history

Spring on the lake

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The purpose of this image can be described as the evocation of the natural surroundings beyond the glowing plane of a computer screen.
View from the other side

the illusion of perception…

Insect apocalypse? We wish! In these early days of June, you can’t plan on being outside for any length of time without being prepared for the onslaught of blackflies and mosquitoes. And we just put a bug net over our bed to protect us from the buggers that hitchhike on the cats to come indoors. The late spring and abundance of wet weather has contributed to their proliferation this year. In the good news department, there were lots of bumblebees in the flowering crabapple tree and looks like the blueberries and juneberries have been adequately pollinated. But where are the dragonflies?

Also, global warming? Not here! We’ve just experienced 3 hard winters, the last one was long and had lots of snow. January’s cold temperatures put a huge dent in our firewood supple and we had to scramble for wood in the last months that saw snow keep coming down. The burning of garbage wood necessitated chimney cleaning twice and it could use another scouring before the season starts again. A lot of time was spent keeping paths and the driveway clear, time that had been allocated to working on my crafts. On my birthday of May 21, there was still a patch of snow behind the house that had come off the roof.

However, we act and are acted upon locally but we think and know globally that the planet as a whole is in trouble. A friend talking recently to Transition Town Maynooth about sustainability said that our cool temperatures here are a result of the melting of the Greenland ice cap. Overall, Canada was 2 degrees warmer than average and the Arctic has been alarmingly warmer. The term “insect apocalypse” was derived from studies documenting the decrease in insect populations from around the world. Bugs may be small but play a vital role in the maintenance of the ecosystems that provide sustenance for all higher forms of life. That meme about a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil affecting the weather in Europe was meant to show how everything is connected to everything else in nature.

And we are nature, probably the biggest intellectual mistake that our culture has made is that we are separate from the rest of creation, an alienation that is part of the material fabric of of our interaction with other beings. Industrial civilization has accelerated our impact on thus planet to the degree that we are now entering a new epoch called the anthropocene marked by mass extinctions. Almost everyday, a new animal is added to the list of those we’ll never see again in their natural state. Tragedy unfolding before our eyes.

The other side of the story may be that technology has both doomed us and given us the means to build a new society through the world wide web of consciousness that lets us know of the demise of other species. A tree falling in a forest does make a sound when a webcam picks it up. Knowledge gives us power to see through the illusions that have bound us and to connect us with those with the imagination to build a better world that includes everything. We can aspire to unity.

history

Changes in the land

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Nothing stays the same

I was brushing and cleaning up at a friend’s place on the hills while cursing myself for not being better prepared for the task at hand. The brush was mostly wild rose and black locust, known around here as devil’s club for the nasty thorns on it. Wild rose is also a prickly plant and i only had one leather glove and light pants on. Chain saw pants would have been more appropriate especially as i was using a chain saw. There were also wild plum trees and they too have a barb on them but easily avoided, i picked a few branches for bouquets. A pitch fork would have been useful on this job for piling up the cut brush but i only discovered it today at another place where i do yard work.

Black locust is a legume tree which doesn’t grow higher than 20′. I hadn’t noticed it when i first moved up here 40 years ago but now there are thickets of it in a couple of places. One is at this place which also has the oldest dwelling in this area, a squared log cabin which is always being renovated. When it was built, the area had been logged off so it probably stood by itself overlooking Lake St.Peter a couple of miles away. The whole area had been cleared and turned into fields by generations of settlers starting a century and a half ago. These days, the bush is everywhere but years ago it wouldn’t have been seen except off in the distance beyond the fields. Judging by aerial photographs, the forest started reclaiming the land in the sixties as farming became less and less viable as an income generating proposition. The rich soil around the cabin was a result of sheep which had been kept there. Apple trees dot the property and all the old farms. Stone fences going through dense bush are a testament to all the hard work by people trying to make the best of the land. If the numbers of humans had kept decreasing at the rate they had been, in another 50 years you would have been hard pressed to find signs of human habitation. Recently however, folks have started leaving the cities and re-discovering the beauty of the land.

Community

Serendipity Rules

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Landing in community. The following thoughts are prompted by yesterday’s TTM meeting:

Of all the people here, there are only 2 with a life-long connection to this area, the rest of us have landed here anytime from 40 years ago to recently. However, the majority of the population around us go back generations or millenia, in the case of first nations, and beyond that for other beings. Community like climate is always there and always changing. What i believe we want to transition to is a state of being integrated with our local environment, a community at peace with itself and its surroundings. Over a century ago, people here had little impact on the environment – with 2 caveats. They were largely self-sufficient and created minimal pollution. The first caveat is that what little money they had came from one of 2 resource extraction industries – logging or mining. The second caveat is why they came here, many fled privation of one kind or another, having lost a battle in the class struggle. The Irish leaving their home because of the so-called famine is one example.They came here and built a human community with blood, sweat and tears that we will never experience. And they did it by co-operating – after each family cleared their plot they created infrastructure and services and buildings that still exist. Transition Town is a new club on the block but but there have always been institutions and gatherings outside of government and corporations in which people dedicated themselves to helping others. The backgrounds of some of those organizations may have had sinister connotations but locally people got involved motivated by mutual aid. I heard the word “agency” at some point and that’s what we need to instill in people, that we can overcome our alienation from the forces that sustain us by getting involved. Grow the land, grow ourselves.