Only individual passion can save the planet?

“All the rainbows in the sky

Start to weep, then say goodbye
You won't be seeing rainbows any more . . . .”

I was listening to those lyrics when I opened a newspaper to a shocking new United Nations report on the state of nature. The lyrics are from Roy Orbison’s 1964 rock ballad ‘It’s Over.’

When I finished reading the UN report I feared Orbison was right – it is over. We are well on the way to having destroyed our planet. 

I admit that listening to Orbison can cause someone to view the world darkly. His music often was dark, sad and lonely, much like the singer himself. 

Orbison had reason to be sad. His first wife, whom he divorced because of her infidelity then remarried her, died in a motorcycle accident. A couple of years later two of his sons died in a house fire. 

For all his troubles, Orbison did not have to worry about pollution and climate change destroying the world. They were not big issues back then. 

They are now and the just-released UN report - Global Biodiversity Outlook 5 – says that in the past 10 years the world has not fully met a single target to slow the destruction of wildlife and life-sustaining ecosystems. 

Twenty targets to reduce pressures on our natural world were agreed to by 193 countries meeting in Japan in 2010 for the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. Despite some progress, says the report, a large number of species are threatened, natural habitats continue to disappear and governments still offer hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies that allow environmental damage. 

Also, the Living Planet Report 2020, produced by the World Wildlife Federation (WWF) and the Zoological Society of London, reported that earth’s wildlife populations have declined dramatically because of human overconsumption. 

There was an average 68-per-cent decrease in mammal, bird, amphibian, reptile and fish populations between 1970 and 2016, said the report. 

It adds that nature is declining at a rate unprecedented in millions of years. Deforestation and conversion of wild lands for agriculture were cited as two main reasons. 

“The way we produce and consume food and energy, and the blatant disregard for the environment entrenched in our current economic model, has pushed the natural world to its limits,” Marco Lambertini, WWF director general, writes in the foreword to the report. 

All this has led to humanity at a crossroads, says Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, the UN’s biodiversity head. It’s a crossroads that will decide how future generations experience nature.

“Earth’s living systems as a whole are being compromised,” she says. “And the more humanity exploits nature in unsustainable ways and undermines its contributions to people, the more we undermine our own well-being, security and prosperity.” 

What is needed urgently, says the Living Planet report, is a deep cultural and systemic shift to a society and economic system that stop taking nature for granted and “recognises that we depend on nature more than nature depends on us.” 

The countries signed on to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity are supposed to meet next May in China to finalize targets for the current decade. 

The meetings continue, the targets get set and the reports flow, but little changes. 

Real progress is hampered by the bureaucratic blob that feeds off slow-moving governments and institutions like the UN. 

The changes needed are to our lifestyles and they won’t come about quickly through government and its bureaucracies. They will happen if people passionately want them to happen and begin taking individual actions that lead to group action. 

Margaret Mead, the American cultural anthropologist prominent in the 1960s-70s, had that figured out long ago. 

“Never ever depend on governments or institutions to solve any major problems,” she said. “All social change comes from the passion of individuals.” 

The recent reports are depressing enough to put Orbison’s ‘It’s Over’ on replay. 

However, another report, released this month by Newcastle University and BirdLife International, says 28 bird and mammal extinctions have been prevented by conservation efforts in the last 27 years. 

Hopefully Margaret Mead’s faith in individual passion will be proven out and more extinctions will be prevented as people decide it is time to become stewards of nature, instead of simple users.

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Cottage country facing change?

The annual lull after the storm of summer visitors to cottage country doesn’t seem to have materialized as fully as in past years. 

Lake access parking lots still hold plenty of vehicles. Town and village streets remain relatively busy. Post Labour Day traffic hasn’t lightened as much as might be expected. 

More people seem to be lingering this year. Perhaps it’s the weather, or maybe it’s a result of Covid-19. 

If the latter, I’m wondering whether we will see some dramatic changes in the future of cottage country. 

The Covid pandemic brought some changes with its late winter appearance. Concerned people bailed out of cities to head north and take refuge in cottages. Many were retirees, especially concerned because the virus was affecting older people more than others. 

Then businesses began closing to lessen spreading the infection, leaving some folks out of work, others forced to work from home. Many of them found themselves free to move to cottages while waiting for the virus threat to pass. 

The virus prevented people from travelling very far. In some cases, money saved from cancelled travel went into making cottages more comfortable, or had people out looking for cottages to rent or buy.

Covid aside, more people in general are yearning for an escape from modern realities and a return to nature, a simpler past and slower and safer lifestyle. The Wall Street Journal reported in July that 39 per cent of urban dwellers in the United States are thinking about moving to rural areas because of the pandemic and the increasing chaos of urban life. 

You can find more evidence of this on the Internet where the hashtag #cottagecore is driving millions of searches for old-fashioned cozy cottage lifestyles. 

Perhaps all this is temporary, just a panic-twinged reaction to the chaotic events of 2020. When Covid is controlled and memories of other chaos begin to fade, most people perhaps will settle into the life they had before 2020. 

However, if the interest in rural and cottage country living continues, and more and more people opt for it, the changes will be dramatic. There will be benefits, as well as disadvantages. 

More population means strain on services, including hospitals, policing and various utilities. More strain will require more staffing, which could bring more extensive medical care and other servicing. 

Population growth also will spur more business activity, which will require more employment. More people mean more homes, more building, more renovations and therefore more construction-related jobs. 

Larger populations also bring the problems that many urban dwellers now would like to leave behind – crowding, crime, horrendous traffic and pollution. 

Some people will favour any change. Others will be unhappy with disruption of life as they have known it. 

Whatever happens, whether it be small or huge, there will be change. It is inevitable, as we have seen in the past. 

My introduction to cottaging a long time ago was to one-room cabins built of logs hewn by hand and with spaces stuffed with moss to keep out critters and cold. Water came from pails hauled from the lake, and light came from coal oil lamps. 

That was in northwestern Ontario where cottages were (and still are) called camps.

Those very basic cottages, or camps, have evolved into mega-cottages with modern electrical or gas appliances and electronic gadgets that connect us to the outside world. 

The world evolves, and evolution naturally brings changes. We can’t avoid changes to many of the physical aspects of cottage country. But what we can protect from change is the most important and most valued part of cottage life – the cottage country state of mind. 

The cottage always has been a place to take a mental break from urban life. It’s the place where simple things like the call of a loon or the breeze rustling tree branches remind us that nature is our most precious asset. 

Nature is our greatest teacher. It reminds us who we really are and what our place really is in the greater scheme of things. It is constantly showing us what is right and what is wrong. 

Every teacher needs a well-equipped classroom, and nature’s classroom is cottage country. 

Misinformation: The cancer among us

It was a pleasant late summer day. A perfect day for some relaxing recreation, so a buddy and I hopped on ATVs and headed off to Sherborne Lake, one of the county’s most beautiful areas.

The lake’s sand beach at the end of the Sherborne access road is a relaxing place to sit, stare out over the sun-kissed water and think.

 

On the beach were two fellows who had just disembarked, beers in hand, from a pickup truck. We exchanged greetings and chatted about the beauty of the place.

 

One of the guys turned the conversation to the greatness of America and how Donald Trump had made it even greater. Americans now were enjoying tax cuts, the flood of Chinese products had been stopped and even Canada had been put in its place with a new North America trade agreement.

 

I felt sick to my stomach and said I had to leave because there were a lot of trees I had to see before the afternoon faded.

 

It wasn’t the reference to Trump that turned my stomach. Americans can elect or not elect whoever they wish. It’s their country, not mine.

 

What turned my stomach was that nothing the guy (a Canadian from southern Ontario) said was based on fact. It was yet another example of misinformation passed along by someone who had not bothered to get properly informed.

 

Organized misinformation and disinformation campaigns, plus individual lying, have hit epidemic proportions in our society.  

 

“Forget allergy season – it’s heightened lying season,” celebrity life coach Lauren Zander is quoted in the June issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.

 

She’s not kidding. Snopes, the fact-checking website, reports record-breaking traffic this year. During the period from late February to late March the site had 37 million visitors, a 43-percent increase from the previous month.

 

Some of that increase can be tied to the confusion caused by the politicization of the Covid-19 pandemic. When it comes to their health, people want clear-cut facts, which they have not been getting during this pandemic.

 

But Covid-19 is not the only reason why Snopes and other fact-checkers are getting more business than they can handle. Lying is becoming a major part of 21^st century living.

 

Experts who study lying say the number of lies told by the average person has been increasing. One study early this year said the average person tells 1.65 lies per day.

 

In its May issue, Forbes magazine had an article by a professor whose research found that U.S. President Donald Trump told an average of 23.2 lies each day.

 

Serious lying has become a significant tool for politicians and their parties. That was evident in the 2016 U.S. election and the United Kingdom Brexit votes and elections around the same time.

 

So evident that the Oxford Dictionary chose ‘post-truth’ as its 2016 word of the year. Post-truth is an adjective denoting the effectiveness of appeals to emotions and personal beliefs while ignoring the actual facts.

 

Assisting the spread of false or inaccurate information is the decline of professional news media jobs. The Canadian Media Guild has estimated that 10,000 media jobs have been lost in recent years, many of them newsroom jobs in which reporters and editors work to deliver factual stories.

 

The Pew Research Centre reports that in U.S. newsrooms employment dropped 23 per cent between 2008 and 2019.

 

Also, various research indicates that more than one-half of people get their ‘news’ from social media sites such as U-Tube, Twitter and Facebook. Yet, most of the ‘news’ on social media is at best unprofessional without fact checking or, at worst, pure gossip or deliberate misinformation.

 

The good news is that more people are becoming aware of the cancerous spread of misinformation and the danger it presents to democracies. One group of concerned folks has formed a movement promoting the Pro-Truth Pledge which asks politicians, government officials and people at large to commit to truth-oriented behaviour and to protect facts and civility in debates.

 

Each one of us must do what we can to stop the misinformation epidemic. We need to speak out when we see and hear politicians, government officials, advertisers - even friends - distorting the truth.  

 

Truth builds bonds that make a society great. Untruths break those bonds.

 

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Killing the cormorants

The big black bird controversy that got its modern start almost 400 years ago is raging again.

It was back in the 1660s that the English poet John Milton stoked the controversy in the epic poem Paradise Lost. In it, Milton portrays Satan breaking into the Garden of Eden and sitting high up on The Tree of Life “like a cormorant.”

A bit earlier, Shakespeare had used the word cormorant in four plays as a synonym for voracious.

Cormorants are homely water birds the size of a small goose. They have long snaky necks that help give them a gangly, creepy appearance. And, they are deep black, like the raven, which also has a controversial reputation.

Seen up close, cormorants actually display some good looks and colour – yellow-orange face and throat, sparkling aquamarine eyes and a bright blue mouth seen when their beaks are open.
However, they have no lovely song and no likeable movements. They don’t have good public relations because there is no cormorant version of Bambi to touch people’s hearts.

They are much disliked, not just because of their evil look, but because they eat fish and foul any territory they occupy. Their feces are highly acidic and kill plants in areas where they accumulate in numbers.

As a result, property owners and sports fishermen complain and campaign to get rid of them.

So, this fall the Ontario government will allow cormorants, which have been protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, to be hunted. Licensed hunters will be allowed to kill 15 cormorants a day between Sept. 15 and Dec. 31.

Fifty years ago, cormorants were approaching extinction in many parts of North America. The overuse of DDT and other powerful pesticides caused their eggs to thin, killing reproduction.
Pesticide controls and bans helped them, and other bird populations, to recover. Now there is an abundance of cormorants – some people say far too many.

Not everyone views these birds as ugly and evil pests. In many fishing villages throughout Asia they are considered the fishing equivalent of a hunting dog. In Yunnan Province, China they are tethered to boats and trained to catch fish for the local boatmen.
And back in 2002, the people of Skerries, Ireland, used town beautification funds to erect a bronze statue of a cormorant standing on a rock with its wings spread.

The Ontario cormorant hunt raises troubling questions. First, is it a hunt, or a cull – an easy way to reduce cormorant populations and public complaints?

Truly traditional hunting is about getting food to eat. It rests on the ethic that all living creatures are important, and their lives must be respected and taken only for food, clothing or another living thing’s survival.

Cormorants are not good food. Some coastal Indigenous people did eat them but found them very difficult to pluck and the meat tough and fishy tasting.

The Bible (Leviticus 11:17) warns that cormorants are a fowl that should not be eaten:

“And these are they which you shall hold in abomination among the fowls; they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination . . . . “

Some British apparently ignored that Biblical warning and ate roasted cormorants during the food shortages of the Second World War. Icelanders also are known to eat cormorants, as well as puffins and gulls. Neither nation is known for its food connoisseurship.

There is little expectation that cormorants shot by hunters in Ontario will be eaten. My concern is that they will be shot simply because they are there to be shot and they will be left to rot.
That’s not hunting. It’s killing for the sport of killing.

Humans consider themselves first and most important of the world’s creatures. Therefore, anything that bothers us or upsets our lifestyles needs to be altered or eliminated.

Cases can be made for culling in certain circumstances. For instance, a swamp area might need to be sprayed to eliminate biting mosquitoes that infect humans with malaria.

Maybe cormorants need to be culled. I don’t know because I don’t have all the facts.

But if experts who know the science and do the studies advise that cormorant populations be reduced, don’t call it what it isn’t.

It’s culling, not hunting.

The voice in the grapevine

I was having a genuinely down moment saying goodbye at the end of a physical distancing visit to my son’s home in Hamilton.

We don’t get to see our children and grandchildren often now because of the pandemic. And when we do we can’t hug them, shake hands or even get close to them.

It’s depressing, not just for us but for millions of others.

I was already feeling down when I arrived for the visit. I had fought the miserable Toronto area traffic to get to my dentist’s office. After some less-than-joyful poking, drilling and grinding I was back cursing the Highway 403 traffic en route to Hamilton.

The visit was outside and brief and as we were saying goodbye, my son pointed to an alluring grapevine canopy at the rear of his house. He told me raccoons were driving him crazy, sneaking into the vines late at night and making off with the fruit.

As I listened, I put out my hand and leaned against the grapevine’s trunk. My down mood lifted as the vine’s energy pulsed beneath my fingertips.

“That’s from Compare Frank,” my son said. “He gave me a slip from one of his vines when we moved here many years ago.”

I clutched tightly the trunk, now the thickness of a large man’s wrist, and felt a surge of optimism and love of life. I was feeling the positive energy of my good friend Compare Frank. Although he passed away five years ago, I could feel his spirit flowing in that vine.

Compare Frank was Francesco Covella, my pal and the kid brother I never had. We called each other Compare, the Italian reference for comrade, or godfather.

The energy in the vine got me thinking about the Covid crisis and Compare Frank. How would he handle the pandemic, which has become one of the saddest periods of many people’s lives?

Sad not just because of the separation from family and friends. Not just because we can’t shake someone’s hand, or place a hand on their shoulder, or any of those other signs of goodwill and appreciation.

Sad because of all the hard-working, expectant folks who put their dreams and their money into small businesses that are suffering horribly. Sad because of the folks who are having trouble meeting the rent or the mortgage payment because their jobs have been suspended for months.

In a way I am glad Compare Frank is not here to witness the sadness, suffering and the nastiness that this pandemic has brought. They are the antithesis of his style of living, which was to be happy and work through difficulties with perseverance and patience.

I’ll never forget the scene when Compare Frank decided my old house in Ottawa needed a bigger basement. The project would require breaking concrete and digging out a nine by 12 space with hand shovels.

  

“It can’t be done,” I cried with unrestrained disgust.

Compare Frank turned his calloused palms upward and shrugged his shoulders.

“Compare,” he said, calling me by the special name bestowed when he had become my son’s godfather, “this is not difficult if you don’t want it to be. Let me teach you.”

The basement room got dug out, as I later recalled in a Readers’ Digest story, and in this column.

Compare Frank taught me not just how to shovel properly, but how to work through life’s difficult times.

This pandemic is more difficult than shovelling out a basement, no matter how deep or how hard the earth. There is the stress of having to remember to wear masks, avoid crowds, keep two metres space between everyone, including friends and family, and give up many things that are important parts of our normal lives.

A contrarian attitude about masks and physical distancing, and complaining about the inconveniences, distracts us from the critical work of overcoming the Covid-19 virus. We need to focus exclusively on getting the job done.

A week has passed since my visit and I still hear Compare Frank’s voice pulsing through the grapevine that he gave to his godson:

“Don’t think about how difficult the work is, or how much more remains to be done. Think positive and persevere. Focus on the task to overcome it, one shovelful at a time.”

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Mushrooms and dirty diapers

When I walk the woods these days I realize that I am seeing only a fraction what is here.

The trees, the low-growing bushes and the animals all are obvious. I see the white birches, the maples, magnificent oaks and pines, as well as the ferns and blueberry bushes.

Sometimes a deer or a bear slips quickly and quietly in and out of my view. The insects are not nearly as shy and cautious. They are seen, heard, and felt.

It’s easy to think of these abundant species of the plant and animal kingdoms as our entire world. They are only a part of it.

Unseen – actually hidden from us – are many thousands of species that are an important part of the forest. In fact, this forest would not exist without them.

These are the 144,000 of known species of organisms that make up nature’s third kingdom – the kingdom of fungi. Some experts believe there may be as many as two to almost four million species of fungi.

Despite those huge numbers, fungi have not been given the same prominence and amount of study as plants and animals. Only now are we starting to understand the importance of fungi, and their possible help in solving the problems of our future.

My interest in fungi was limited to mushrooms, so prominent this month on the forest floor after the recent rains, or the brown fungus that sometimes forms on a toenail. Other commonly-known fungi are yeast, rust, mildew and mould.

That has changed since a friend gave me a fascinating new book titled Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our World, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures. The author is British biologist-writer Merlin Sheldrake, a magical moniker for a magical subject.

It is a complex book, but fascinating and readable, with page after page packed with information about the importance of fungi. I finished reading it with a sense that study of the fungi kingdom has been neglected in favour of plants and animals research.

Yet it was fungi that helped plants to begin living on land millions of years ago.

Some biologists believe that 90 per cent of living plants have a life-giving relationship with fungal networks entangled in their roots.

It’s a really cool relationship – tentacled fungi networks living deep in the dark soil help the tree to absorb moisture and minerals. In return, the tree collects sunlight, carbon dioxide and moisture from the open air to produce nutrients that it shares with fungi.

But most fascinating is the idea that fungi are not just the dumb and dirty little organisms that cannot communicate the way animals and some plants do. Entangled Life notes that some experts believe that fungal networks monitor large streams of data as part of their everyday existence.

Sheldrake speculates that if we were somehow able to tap into those fungal data streams we could learn more about the ecosystem, including soil quality, water purity and pollution.

We humans believe that a brain or mind is needed to have intelligence and cognition. Fungi do not have brains or minds but maybe they have other ways of gaining intelligence and knowledge and understanding – ways that we cannot see or understand.

Naturalist Charles Darwin, best known for his theory of evolution, wrote 150 years ago:

“Intelligence is based on how efficient a species becomes at doing the things they need to survive.”

Fungi certainly have found some way of staying alive and helping plants and animals – we humans included – to do likewise.

Fungi are important to humans. They help to provide us food such as mushrooms, bread, cheese and, of course, beer. They are important in making life-saving medicines such as penicillin, and chemicals.

Some fungi have powerful appetites for pollutants. Entangled Lives notes they can consume cigarette butts, some herbicides, crude oil, some plastics and even baby diapers.

One research project showed that a certain fungus consumed 85 per cent of a mass of soiled diapers over two years. During the process, the fungus produced edible oyster mushrooms that had no trace of human disease.

Anything that can turn dirty diapers into delicious oyster mushrooms surely offers some good possibilities for cleaning up our increasingly polluted world.

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A little dab’ll do ya!

From Shaman’s Rock

By Jim Poling Sr.

I am hopelessly out of touch with the world of 2020.

My hair has led me to that realization. I haven’t had it cut for five and half months and people have started to call me Doc, after Dr. Emmett Brown, the absent-minded professor in the movie Back to Future. Doc, with his wild grey curls, often looked like he had just stuck his finger in an electric light bulb socket. 

So, I needed something to tame my wild and crazy mane. My mind quickly drifted back decades to the days when my dad introduced me to Brylcreem, a favourite men’s hair cream in those days.

That memory set off a famous jingle dancing in my head,

“Brylcreem, a little dab’ll do ya!

“Brylcreem, you look so debonair.

“Brylcreem, the gals will pursue ya,

Simply rub a little in your hair!”

Brylcreem, a dab the size of a dime would style, strengthen and condition your hair. I wondered if it was still being made so I asked Google.

Google told me that Brylcreem was invented in Britain in 1928 by a company called County Chemicals in Birmingham. It was an emulsion of water and mineral oil stabilized by beeswax. It rapidly became popular, notably among Royal Air Force (RAF) pilots during the Second World War. These guys became known as the Brylcreem Boys.

My dad did not serve in the RAF but he was a Brylcreem Boy. He always had a tube of it on his dresser. And, as part of my growing up ritual he made sure I had a tube of my own.

I used it faithfully, trying to slick back my curls in hopes of developing the duck-cut style of the rock ‘n roll generation. But I never recall the gals pursuing me.

Then came the brush cut era and Brylcreem and I parted company.

Google tipped me that Brylcreem was still alive and reasonably well despite its advanced age. Unilever, that British-Dutch giant that sells more than 400 brands of food, products, drinks, and personal care products in almost 200 countries, was selling it in stores across the U.S. and Canada.

So out shopping I went, breaking the pandemic isolation that had me looking like Doc Brown. I really needed a tube of Brylcreem to get my head slickly under control.

My first stop was a popular large department store with a personal care products section the size of Yankee stadium. There was row upon row upon row of shelving loaded with enough shampoos, conditioners, and hair goos to grease 100 rock bands for a lifetime.

The last time I had gone looking at hair products, a few bottles or tubes of shampoo and hair conditioners occupied a tiny corner of one shelf. Now there were hundreds of all shapes, sizes and labelling screaming, “Pick Me!”

There was a shea butter conditioner with your choice of bentonite clay or charcoal. And, a ‘strong roots’ coconut oil with a label showing sliced coconut, plus an extra virgin oil conditioner with a photo of some tasty-looking Frantoio olives.

Back in the old days, mom scolded us to eat our fruits, vegetables and nuts, not rub them into our hair.

Most appetizing of all was an egg protein hair product whose label featured a golden waffle being smeared with egg yolk and maple syrup. I couldn’t imagine someone plastering their hair with such a scrumptious meal in a bottle.

I wondered if the 2020 version of Brylcreem would be that yummy. I never tasted it when I was a boy, but knew of someone who did. In Season 2 of The Sopranos, Junior Soprano said to a colleague:

"The Federal Marshals are so far up my . . . I can taste Brylcreem."

He didn’t describe the taste.

Despite the hundreds of hair goos and other hair stuff on the endless rows of shelves, there was no Brylcreem.

I did find it online, however, and when I need more I won’t have to go to a store and become confused about whether I’m in the hair products or grocery aisle.

Better still, maybe the Covid pandemic will end someday, I’ll get a haircut and Brylcreem can return to the past.

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