was told to go to her laptop, tap this, tap that and eventually end up at a screen displaying a form. Fill out the form, then tap some more to send the completed form into the miasma of hospital bureaucracy.

My sister believes there must be an easier way to pass along appreciation and thanks. 

I suppose one could still use the old-fashioned approach of writing a letter, searching for an address, addressing an envelope, inserting the letter, licking the envelope seal and paying $1 plus for a stamp then posting the letter and hoping it might find the right person.

We now live in the digital age surrounded by software engineers who work daily at changing the way we do things. Surely some of them can design a digital way to say thank you quickly and directly.

My sister wonders why there isn’t a system with which any company that deals with people – not just hospitals – has a simple-to-reach site just for compliments. It takes in messages of thanks and appreciation and directs them to the employee.

Something that bypasses the nests of bureaucracy and computer systems that complicate simple living. Something that you can do quickly on your cell phone while the experience is still fresh in your mind.

It’s an interesting thought. Perhaps someone will pick up on it and one day we’ll be able to send a kudo to a helpful person without the usual rigamarole.

Meanwhile my sister turned to social media to try to thank the nurse for her exceptional kindness. Her post included the following:

“You will never know the impact your kindness had on me that day. You could have just as easily taken my info when I came in and had me go back to a seat. Instead you gave me a new sling to comfort me while I waited and gave me medication to relieve the excruciating pain the fractures in my arm were causing. Thank you for making the rest of that day tolerable. I hope this message finds you somehow.”

I too hope it finds her.

It’s a harsh world out there where excellent and intelligent job performance mixed with kindness are not easy to find. When we do find it we should celebrate it and have better ways of passing along our thanks and appreciation.

 Our spring and summer of smoke is being called abnormal. It’s not. It’s a new normal that scientists predict will become an even more normal part of our lives.

“This is our potential future,” Morgan Crowley, a Canadian Forest Service fire scientist, said in an interview with the Vox media service recently. “It’s real. It’s really important that we prepare for our future and find ways to reduce the effects on our vulnerable populations.”

This year already is the worst forest fire season in Canadian and North American history. Canada has suffered more than 3,000 forest fires since the end of March, burning about 20 million acres. And, we are not quite halfway through the fire season.

It’s going to get worse. More forest fires and more smoke clouding our skies and affecting our health will be a fact of life. We need to listen to, and act on, Ms. Crowley’s warning to prepare for the future and work on finding ways to protect vulnerable populations.

Changing climate is creating conditions that increase wildfire potential. Higher temperatures and increased wind have been drying out our forests, turning them into tinder boxes.

A key factor in recent forest fire history is something that the public has heard little about. It’s called VPD – vapour pressure deficit and is the difference between the amount of moisture actually in the air and the amount of moisture the air could hold.

When the air has much more room for moisture it sucks it out of trees and other plant growth. The larger the moisture deficit, the drier our forests become.

Drier forests don’t necessarily mean there will be more fires, but they definitely mean much drier material for a fire to burn. That’s why recent fires have been larger than usual and creating more smoke.

There is increasing concern about how wildfire smoke is affecting our health. Breathing in the smoke causes running noses, scratchy throats, irritated sinuses, coughs and headaches. The smoke causes more serious problems for people who suffer asthma, bronchitis, and pulmonary disease.

Wildfire smoke can be seen and smelled but it contains tiny toxic particulates that are invisible to the human eye. These particulates can be comprised of acids, sulphites, nitrates, soot, metals and other things can travel deep into the lungs and the bloodstream.

Some medical researchers suspect that breathing wildfire smoke can increase cancer rates – notably lung and brain cancers. They don’t have much solid evidence of that yet and say more study is needed.

There also are suspicions that wildfire smoke is more harmful to infants and also can affect developing fetuses.

New research published in the June issue of the journal Science of the Total Environment says smoke particulates from wildfires could cause 4,000 to 9,200 premature deaths a year in the U.S.

What has not received much study yet are the effects of wildfire smoke on our mental health.

The constant talk about smokey grey days and waking up to discover you can’t see the far shore of your lake can be stressful and create anxiety. 

Some studies of general air pollution have found that bad air can cause unhappiness and depression. One study has said that air pollution is linked not just to depression and anxiety, but causes some functional changes in the brain.

Especially disturbing is a 2022 study that found wildfire smoke exposure during the school year lowered standardized test scores slightly. 

Older studies of people affected by wildfire smoke in British Columbia and California found no increase in mental-health-related doctor visits or hospitalizations.

Today, however, psychologists are increasingly reporting patients reacting to natural disasters with feelings of loss and grief.

Global warming, drying climate despite wild rain storms and the smoke are triggering worries about the future. How long will this last? What’s next and will it be worse? All questions many of us have and which are questions that disturb our mental well-being.

“Climate change is a mental health issue,” says Nancy Piotrowski, a licensed psychologist representative for the American Psychological Association’s Society for Environmental, Population and Conservation Psychology.

So wildfire smoke is not just getting into our throats and eyes. It’s getting into our heads.