Thoughts about autumn

Trees, I believe, are smarter than humans. They are more grounded, obviously, but they also have an advanced sense of life, a more mature understanding of what it is all about.

Humans see life as individual time frames with beginnings and ends. Trees see life as infinite – forever possible through change and renewal.

As autumn tiptoes across our landscapes, and trees shed their summer clothing, we humans feel a sense of sadness. The sun weakens, shadows lengthen, vegetation begins to die. We have a feeling of good things having ended.

Summer, with its sun, fun and freedoms, has gone and left us sadly anticipating the bleakness of winter, which can be restrictive, confining and at times downright cruel. It is a time of change and change is something that most of us dislike and struggle against.

Trees, however, see autumn more positively. Autumn is an interregnum, a pause allowing time to prepare for changes needed for the continuation of life. Trees have an important role in the preparations.

Trees are diligent gardeners tending their close-at-hand plots with varying methods of cultivating and seeding. Muscular oaks hurl down acorns containing precious embryos for new life, while the gloriously-crowned maples helicopter their seed pods to the surrounding soil.

Seeds delivered, trees then float millions of dying leaves to the ground where they decay and create rich nutrients that soil needs for growth.

There is no immediate or apparent result from the trees’ autumn work. Many months must pass before the first indications of new life will appear.

But unlike we antsy humans, trees are patient and long suffering. They stand naked in the freezing winter winds, firm in their faith that the natural forces guiding all earth events will bring back longer hours of sun and warmth.

It’s not that humans don’t enjoy and appreciate autumn. The cool air it brings to replace oppressive heat and humidity is much welcome. So are the autumn days and evenings without stinging bugs and flies. Outside activities are fewer perhaps, but fewer active people around also means more serenity.

However, our appreciation of autumn is not deep enough. It is too self-centred. It lacks an understanding of the season’s important connection to other seasons and the continuation of life through millennia, not just years.  

Trees demonstrate that understanding each September. We would do well to try to build a better understanding of autumn every time the trees begin to drop their seeds and shed their brilliant leaves.

It is not outrageous to say that trees can provide us with some wisdom and better understanding.

However, each year there are fewer trees to look to for their wisdom. The most recent assessments show that the world’s forest area decreased from 31.6 per cent of global land area to 30.6 per cent during the 25-year period 1990 to 2015. It is estimated that trees once covered 50 per cent of earth’s land mass.

The pace of loss has been slowing in recent years thanks to increased awareness of trees and their importance to all life. That’s really great news.

The not-so-good news is that much forest reduction is the result of clearing land to house and feed a growing human population. The current world population is roughly 7.6 billion and is expected to swell to 10 billion people in the next 30 years.

Studies estimate that population growth by 2050 will force the global demand for food to grow by 50 per cent. More mouths to feed means more land for planting, which means more trees have to be cut.

There are other concerns, notably fires, especially in the Amazon which is home to the world’s largest and most important tropical forest. Then there is climate change and how it might affect the land. And, of course anti-conservation politicians who seem determined to wipe out the conservation gains of recent decades, all in the name of progress.

Just looking at trees, especially in autumn, offers some understanding, and hope for the future. Trees have been here helping to perpetruate life for 360 million years without negatively altering the planet.

Humans, in our modern form, have been here a mere 200,000 years, generally wreaking havoc. The trees must know something that we don’t know.

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Winning the biggest race

H. G. Wells, the English author of The War of the Worlds, once wrote that human history “becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”

In today’s unsettled times it appears that catastrophe is winning.

Despite literacy rates increasing, the world seems less civil, less tolerant and less well-ordered. Those three characteristics all are products of good education. Education, and the human qualities it allows us to develop, is our best defence against catastrophes.

That’s worth thinking about as millions of children return to schools where they will receive classroom teaching in mathematics, reading and writing, science and other traditional subjects. If they are lucky, they might get some lessons on how to become better human beings.

It’s that last sentence that has me wondering whether our education systems need a rebalancing in terms of what and how they teach. Are they teaching too much of the stuff that helps us to acquire high-paying, high-influence work, and not enough about how to be thoughtful, caring, ethical individuals?

Certainly there is ample evidence that our society needs a heavy dose of education on how to behave.

Bullying, for instance, has become a major issue in our schools. On our streets and highways, road rage is costing us much in money, injuries and deaths. On social media and other Internet sites we see people who toss aside thoughtfulness and tolerance the moment their fingers touch a keyboard.

In politics we see purposeful dialogue abandoned in favour of boisterous intolerance, totally lacking civility. Many politicians forget, or simply ignore, the fact that there is a critical link between civility and ethics.

Respect for others is a cornerstone of ethics, which teaches us to treat people with empathy and not simply for our own personal advantage.

Our school systems should put more emphasis on, and more resources into, teaching character building. They could take a page – in fact a few pages – from what I consider to be the very best of educations; the Jesuit school system.

Yes, Jesuit education is faith based, part of the Roman Catholic Church which has its own problems. But look beyond the religious connection to see how the Jesuit system teaches the best of human values. It is a system that promotes intellectual competence, a commitment to justice and openness to growth.

It aims to train leaders in fields ranging from politics, to entertainment and sports. Anyone who looks up a list of Jesuit alumni might be surprised to see the number of names in leadership positions.

Not all Jesuit educated persons follow the lessons of commitment to justice and ethical values. A recent example is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who argued last week that jobs are more important than ethics.

That basically was his response to the Ethics Commissioner’s report that he violated the Conflict of Interest Act when he tried to have then-justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould let Quebec-based engineering firm SNC-Lavalin off the hook on criminal charges.

It is not that the prime minister did not know that what he was doing was ethically wrong. His early education was at College Jean-de-Brebeuf, the Jesuit school also attended by his father Pierre, Canada’s 15^th prime minister.

However, that’s a discussion for another time, in another place and by other people. The point here is that the Jesuit education system, as well as some others, offers  examples of what is needed in our public school systems.

Our public schools need more emphasis on teaching students how to take responsibility for themselves, as well as how to advocate intelligently for themselves and their beliefs and principles. They need to teach students the need to gather and analyse facts before making judgments.

Many potential catastrophes exist in our world. Wars, climate change, mass migrations of people, drug epidemics, gun violence are just a few that threaten our existence. However, all potential catastrophic problems can be solved, or at least alleviated.

The keys to our continued existence are better educated populations, which can be built by making education our most important priority.

Ours has become a world of thoughtless social media, too much junk TV and ‘populist’ leaders who talk and think like gangsters.

We can do better with better education, and win the race against catastrophe.

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Without change could this be our future too?

And so it begins; the second American Civil War.

It is not like the first American Civil War (1861-1865) with uniformed armies shooting at

each other, but there are frightening similarities. The first civil war started when the political system failed to resolve differences over the spread of slavery.

This one is civil upheaval resulting from a political system unable to reconcile the differences between two distinct populations of citizens with different values. The differences have hardened into hatred infecting the two main political parties, the right-wing Republicans and the leftist Democrats. The centre seems to have disappeared.

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This second civil war has been a long time developing, most notably since the divisive Viet Nam War of 50 years ago. All the signs have been obvious but ignored because this could not happen to “the greatest nation on earth.”

When a country’s institutions deteriorate, when citizens begin rejecting authority, and when a political system can no longer bring people together, civil war begins.  In the U.S., the Congress is frozen in a state of intolerance for other political views, the justice system has been weakened by the country’s own leaders, and the Supreme Court has become politicized, rendering it less respected, and less effective.

Critical issues such as climate change, global migration, health care and collapsing infrastructure are not being addressed and will not be solved in a country at war with itself. Also, there is a danger that countries such as Russia, China and North Korea will find advantages in the weakened U.S.

The actual start of first civil war was easy to pinpoint. Soldiers of the confederacy of pro-slavery states attacked and captured Fort Sumter near Charleston, South Carolina in April 1861.

Identifying the actual start of this second civil war is not so easy. My guess is that July 23 just passed is when this one officially began.

On that day, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrived in the outskirts of Nashville, Tennessee. ICE is the federal agency that has been rounding up thousands of undocumented immigrants and holding them in makeshift prisons.

They were trying to get a man and his 12-year-old son, who had locked themselves in a van. The ICE agents planned to grab them when they left the van to go into their house.

However, neighbours gathered and formed a human chain around the van, allowing the man and his son to get out of the van and into their house

ICE had called in the local police, who just stood and watched, saying they would not get involved unless fighting broke out and they had to keep the peace. When citizens form up to stop federal law enforcement officers, I call that a sign of civil war. When local police refuse to be involved, I call that a sign of civil war.

Another sign is refusal of many victims of recent mass shootings to meet the president who came to visit them.

Even if you don’t believe civil war has started it is hard not to believe there will be one soon. Recent polling shows that roughly one-third of Americans expect civil war within the next five years.

Supporting that are rising gun sales, which increased 3.8 per cent over the last year. There now are believed to be 400 million firearms in the hands of Americans.

All those guns – more than one for each American man, woman and child – are not being used for hunting and recreational shooting. Many Americans you talk to will say people are buying them for protection against increasing violence and the possibility of civil war.

Hate groups continue to grow in the U.S., not just the white supremacists of the right but loosely-organized Antifa (Anti-Fascist) groups, which have been showing up more prominently at high-profile public rallies to protest, sometimes violently, racism and hate.

There is a lesson here for Canadians, particularly the politicians seeking election this fall. They need to stop the nasty, vindictive politicking and talk about how they can respect each other and work together to give ordinary citizens the things they need to have better lives.

If they won’t, and continue to work on behalf of their parties instead of the people, we can turn our gazes south and see our future.

Rockin’ in the corn patch

I’m following the lead of Donnie Trump. I’m withdrawing from a treaty and building a wall.

I have to do it to stop thieving neighbours from stealing my corn. Every year, come late summer, they sneak into my garden at night and strip the corn stalks clean. Not a single cob left for me to enjoy.

I’ve tried to coexist peacefully with them, allowing them to roam my property freely. And this is how they treat me. Sneaking around at night with their masks, ringed bushy tails and nimble fingers.

So I have withdrawn from our treaty and am building a wall. What else could I do? This is not the United States so I can’t just shoot them.

I bought several rolls of poultry fencing and have been busy stretching it around my modest corn patch. Now I am dreaming of the little bandits pacing back and forth outside the fence, whining about being locked away from those cobs of sweet golden kernels.

I have given this much thought because, unlike Donnie Trump, I do not consider the enemy stupid. These bandits, in fact, are quite intelligent.

The Ojibwe people called them ahrah-koon-em, meaning they could do things with their hands, which have long, flexible fingers that allow them to steal anything in sight.

These guys are so smart that some studies show that once they find a solution to a problem, they can remember it three years later. I have a hard time remembering day to day where I leave my car keys.

Back in 1908 the ethologist H. B. Davis found that raccoons were able to open 11 of 13 complex locks in fewer than 10 tries. Also, they could repeat the unlocking when the locks were rearranged or turned upside down.

They also have terrific memories for recalling places where they have found food, and travel long distances to return to those places. I witnessed that several years ago.

A raccoon was at our compost bin, banging and chewing and waking us up in the middle of the night. So I bought one of those no-hurt-‘em cage traps, caught him and transported him several miles down the highway.

I left the trap armed and two days later I had another raccoon. He looked very familiar but I figured he was the other guy’s brother or some other relative. I transported him down the highway.

Two days later another raccoon appeared in the trap.

“That’s the same raccoon,” my wife said.

“Impossible,” I said, loading him into the boat to take him across the lake to the end of a deep bay where the forest is thick, wild and isolated.

We had peace for a few days. Then one morning I got up and found a raccoon in the trap.

“It is definitely the same guy,” said my wife. “Look at the way he grins at you.”

A heated debate ensued, ending when I said I would prove it was not the same raccoon returning time and again. I took an aerosol can of fluorescent orange paint, sprayed his tail and boated him to the end of the lake.

I figured I now had cleared my property of all raccoons, presumably that first guy and all his family.

Four or five days passed before my wife ran in to tell me the trap was filled again. Another raccoon, this one with an orange tail!

Friends tell me that my fencing efforts will fail because the raccoons will climb the chicken wire or tunnel under it. The prize on the other side is too tasty to ignore.

If they do get in I have another plan. I have read that if you put a portable radio near the corn patch they will stay away. It can’t be tuned to a music station, however, because they love music to steal by.

It has to be tuned to an all-talk station, which fools them into thinking that live humans are guarding the patch.

There is no electricity at the garden and I am concerned about the batteries failing. I worry that I could arrive at the garden one morning, and find the batteries dead and the corn gone.  Or arriving and finding the corn gone, and the radio playing rock ‘n roll.

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