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.

 #

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.

 

#

 

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.