Looking to nature for safer roads

The dragonfly is seen in many parts of the world as a symbol of adaptability and transformation.

I see the dragonfly differently as I sit on my waterfront deck and watch squadrons of them zip, zoom and soar, capturing dozens of mosquitos, midges and other little irritating bugs.
 
I see the dragonfly as control. Control to achieve balance.

Dragonflies are a superb control for mosquitos, which are an annoyance at the least, and a deadly force at most. The world needs mosquitos, but not an overabundance of them, and dragonflies help to make sure that there is not.

On the wing, an adult dragonfly is believed to eat 100 or more mosquitos every day. As larva, they kill even more in the water where mosquitos breed.

That’s the wonder of nature, providing effective control and balance in an effort to avoid catastrophe.

And, that’s something that human society has difficulty with. We just can’t seem to exercise the balance and control needed to keep us all safe and happy.
 
There was yet another heart-tearing example of this last week in Brampton.
Teacher Karolina Ciasullo, 37, and daughters Klara, 6; Lilianna, 4; and Mila, 1; were killed when a sports car smashed into their van in a Brampton-area intersection. The sports car driver, a 20-year-old man, was in hospital in serious condition.

Peel police have held back details of the tragedy, possibly because a police chase might have been involved.

Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown has said the sports car operator was a known reckless driver whose driving licence was under suspension. He distributed a video of the same car, and allegedly the same driver, driving dangerously a couple of days earlier.
 
The Brampton tragedy brings to mind the reckless driving killings of three other young children and their grandfather north of Toronto in 2015. Marco Muzzo was drunk and speeding when his vehicle slammed into a van, killing Gary Neville, 65, and his three grandchildren Daniel Neville-Lake, 9; Harrison, 5; and Milly, 2.

Muzzo was sentenced to 10 years in prison, and now is out on day parole.
 
It also brings to mind the pedestrians killed by cars every week, it seems, in Toronto. And, it brings to mind the speeding and dangerous driving many of us see daily on Ontario roads.

If you listen to various Ontario government authorities, Ontario has some of the world’s safest roads. Try telling that to what’s left of the families decimated by reckless drivers.

And, although the number of traffic fatalities in relation to numbers of drivers might be falling, the number of actual deaths is increasing, evidence of more forceful collisions, probably from speed.

Evidence of speeding, racing and reckless driving is before the eyes of anyone who travels the roads.

On Highway 11 between Barrie and Huntsville almost no vehicles, transport trucks included, follow the posted speed limits.
 
Transports are among the worst offenders. Ontario Provincial Police statistics show 7,674 collisions involving transport trucks in 2018, a four-year high. Fifty-five people were killed in those collisions, another 1,142 injured.

Rubber tire marks from racing starts, wheelies and other antics are a familiar sight on many rural roads.

It’s not that police forces are ignoring the situation. The OPP laid just under 7,000 speeding charges during the May holiday weekend.

Citizens need to start shouting into government ears about the need for a more intense police crackdown on our streets and highways.

Whether you believe or disbelieve all the news releases about Ontario having the safest roads, they need to be better, and can be better. Beautiful young families should not be dying because of speeders and reckless drivers.
 
Despite all the dragonfly effort at control, mosquito populations continue to exist. Traffic accidents will continue no matter how hard we try to control them.

But tragedies like the one in Brampton last week are no accidents. They are the direct result of irresponsible actions by drivers unwilling to control themselves.

Our governments, pushed by its citizens, need a bigger and better effort to stop this senseless type of road carnage. If it means more traffic police funding, so be it.

Take a lesson from nature: It’s all about creating a better, safer world through control and balance.
 
 

Raccoons with orange tails

The wind in my ears

There are days when I want to be like Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh and cut off my ear.

It’s the wind. It is getting stronger by the year and never seems to stop. Howling in my ears, like the famous mistral wind that helped drive van Gogh crazy while he was painting in southern France.

Van Gogh complained in letters that the mistral made painting difficult and got on his nerves.

“I find painting hard work because of the wind,” he wrote in one letter, noting that the mistral blew sand onto his wet canvas and made scratches in the paint when he brushed.

There is speculation that the mistral, a strong, sustained wind most prevalent in winter and spring, helped to drive van Gogh crazy. He sliced off his ear and gave it to a prostitute in 1888, two years before committing suicide by shooting himself in the stomach.

Our winds are not really driving me crazy, but they are making me take notice of the changes in our climate.

A recent study in the journal Nature Climate Change reports that winds in much of the world have become faster in the last 10 years. It says that in northern-mid-latitude regions wind speeds have increased seven per cent in the last decade.

Some studies say increasing winds are at least partially tied to climate change. Northern regions are warming more rapidly than southern regions, creating smaller temperature differences that affect the jet stream, which is creating more wild weather, including more and stronger winds.

There are not a lot of definitive studies on what is happening with the wind, and those that do exist are highly technical or deal with how more wind is terrific for wind turbines producing electrical power.

All I know is what I see and feel. There seem to be fewer calm days in the past couple of years.

The lake where I spend much of my time is seldom calm. A walk in the woods shows me far more twigs and branches felled by the wind.

Also, there seems to be more severe wind events – times when the winds gust to 95 kilometres per hour or higher. Certainly, the number of tornadoes has been increasing in the U.S. and Canada.

Canada averaged 60 to 70 tornadoes a year during the 1980-2009 period. However, many tornadoes occur in remote areas where they go unrecorded and some analysts believe the Canadian annual average is 150 to 230 tornadoes a year.

The U.S. averages roughly 1,200 tornadoes a year, and so far in 2020 there have been more than 500.

More days of more wind are not a major concern in our part of the country as long as we don’t experience more severe wind events. In fact, light to medium winds are a blessing at this time of year when the spring and early summer flies are numerous and feasting.

The real concern is the future and the possibility that climate change will bring more destructive winds.

An Environment Canada study done six or seven years ago reported that there will be more “wind gust events” and more of them severe, in the coming years.

The study concludes that:

“The implications of these increases should be taken into consideration and integrated into policies and planning for adaptation strategies, including measures to incorporate climate change into engineering infrastructure design standards and disaster-risk-reduction measures.”

In simpler English: It’s going to get windier in future, so plan to build stronger policies and buildings to withstand stronger winds.

I’ve been convinced for some time that it is getting windier, but I won’t be like van Gogh and let it bother me.

Annoying winds may bite your cheeks in winter and buzz your ears in summer, but they are an important and beneficial part of nature.

Wind helps plants to move pollen and seeds that create new generations. Wind blowing on a new seedling or a developing spring plant helps that new life to become stronger. When pushed by the wind a plant produces a hormone called auxin that stimulates the growth of supporting cells.

Even damaging winds can be beneficial to a forest. They knock down diseased trees, creating space for new life that support a greater diversity of wildlife.

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Drawing out human brilliance

It was a forlorn day in spite of the golden sunshine in a sapphire blue sky,

At 32 degrees Celsius early last week it was too hot to do anything but sit, but certainly not outside. The humidity was suffocating and the mosquitoes and blackflies were working overtime.

So, I condemned myself to an afternoon of television. An afternoon of staring into the reflection of a world where people seem to become more obtuse and pathetic by the day.

But there on that insolent screen was an uplifting surprise. Three hours or so of flickering film showing me how brilliant and uplifting our world can be.

The first film was Temple Grandin, a 2010 biographical drama about an autistic woman who earned a doctorate in animal science.

Temple Grandin, born in Boston in 1947, was unable to talk until age four and displayed behavioural problems. She was diagnosed with autism, but her parents rejected a doctor’s advice to put her into an institution, and instead placed her in private schools where her high IQ was discovered and nurtured.

Temple had poor short-term memory and could not follow written instructions, but a long-term visual memory allowed her to become a visual thinker. She graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, followed by a master’s and a doctorate in animal science.

Over time she became aware that anxiety and fear found in both autistic people and animals is caused by hypersensitivity to touch and sound. She devoted her life to alleviating anxiety and fear in both.

As a teenager she designed a “squeeze machine” to help control her nervous tensions and improved versions of it were used in schools to soothe autistic children. Other ideas and designs revolutionized practices for compassionate handling of livestock on farms and in slaughterhouses.

She also became a professor at the University of Colorado and an international spokesperson for autism.

If that was not enough of a lesson in how brilliant humans can be, I then stumbled into the movie version of Jesus Christ Superstar.

I have a long, complicated history with that movie and the soundtrack of the 1970 rock opera.

I was a young reporter in Alberta when two excited colleagues brought the musical album into the office. I was shocked by the music. It seemed blasphemous and indeed was criticized by religious groups throughout the world.

Over the years I began to look at Superstar as a work of art, leaving aside the various religious connections.  I began to fully appreciate the genius that went into this work.

Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and his partner lyricist Tim Rice both are musical geniuses.

 Lloyd Webber was a child prodigy who played the piano, violin and French horn in early childhood. He began writing his own music at age six. It helped, of course, that his father was director of the London School of Music, his mother a piano teacher.

When you see the brilliance of people like Temple Grandin, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice you have to wonder why the world often is such a messed-up place. These people are brilliant leaders in their own spheres and you wonder why such brilliance is lacking in the spheres of national and international affairs.

So many of our leaders are run-of-the-mill folks who think like, and act to please, the overall crowd. They lack the courage to say and do what they believe is right.

When you watch movies like Temple Grandin and Jesus Christ Superstar, you see people who think differently from the rest of us. That is the source of their brilliance; they are not restrained by fear of thinking differently, and of course it helps to be aided by discipline, intelligence, creativity, and sometimes simple good fortune.

We live in times that demand brilliance in leadership: Millions are sick and dying in a pandemic that many leaders said happens only once every 100 years; the United States is imploding and leaving its world leadership open to China and Russia.

It’s not that there is a shortage of human brilliance. There are many brilliant people out there in every field. Somehow, we have to draw them out and into the overall leadership roles now so desperately needed.

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