Mother Nature is no longer simply disappointed in us; she is blazing angry.

Her anger is evident throughout the world this month. Killer mudslides in Japan. Parts of Germany devastated by unprecedented flooding. Ditto India. 

People in China were photographed up to their necks in a flooded subway. Tornadoes ripped through the U.S. and parts of Ontario.

And, of course, many of us have been inhaling smoke from massive wildfires out west. Smoke that has stretched from British Columbia to Halifax, with some research suggesting that breathing it can reduce immunity and increase the chances of contracting Covid-19.

Those of you who still believe that global warming and destructive climate change are fake news can stop reading here and go back to your social media gossip and computer games.

Politicians and their governments are getting worried and talking longer and louder about stopping climate change. But it is too late. It is already here.

Nature takes its time and it will take decades or maybe centuries to reverse damage already started. Those millions of tons of Arctic ice that have melted are not coming back soon. All that can be done now is to stop the damage from worsening.

Stopping it from getting worse is too important and too big a job to leave to the politicians, most of whom nowadays are talkers, not thinkers and doers. We individuals have to think through how we can change our lives in practical ways to alleviate climate change. 

That will require us to give up some things we are not willing, or simply unable, to give up. Fighting the advance of climate change is a daunting task that demands sacrifices from us all. It’s questionable whether enough of us are willing to make those sacrifices. 

I think about this as I look out at the patch of lawn at my lake place. It was designed and planted mainly as a covering for the septic field. It looks pretty when trimmed but I have been questioning why I should maintain and groom it. 

This year I decided not to cut it; simply let it grow naturally. One reason was to let it build itself up for the annual summer influx of very active granddogs.

As it grew taller and more unkempt, I began to see its natural beauty. The green clover produced small, white blossoms that attracted bumblebees, a declining species once considered one of our world’s most important pollinators.

Patches of chickweed, an antioxidant-rich plant used as herbal medicine, sprouted beautifully delicate tiny white flowers. A couple of clumps of wild daisies with white heads and golden faces also appeared, adding an aura of innocence to my out-of-control landscape.

Passersby looked at my jungle-like yard with dismay and concern about my mental health. 

Lawns are seen as an important indicator of socio-economic character. A well-groomed lawn tells others that you are a good fit for the neighbourhood. Someone with the time, money and good sense to support an eye-pleasing attraction. An ungroomed yard says you are not.

But seeing manicured lawns as natural and important pieces of our environment is a myth. They are not natural. Their only purpose is to be decorative.

Lawns were invented by the wealthy English and French aristocracy for their self-conceit. Settlers brought the idea of manicured spaces to America, where lawns became an obsessive sign of prosperity.

Canadians also have the lawn obsession. The country has seven million plus detached homes, most with manicured lawns, plus tens of thousands of row housing and apartment buildings with patches of lawn.

Maintaining lawns consumes huge amounts of gas, oil, electricity or compounds needed to make batteries. Lawn maintenance also wastes millions of gallons of water that could be used for other things.

After three months I succumbed to the smirks and whispers of the passersby and cut my jungle lawn. The majority likes manicured lawns and many other nice things that must be given up to stop damaging climate change. 

I’m sorry now that I succumbed to the majority. Beating back global warming is going to mean sacrificing things that we like. We have to start accepting that because Mother Nature is demanding it.

An interesting anniversary passed virtually unnoticed last Sunday: the 204th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death.

Austen, in the two centuries after her passing, became world famous for her novels interpreting and critiquing life among the British upper middle-class landowners of the late 1700s. 

Her writings used literary realism in which the author tries to describe everyday life like it is and not how they imagine it as most fiction writers do. She is the acknowledged mistress of characterization, using her characters’ actions – not just their words – to show readers their true and complete characters.

Jane Austen is not here to describe our tragicomic lives in North America in the first part of the 21st century. It’s not hard to imagine, however, the word pictures she would draw of Canadians and Americans.

Her Canadians might be shell-shocked characters wandering zombie-like in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the climate change mutilating our wonderfully diverse northern regions.

I can imagine Austen’s biting irony when one of her Canadian zombies is stopped on the street and asked where she is going.

“I’m out looking for our leaders,” she says bewilderedly. “Have you seen where they’ve gone?”

Austen’s characters in today’s United States would be angry and unfocussed. 

The U.S. is a country in civil war. It is not the civil war of the 1800s when men in blue uniforms and grey uniforms fired muskets at each other. It is a civil war in which people with unbending blue views and hard rock red views are tearing the country apart.

America’s social problems grow and are not getting fixed because there is no truly functional government. Blind partisanship is so severe that it has shackled the federal government and many state governments.

Jane Austen surely would repeat one line from her novel Pride and Prejudice when writing about America - “keep your breath to cool your porridge.”

That famous line has been taken to mean Mind Your Own Business! Good advice because therein lies America’s greatest fault, and the fault of many of us.

That fault was glaringly evident earlier this month when President Joe Biden spoke from both sides of his mouth. One day he said the U.S, supports Cuban citizens’ “clarion call for freedom and relief” from its Communist government.

He was saying he favours the overthrow of a peoples’ government, yet just days before said U.S. troops are being withdrawn from Afghanistan because the Afghan people have the right “to decide their future and how they want to run their country.”

So, Afghans should be left alone to decide if they should be governed by Taliban, but Cubans wishing to overthrow their Communist government should be supported.

The U.S. has a habit of interfering in other countries’ business, resulting in tens of thousands of lost American lives in Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Afghanistan and other places. 

Most often when we push our noses into someone else’s business we do not help them.  We deprive them of the chance to learn by trial and error and from making their own mistakes. We take from them an opportunity to have pride in managing their lives.

One of the worst things about not minding our own business is what it does to ourselves. When you are knee deep into someone else’s business, you are neglecting your own.

Edward Weston, the famous American modernist photographer, once said:

“A lifetime can well be spent correcting and improving one’s own faults without bothering about others.”

The United States – in fact all countries and individuals – have enough faults to correct without getting involved trying to correct others.

Jane Austen’s work has a huge North American following today. One reason is that it remains relevant.

The class divides of the 1700s continue to exist today, although they might not be exactly the same. Divisions between the haves and the have-nots grow wider today, as do resulting different social norms.

Both her society and ours are heavily opinionated. Her characters form strong opinions based on parlour gossip. We form opinions based on social media gossip.

Minding our own business, and forming opinions based on proven facts, would go a long way to making our society a better one than Jane Austen’s.

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You have to wonder whether the Neanderthals of 50,000 years ago lived better lives than we genius Homo Sapiens of the super tech 21st century.

The Neanderthals lived in caves and had only wood and stone tools, but probably had more relaxed and rewarding lives than we do today. Yuval Noah Harari makes that case in his international bestselling book titled Sapiens. A Brief History of Mankind.

Ancient peoples were hunter-gatherers who fed themselves by gathering berries, nuts, roots, insects and plants and by hunting animals. Getting food was their main job and, in some ways, it was easier than the jobs we have today.

These hunter-gatherers set off into the meadows and woods some time after dawn in search of mushrooms, bugs or anything else edible. They likely had all they needed by noon and were back home for lunch, with the rest of the day for napping, telling stories and playing with the kids.

Today, many folks climb into a vehicle after dawn, endure a frustrating commute to the shop, and work repetitive, mind-numbing tasks until early evening. They make the same irritating and boring commute back home for a late dinner, perhaps a bit of TV, then bed.

Many are not totally happy with this lifestyle. It probably is a factor in the social unrest we see today.           

And, not just in capitalistic countries. There have been stories recently about Chinese workers, notably younger ones, suffering burnout from long hours doing boring jobs.     

Dolly Parton sang about working 9-to-5; the Chinese now are singing 996, a reference to working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.

Hunter-gathers also had a lighter household work load. No dishes to wash. No toilets to clean. No vacuuming or sweeping up. No beds to make.

Today we have luxuries like vacuum cleaners and dishwashers to help us but luxuries need to be maintained, which costs time and money, which requires us to work harder.

Overall, Neanderthals had more time to relax and less worry about what was going on around them.

There were no organized politics back then, so Neanderthals did not have to put up with the thought manipulation, misinformation, and outright lying that we have today. No arguments over vaccines because there was little infectious disease and no large, crowded populations in which epidemics thrive.

The Neanderthals did have worries. If one fell and broke a leg, there was no health care. 

Going to work could be dangerous. You could be bitten by a poisonous snake, eaten by a sabre tooth tiger or stepped on by a woolly mammoth.

Folks today don’t have to fear being attacked by wild animals while going to work. However, we could be killed in traffic accident or in a drive-by shooting. 

As our cities grow larger and more crowded, they become more dangerous, less healthy and less likely to be places of better living. More people are feeling this and are moving to smaller, more relaxed places. 

Statistics Canada reported recently a sharp rise in the number of people moving out of our three largest cities – Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. It reported that 87,444 people left those three cities between July 2019 and July 2020 for other parts of the same province, up from an average annual exodus of 72,686 the previous three years.

Few of us would want to live in a cave, or spend the day digging roots and catching insects for food. But many people are looking for less stressful, simpler lives. 

Harari’s thoughts in the book Sapiens put the lives of Neanderthals, plus our own lives, in a new light. It’s a fascinating and provocative look at human history and is followed up by: Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. 

The latter contains thoughts, supported by some interesting facts, about what our future might hold. 

The Neanderthals lived lives directed by the forces of nature. Today increasingly large chunks of our lives are directed by computerization.

That leaves me wondering not just whether the Neanderthals lived better lives, but whether algorithms will become more important than nature and life will become simply data processing. 

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I’ve been worrying about my granddog Rusty who has been suffering through the West Coast heat wave.

Rusty has a daily walk and on a recent outing during unusually warm temperatures he began panting heavily. His mom took him home immediately, gave him more water to drink, and washed his paws and head to cool him.

The time it took to slow his panting was a concern, but he recovered nicely and of course was anxious to get out for another walk.

Rusty’s incident shows us just how dangerous our increasingly frequent, and severe, heat waves are becoming. They are affecting the health of humans and their pets, notably dogs who are difficult to keep cool because they sweat mainly through their feet and don’t cool effectively with fans.

The heat has been killing hundreds of people in the Canadian and U.S. West. There is no point trying to give actual numbers because many jurisdictions do not have the same criteria for labelling deaths from severe heat exposure.

No matter what the accurate numbers, Canadians and Americans are dying of the heat more often and in greater numbers than any time before.

Some researchers say the heat that has caused hospitalizations, deaths and fires out west in the past couple of weeks is not a once-a-year event. Severe heat events are a developing health emergency that has the potential to become as serious as the current Covid emergency.

A study published recently in the journal Nature Climate Change found that 37 per cent of the world’s heat-related deaths are due to higher temperatures from human-caused climate change.

A couple of weeks ago the Canadian Institute for Climate Choices issued a report calling for action to help us all adapt to the new realty of extreme heat from climate change.

"Climate change is an escalating public health emergency, and we need to start treating it that way," said the introduction to the report.

U.S. climate assessments predict there will be 20 to 30 more 90-degree Fahrenheit days a year in most parts of that country by the middle of this century. Extreme heat already is a leading cause of weather-related deaths in the United States, killing an average 600 or more a year between 1999-2009.

An earlier Canadian study predicted that by 2050 major Canadian cities will experience four times the number of extreme heat days than they did less than 10 years ago. Cities can become high heat islands because their buildings absorb heat and because they lack plentiful greenspaces with protective tree canopies.

Increasing extreme heat events impact more than our health. 

Agriculture is endangered by high temperatures because some crops require cool nights. Hot nights also stress livestock, causing milk output to decline in cows They also cause slower growth and reduced conception rates.

Hot nights also deprive roads and buildings of cool down time and result in deformed concrete and asphalt.

Research, and even what we are seeing and feeling in recent summers, tell us that government urgently needs to do serious planning on how to adapt to and deal with the consequences of extreme heat events. They need to identify and plan for protection of vulnerable populations, for more cooling centres and how to use heat-reflecting products for roofs and for roads.

Nature, as usual, has some of the answers for protection against extreme heat. Trees and other vegetation are known to reduce temperatures through shade and transpiration in which tiny water droplets are released by tree leaves, providing water vapour that cools the surrounding air.

The problem is that we are knocking down more trees every year. Various studies show that despite some improvements in recent years the world still is losing too many of its trees.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that the area of primary forest worldwide has decreased by over 80 million hectares since 1990.

Trees can be a major factor in helping us all get through the horrors of predicted future extreme heat events. 

There are impressive tree planting programs seen throughout the world. But some scientists say that planting more trees is not the best approach to having more protective forests.

The best approach is to reduce the number of trees we all cut.

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Nature regularly shows us that life doesn’t have to be as complicated as we sometimes make it. It’s showing us again this month with a spectacular display of one of its simplest, most modest wildflowers.

The common daisy is straightforward, inspirational beauty sometimes called sunshine on the ground. It is in full bloom in June, and especially abundant this year along roadsides, in fields and other open areas.

The beauty of the daisy is its simplicity. It has a radial arrangement of 15 to 30 small and thin white petals surrounding a bright yellow central disc. There are 23,000 species of daisies but the one we see in this part of the world is usually the ox-eye daisy.

In sunshine or in shade clumps of daisies radiate innocence and purity, plus an unpretentious cleverness.

Ancient civilizations considered the daisy clever because of its usefulness. Four thousand years ago, the Egyptians nurtured daisies in their substantial gardens for medicinal uses and for decoration.

A variety of peoples throughout the centuries used daisy extracts to treat wounds, coughs, colds and bronchitis. They also have been used for kidney and liver problems and for skin problems, including inflammations.

Henry the Eighth, the English king who had six wives, ate daisies to stem stomach-ulcer pains and other ailments. 

There is a growing daisy extract market today, driven by a ‘return to nature’ movement which favours herbal remedies over synthetic medicines.

The name daisy comes from the Anglo-Saxons whose ‘daes eage’ meant ‘days eye’, a reference to the flower closing its head at night and opening it first thing in the morning.

The Romans associated the flower with the nymph Belides who turned herself into a daisy to escape the sleazy attention of Vertumnus, the god of seasons. 

The Vikings associated the flower with motherhood and childbirth, while Celts believed that when a child died the gods sprinkled its grave with daisies to help relieve the grief of the parents.

Christian religions associated the daisy with the Virgin Mary because it symbolized chastity, humility and innocence.

I understand the symbolism attached to the daisy over many centuries. However, I see something else.

The daisy reminds us of what lies ahead. Although we are in the heart of summer, the daisy’s white head and golden face remind me that changes are not that far off.

Daylight hours already have begun to get shorter and just six weeks from now the greenery of the trees will begin turning to the golds and reds of autumn. Much later, the leaves will fall and the landscape will take on the whiteness of the daisy’s outer petals.

That seems to be depressing, wildly negative thinking. What sane mind thinks of cold and snow when we have just started enjoying the sunshine and heat of summer?

Seeing those white and gold daisies as reminders of colder, darker days ahead is more mindful than negative. It’s possible to soak up the beauty of flowers and other joys of summer while being mindful of coming changes.

Change is important because it is inevitable. It is the most basic law of nature, yet many of us don’t like to think about it. We like things to remain the same. 

We live in a world of change that is not just unprecedented, but is accelerating. We see evidence of climate change almost every day. Many aspects of our culture – our politics, our communication styles, even our religious institutions – are undergoing tremendous change but we spend much time arguing about them and too little thinking about how to deal with them.

Nature teaches us to accept change and to adjust to changing conditions. The beautiful daisies of summer are just one part of nature’s many lessons.

The daisies tell me something else. They remind me of how lucky we are to live in a country of four seasons.

Each season brings us different experiences, different foods, different clothing. We get to swim and water ski in July and skate and snow ski in January.

Each season brings its own trait. Summer gives us exuberance, autumn reverence, winter perseverance and spring hope and renewal.

We are lucky folks, we Canadians.

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