A leaf’s lesson in courage

There is a lesson learned from the tenacious and tiresome winter which, according to the calendar, ended last week.

It comes on an almost-spring breeze that brushes my cheeks as I walk a snow-covered path through a copse of young oaks and beeches that appear to be stone cold dead.

The breeze carries an unhurried clicking sound that is out of place and unnatural in these somnolent woods. I stop to listen and look about to find the source.

Over my shoulder I see a single leaf tossing restlessly in the breeze. It is an oak leaf – brown and brittle - that has clutched its branch desperately through many weeks of blowing snow, freezing rain and bitter temperatures. A single sign of life in an otherwise lifeless forest.

The leaf fluttering on its branch may appear to be a sign of life but it is in fact dead, and has been since last fall. How and why it has clung through the brutal winter is a matter of scientific speculation.

Dead or not, the leaf for me is a lesson in courage. It succumbed in a natural process many months ago but refused to fall, becoming a symbol of resistance to the cruelty of winter.

A few other trees around me also hold dark brown oak and pale tan beech leaves. Some will succumb to early spring winds but others will remain until the new growth of May demands their space.

The botanical term for leaves that do not fall on schedule is marcescence. It’s a word that comes from Latin (whither) but it does not explain why some leaves hang on through the brutish winter months.

The trees I see with dead leaves still attached to their branches are all oaks and beeches (which, incidentally, are related even though their leaves are distinctly different). They are two of just a few deciduous species that refuse to drop all their leaves in autumn. Another common one is hornbeam, which some of us call ironwood.

There are a number of theories why these trees retain some leaves throughout the winter. One is that they hold leaves until spring then drop them to deliver new organic feed that the tree really needs after a long winter hibernation.

Oaks and beeches often grow in poor soil conditions – dry, rocky areas – and even small amounts of nutrients provided by dead leaves in spring are considered helpful to their growth.

Another theory is that dead leaves block blowing snow, forcing it to fall to the base of the tree, thus providing small amounts of much needed water in spring.

Yet another theory is that clinging dead leaves provide some frost protection for buds and new twigs that begin to grow as the weather warms during spring days. And still another study holds that dead leaves help to hide succulent new buds from browsing moose and deer, saving them to grow into new shoots and leaves.

Those theories sound a bit stretched but no one simply made them up. They are based on scientific observations and research studies.

Despite the studies and the bright minds that conduct them, there is no definitive answer why some trees retain leaves they should shed in autumn. We simply do not know why.

And that’s a good thing. It’s good that nature keeps some secrets because without some mysteries life would be very boring.

The German theoretical physicist Max Planck, who won a Nobel Prize in 1918,

had some thoughts on nature’s secrets:

“Science  cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature,” he wrote in his 1933 book Where Is Science Going? “And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”

Mysteries aside, the fact is that even the most stubborn leaves fall eventually, joining millions of others in the miracle of decomposition that provides nutrient rich food for trees and other plants. It’s the perfect example of spent lives providing for new life.

The dead leaves that cling through winter only to drop in spring also provide a bit more raking, which we thought had ended in November. However, raking is a lot better than shovelling snow.

Email: shaman@vianet.ca
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The failed war on drugs

I spot the book on the shelf and am intrigued. It is titled The Border and the author is Don Winslow.

I have not heard of it, nor the author. Still I am intrigued, possibly because the title recalls TV images of displaced people massing on the U.S. southern border, and all the noise about building walls to keep them out.

I am intrigued, but I don’t usually buy books that are 700 pages thick and the last in a series of three, the first two which I have not read. But I do buy The Border, and  I am glad that I did.

It is a work of fiction, entertaining as well as enlightening because it is fiction based on fact. One review describes the research as impeccable.

The Border, plus the other two books in what has become known as the Cartel Trilogy (The Power of the Dog and The Cartel), are about North America’s longest war – the war on drugs.

The war on drugs is almost 50 years old. It was declared in June 1971 by U.S. President Richard (Tricky Dick) Nixon who called the illegal drug trade the enemy of the people. (The current U.S. president has changed the enemy of the people from illicit drugs to the media). 

After half a century, the war on drugs is a pathetic failure. The number of victims increases every year and now can be counted in the hundreds of thousands.

More than 70,000 people died of drug overdoses in the U.S. in 2017. Complete figures for 2018 are not available but will be even higher because drug overdose deaths have increased every year since the late 1990s.

Canadian statistical gathering and reporting is disorganized and bureaucratic, but it is safe to say that 3,000 to 4,000 Canadians die every year of drug overdoses.

Drug overdosing used to be mainly a big city problem. No longer. Statistical evidence shows that opioid poisoning rates are two to three times higher in some small centres than in the big cities.

Reading The Border will give anyone a better understanding of why we are losing the war.

For instance, early in the book the main character, drug war solider Art Keller, is riding a Washington, D.C.-to-New York City train. He stares out the window at the shells of closed factories along the route.

What happened to most of the workers, he wonders, even though he knows the answer. Far too many of them are unemployed and spending their time shooting up smack.

“It’s tempting to think that the root causes of the heroin epidemic are in Mexico,” Keller says to himself. . . . “but the real source is right here and in scores of smaller cities and towns.”

That is a key message about the drug crisis. The problem is rooted not in Mexico nor any other country that produces illicit drugs. The problem is rooted in American and Canadian societies.

Rooted here because we want the drugs. If we did not want the drugs, the illicit market would dry up and blow away. Cartels and drug gangs would disappear. So would the migrant masses crowding the U.S. southern border, all trying to escape the horrors of the drug trafficking wars in Mexico and Central and South America.

Drugs are a response to pain. People take them to escape physical or mental pain. Most illicit drug users want to escape mental pain created by the world around them.

Our approach to illicit drug use has been a military one - hunt down and lock up traffickers and users. Perhaps a better approach is to concentrate on what is causing the pain in our society.

It’s a social health problem. We need to look at the causes and try to eliminate or fix them.

We needn’t look far: shrinking job markets, inequality, poverty, racism, poor educational policies, the rise of far right thinking, the decline or our planet’s natural state and the resulting change in climates.

As the author said in an interview with Time magazine:

“We spend billions of dollars buying the drugs and billions of dollars trying to keep the drugs out. Let’s spend these billions of dollars addressing the roots of the drug problem . . . .”

Suffer the little children?

“The child that is hungry must be fed. The child that is sick must be nursed. the child must be the first to receive relief in times of distress.”

Those are not my words. They are words almost 100 years old. Words from the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child adopted by the League of Nations in 1924.

They are words reinforced by United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child of 1989. This year marks the 30^th anniversary of that convention.

However, too often words are simply letters printed on paper or digital screens. Words require belief, passion and commitment before they can have positive impact.

Millions of words have been written about how we humans treat our children. Declarations of rights have been signed. Laws have been passed. Yet, across large tracts of human society children are abused, allowed to go hungry, sick and uneducated.

The animals of the forest treat their children better than humans treat theirs.

One in every four children now live in countries torn by war or other disaster, says the 2018 Humanitarian Action for Children Report by the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF). It adds that nearly 50 million children have

been uprooted from their homes due to violence, poverty or

natural disasters.

Children are used as pawns in wars. They are recruited as soldiers, some fitted with explosive packs and sent out as suicide bombers.

In Afghanistan 89 per cent of civilian war casualities are children. An estimated 5,000 Afghan children were killed or maimed during the first nine months of 2018.

The United Nations has verified that 1,497 children have died or been maimed in the war there. It also has verified the killing of 870 children in Syria during the first nine months of last year.

But it is not just war that is devastating children. In some villages in India, children deemed old enough – 10 or 11 - are expected to start doing sex work. There are believed to be at least one million child prostitutes in India, where some prostitution is legal.

Child trafficking is booming. Humanium, a children’s charity, says that upwards of 20,000 Ethiopian children, some as young as 10, are sold by their parents in a trade that flourishes on poverty.

When they are not being blown apart or forced into the sex trade, children in many countries are being starved and denied education.

UNICEF says that in war-torn Yemen 30,000 children under five years old die every year of malnutrition-related diseases. The effects of malnutrition will be around long after the conflict ends.

Hospitals and schools are used for military purposes in Yemen and the health and education systems basically have collapsed.

Says Manuel Fontaine, UNICEF Director of Emergency Programmes:

“For too long, parties to conflict have been committing atrocities with near-total impunity, and it is only getting worse. . . . Children living in countries at war have come under direct attack, have been used as human shields, killed, maimed or recruited to fight. Rape, forced marriage and abduction have become standard tactics in conflicts from Syria to Yemen, and from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Nigeria, South Sudan and Myanmar.”

It is not just in far off, under-developed countries that children suffer. UNICEF says that Canada, the world’s fifth most prosperous country, is 25th out of 41 affluent nations ranked for well-being of children. We are ranked near the bottom in terms of key measures on child health, safety and poverty.

In 1989 the Canadian House of Commons voted to eradicate child poverty. Today more than one million Canadian children live in poverty.

Perhaps we humans should take lessons from the animals of the forest on how to treat children. As Jim and Jamie Dutcher note in their new book The Wisdom of Wolves:

“In a wolf pack, there are no forgotten children. Every pup is worth teaching, every pup valued and every pup is eventually expected to make a contribution to the well-being of the pack.”

Meanwhile, the world has 2.2 billion children. One billion, roughly every second child, lives in poverty.

That kind of leaves you wondering who the wild animals of the world really are.

#

Who will WE always be?

It seems ludicrous that any political moment these days could make you proud to be a Canadian. But there was one last week when pride swelled in my chest.

It came watching Jody Wilson-Raybould, Vancouver Liberal member of Parliament, testify before the House of Commons justice committee about her role in the SNC-Lavalin affair. Wilson-Raybould is the former justice minister and attorney-general demoted to veterans affairs minister, a portfolio she resigned soon after.

She appeared before the committee the same day that Michael Cohen, former Trump fixer, appeared before Congress in Washington to call President Trump a con man, a cheat and a racist.

It was yet another bitter, snowy winter day, so I flopped in front of the television and flipped between the Canadian and U.S. hearings. It was educational to see the sharp differences.

The Congressional hearing presumably was held to sweat Cohen for information that might help determine whether President Trump did or did not collude with Russia and obstruct justice. In fact, it was just another political cockfight staged to win fans, also known as voters.

There were few serious attempts to dig out real facts – certainly none by bullying Republican supporters of the president. It was a political circus of pathetic clowns and barking seals.

Some media reports compared it to the television drama The Sopranos. More frightening, it prompted a flashback to historical reports about the collapse of  Congress during the lead up to the U.S. Civil War.

Over in Ottawa, Wilson-Raybould testified there was consistent and sustained pressure from the prime minister and others to have her shelve prosecution of SNC-Lavalin, the Quebec engineering firm facing corruption charges.  

The prime minister worried that following through with prosecution would hurt the company and lead to job losses, which would be bad for the economy. The prime minister’s office wanted a Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA) in which the company would not be prosecuted if it agreed to remediation measures, fines or other undertakings.

The Ottawa hearing was more civil and respectful than the Washington spectacle, however not without moments tainted by political duplicity. There was some pride in seeing that we have not slid as far into the political sewer as the Americans. Not yet.

But the real pride came in watching Wilson-Raybould. She gave us all a clear reminder of the importance of standing up for what you believe, no matter who tells you otherwise. And, no matter what it costs you personally.

She reminded me of my mother, despite the fact that she is the same age as two of our daughters.

Our mothers teach us who we are and what we should stand for. They teach us to conduct ourselves with conviction and dignity. They teach us to consider carefully what we say because words that fly past our lips cannot be taken back.

The SNC-Lavalin affair has developed into a very dirty and nasty fight, and it is not over yet.

Pressure tactics by Justin Trudeau and his people to get Wilson-Raybould to give SNC-Lavalin a pass on criminal charges were not illegal. Wilson-Raybould has said that herself. That does not mean that they were ethically acceptable or the right thing to do.

Trudeau says they were appropriate tactics. Wilson-Raybould says they were not.

This is a fight the honourable lady cannot win. Power and politics, jobs and money,  trump honour and higher principles.

One would have thought that rational and intelligent people could have found a way early on to prevent this affair from morphing into the mess it is. That is too much to expect in the politics of today.

The best solution now is for Wilson-Raybould to walk. Quit the Liberal party, quit Parliament and accept that there is not room for higher-minded people in the politics of today.

She is an intelligent, principled person with strong core values. What she has to offer is wasted on political life but of great value to other parts of Canadian life.

Her most important words to Parliament are contained in the final paragraph of her closing remarks to the justice committee:

“This is who I am and who I will always be.”

Canadians need to think hard about who we are and who we will always want to be.

Email: shaman@vianet.ca
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