Suddenly, the Royal family no longer bores me to tears.

I’ve yawned through years of watching the Queen deliver stultifying television addresses with her cut-glass upper-class accent. 

And, one time I spoke very briefly with her husband Prince Philip at a media event, and that conversation had me running to the free bar for a double vodka.Then, of course, there have been the long-running Royal soap operas of Charles and Diana and Camilla, and more recently the breakaway couple Harry and Meghan. Plus, Prince Andrew’s troubling connection to sex trafficker Jeffery Epstein.

I suppose watching and listening to the Royals has made for entertaining television. But the ongoing domestic or political situations of the Royals, or other members of the rich and famous world, are of little interest to me and have little impact in my working-class world.

However, my disinterest in Royal family happenings vanished quickly last Wednesday.

I was reading an awesome, and totally frightening, story on how climate change could destroy our planet. When I finished digesting the story, I flipped the digital pages and saw a short piece on Prince William interviewed on climate change.

When Royals speak on controversial issues, they hedge their words to avoid clear and direct statements. They don’t say exactly what they are thinking.

Well, William certainly said what he was thinking during the BBC interview. He criticized the space race and space tourism, saying the world’s greatest minds should focus on saving Earth instead.

“We need some of the world’s greatest brains and minds fixed on trying to repair this planet, not trying to find the next place to go and live,” he said.

His comments were aired the day after actor William Shatner and three other ‘space tourists’ took a short ride into space on a rocket built by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos.

It’s not known if Bezos and other space toy billionaires heard the remarks, but Shatner certainly did. 

Shatner shot back the next day saying the prince is missing the point. Space tourism, he said, is a baby step t o getting polluting industries, like those that produce electricity, off Earth and into space where they produce power that can be sent down to Earth.

Interesting, but I don’t think Prince William missed the point at all. The point is that trillions of dollars are being spent by the phenomenally wealthy on multi-million-dollar mansions and billion-dollar ego toys. That money could help to solve the climate crisis and other critical problems such as world hunger and disease. Not to mention poverty and the need for more education.

So, I say: Good on you, William! 

It’s time for William, other Royals and other members of the world’s rich and famous to become effective influencers on change with firm and clear messaging and direct actions.

“We can’t have more clever speak,” the prince said in the interview. 

News coverage of William’s criticism and Shatner’s response lacked context and made it appear the two are on opposite sides of a fence barking at each other.

The prince, however, is well aware that billionaire entrepreneurs like Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson are concerned about climate change and other problems and are donating money to help fix them. However, he feels that the huge amounts of money and effort being spent on space tourism would be better directed to climate change, which is an immediate critical problem.

Shatner believes that climate change is a serious problem that needs to be fixed, but that space tourism is a step towards finding ways of reducing emissions that are creating global warming.

So, they are not on different sides of the fence. They have different views on how to save the world but at least they are talking about it in public.

Speaking of context, it’s unfair for me or others to disparage the Queen and other Royals. The Royals have lived in a different world, but there is evidence that they are trying to change and become important parts of the real world that the rest of us inhabit.

Will’s comments on spending less on space exploration and more on our problems, are evidence of that.

They are everywhere.

In the 70 acres of bush that I call home in Haliburton County, I estimate there are nearly 300 of them, and many more just beyond my property lines. They have me surrounded and I have visions of them taking over the entire world.

An exaggeration? Well, wildlife researchers say that one acre of land could hold as many as 30 of them.  You do the math: the world has 37 billion acres of land and if each acre has 30 of them, they total 111 billion, outnumbering us humans by 104 billion.

So yes, chipmunks are taking over the world. My world at least. 

I can’t walk a short distance without having one or two scamper across my path. When I cut firewood with my chainsaw, one comes close and stares up at me with a look that says: “Why are you here making all that racket?”

When I’m eating lunch on the deck, another approaches with accusing eyes: “Sure, we let you share our land but you won’t share a morsel of your lunch!”

I don’t know where they all came from suddenly. There have been reports of chipmunk population explosions in parts of eastern Canada and the United States over the past two or three years. They have been regional increases, not widespread, with no definitive reasons.

Some wildlife experts say a milder winter and an abundance of acorns might be a reason. 

Chipmunks in Canada usually have one litter of newborns a year while in the warmer south they have two litters – one in the spring and one in the fall. There is a theory that warming temperatures are shortening winters, allowing for two litters a year in parts of Canada.

Chipmunk litters usually are four to six kits, so an extra litter a year could increase populations significantly.

These little guys are cute and charming and amaze us with their busyness. They never stop scampering about, looking for things to eat and digging tunnels.

They store seeds, bugs and acorns in their little cheek pouches, which researchers say can hold more food morsels than most people would imagine. A researcher found that one chipmunk packed 60 sunflower seeds into one of its pouches.

Other research has determined that a four-ounce chipmunk can gather and store up to eight pounds of food a year in its underground burrow. Tunnelled burrows are as much as three feet below the ground surface and can be more than 30 feet in length.

The extensive burrowing is an issue for some people. They say that large numbers of tunnelling chipmunks can damage retaining walls, deck supports and even house foundations. Others say there is no real evidence that chipmunk tunnelling causes much landscape structural damage.

They can, however, give gardeners grief. This year we had no sunflowers because they dug up all the seeds we planted – several times. They also love to nibble on ripening tomatoes.

The biggest knock against chipmunks simply being fun little cuties came this year from Lake Tahoe, California. The United States Forest Service closed several popular Tahoe sites when bubonic plague was discovered among chipmunks there.

Bubonic plague occurs naturally in some higher elevations and is found in small rodents, such as chipmunks, and their fleas. Humans are infected if they are bitten by those fleas.

Bubonic plague, also known as The Black Death, killed millions of people around the world centuries ago. Today it is treatable and curable with drugs.

When chipmunk populations explode and damage lawns, gardens and flower beds, some people demand extermination programs. However, we humans need to accept that we just can’t kill everything that disturbs our treasured modern lifestyles.  

The U.S. Forest Service understands that. When some Tahoe chipmunks were found with the plague last summer it said it would not start eliminating chipmunks. Controlling the fleas would be a better approach.

At any rate, chipmunks carrying the plague are not an issue in our part of the world. They pose no threat to us, if we watch them from a distance and don’t try to handle them.

As to them taking over the world, I guess that is an exaggeration. The little guys live only two or three years on average.

This is the golden time; the best days of the year.

Sparkling sunbeams spill from a brilliant blue sky. Golden bronze and crimson leaves catch them, then lose their weakening autumn grip and flutter to the forest floor.

It is prime time for walking the woods and breathing in the gifts of Nature’s beauty. 

It also is hunting season so I walk with a shotgun, although I have no intention of using it. It is an old Winchester 12-gauge featherweight, long-barrelled and pump action.

It was my dad’s duck gun, too heavy-duty for small game in the woods. I carry it not for hunting game, but for memories. Memories are more plentiful than partridge or rabbits.

There’s the memory of dad’s smile as he pumped spent cartridges from the Winchester and watched three mallards fall into a Northwestern Ontario pond. And, the blow to my shoulder the time he showed me how to shoot.

Sadly, those memories are being pushed aside by facts about how guns are changing our society. The times of guns as part of our heritage are disappearing into the chaos of gun violence.

Gun violence has been increasing steadily in Canada. Statistics Canada reports that criminal use of firearms increased 81 per cent between 2009 and 2019. There were 7,700 victims of crime involving firearms in Canada during 2017, the most recent year for which there are statistics. 

Toronto is the epicentre of gun crime, registering 462 of what police call ‘firearms events’ in 2020. Those events saw 217 people shot and killed or injured.

U.S. figures collected by the Gun Violence Archive are even more shocking. Gun violence is so rampant there that the place should be labelled a third world country.

So far this year there have been roughly 34,000 gun deaths in the United States. Another 31,000 people have been wounded. Those figures include 535 mass shootings and 22 mass murders. 

By year’s end there will have been between 85,000 and 90,000 shooting deaths and woundings in the U.S.

Children are not being spared. Gun violence became the leading cause of death of American children ages one to19 in 2018, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). A year later, nine children and teens were killed with guns each day - a total of 3,371 young deaths by guns for 2019.

It is estimated that guns now kill more American children and teens than cancer, pneumonia, influenza, asthma, HIV/AIDs, and opioids combined.

The figures keep climbing but many American politicians resist making laws to control the gun madness. Some, like Senator Elizabeth Warren, a presidential hopeful, try but can’t get the needed support.

“If a mysterious virus suddenly started killing eight of our children every day, America would mobilize teams of doctors and public health officials,” Warren wrote in her 2014 book A Fighting Chance. “We would move heaven and earth until we found a way to protect our children. But not with gun violence.”

Gun sales in the states have soared during the Covid pandemic. In March 2020, the first official month of the pandemic, nearly two million guns were sold in 31 days, the second highest number of guns sold in a single month.

Americans now own roughly 400 million firearms, compared with 5.5 million possessed by U.S. military and law enforcement agencies. Nearly one in five firearms are sold without background checks, which are not required for sales at gun shows, online or between private persons.

Canada has significant controls on guns, but few over the factors that help to create gun violence.  U.S. and Canadian geography and culture are so tightly tied together that what happens there often develops here.

There is growing demand in both countries that something be done about gun violence. It’s not likely that anything will be done soon in the U.S. but certainly there is a growing demand in Canada for politicians to do even more.

What worries me is that when our politicians do more to control guns, they usually end up with more restrictions on lawful gun owners, while criminals continue to get more guns for more crimes against society.

Watching all this I fear that our gun heritage soon will be just a memory.

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