RANT: A COMFORTABLE LIFE

I WENT FOR A WALK the other day in a park near where I live. It’s a large open green space, a long, 50-acre site with a small wood running beside it that slopes steeply down to the spring-fed Kidd’s Creek. It was a nine-hole golf course back in the day, from 1911 until 1970, and before that, in colonial times and earlier, it was part of a portage trail connecting Lake Simcoe to Georgian Bay, which in turn was part of a larger transportation network linking Lake Ontario with Lake Huron, used by indigenous peoples and European settlers alike. TODAY, it’s a popular spot for sports and for families to picnic, and on sunny days the park is well-populated but still with plenty of “elbow-room”; it never feels crowded to any great extent. I walk there often (and run when the mood is upon me) and my favourite spot is the city-maintained flower gardens and arboretum located at the park’s west end. There, they have numerous native and imported flowers, bushes and trees, as well as a dedicated “butterfly garden” with milkweed plants* prominent, along with veronicas, giant hyssops, blazing asters, mountain mints and meadow-sweets blooms—a tasty floral buffet for those tiny, pastel beauties that float and flutter through our lives and gardens.

    You can build it, but will they come?

MY HANDY-DANDY BUTTERFLY GUIDE (gotten from my local library) says to expect a return visit in August of Danaus plexippus (Monarch butterflies) into my area from the east and north as they begin their generations-long southward migration to their great colonies in central Mexico where they over-winter. So, I look forward to seeing them next month. ONLY I DIDN’T NOTICE ANY MONARCHS earlier in the year when they (apparently) arrived in my province, and as far as Sunnidale Park’s butterfly garden is concerned, I’ve yet to see any butterflies there. That could be because I’m not paying attention to my surroundings (as usual), or just bad luck, like being there when daytime temperatures are too warm for the colourful critters to be out and about, for example.

THOUGH IT SEEMS to me there’s a general lack of insect life hereabouts; I’ve barely been bitten by mosquitoes thus far this year. Is there something wrong with my blood, something they don’t like? Too old? Too tired?  Dunno.

 

WELL, ONE THING I DO KNOW and recall was years ago, driving through southern Ontario while visiting my family and by the time I’d reached their farm, deep inside green fields of Kent County, my windshield would be plastered with the squashed bodies of a whole range of insects—flies, grasshoppers, crickets, June bugs, mosquitoes, bees, hornets—you name it! (Not to mention bird droppings from all feathered feasters enjoying the insectoid buffet in the air above my racing automobile.) Especially at night. I crashed into whole streams of them as I roared down those dusty, gravel roads in the cool of a summer’s evening! It was a right-of-passage, a “blooding”, that marked the journey between the city and the country. Laving off all those bug-bodies from my car’s windshield and grille at my journey’s end was a demonstration of the fecundity, of the rich enduring ecology of farms and fields of my homeland. At least that’s how I remember it.

 

BACK THEN, hordes of insects were a “known-known”, something we’d expect to be always there, like rain-forests and arctic ice. A given. Nowadays, we’re up against what we think are “known-unknowns” because of the undeniable massive die-offs of insect life throughout the world. Get real! We all know what we’re doing and what are the consequences for our actions and in-actions vis-à-vis the natural world. Yet we insist it remains an open question to be discovered in a vague, “unknown” future. Who are we kidding? We know what the future will be like if we continue the way we’ve been going. It’ll be fifty shades of BAD, whichever way we look at and by whatever degree, or punishment, that Mother Nature chooses to lash us with. And lash She will! AND STILL, we choose to ignore the future and what's in store for those who will inhabit it. We continue to envision it as a mostly (probably? maybe?) benign unknown that's coming. Good luck with that!

 

WHERE HAVE ALL THE INSECTS GONE? That’s a good question. For answers, read Rachael Carson’s 1964 Silent Spring and go from there. The known, dependable and, yes, oft-times annoying lives and livelihoods of our insect brothers and sisters have been usurped, upended and in many places all but destroyed by our development of oh-so clever herbicides and pesticides (note the Latin-tag cide, as in: “killer” or “act of killing”); by reckless genetic experiments and GMOs; by the loss of habitats, and of course by what may yet move everything into a new and more frightening realm of “unknown unknowns”, namely anthropogenic global warming and climate change.

ATTEND to this: “CLASS INSECTA”, is under threat! One study estimates that 40% of the roughly one million species of insects are currently facing extinction! Prof Dave Goulson, at the University of Sussex, UK suggests “we may have lost 50% or more of our insects since 1970.” Insects are necessary components of the earth’s ecology and provide invaluable “services”, including pollinating nearly “80%” of the earth’s flowering plants, particularly ones used by humans for food. “Approximately one third of the world’s crop production depends directly or indirectly on pollination by insects”; insects act as the “primary or secondary de-composers” of organic matter which would otherwise remain as trash; they are food for numerous forms of wildlife, as well as for humans; they are the object of human inquiry and scientific study; they act as disease vectors and natural agents of population control; they are part of human culture and inspire much in the way of artistic and literary appreciation. I could go on. Ants in your pants!

TO CONCLUDE this RANT, I’d just like to remind everyone that WE LIVE COMFORTABLE LIVES and have lived in comfortable times lo these many years, at least in my neck-of-the-woods. (Perhaps not that long, after all, perhaps since the last world war and up until the next one?) But, for people in developed, industrialized countries, life is pretty good nowadays (especially if you have any money). And if we game it out—assuming there’s no melt-down of the world’s financial system or any nuclear-tipped “hot wars” exploding on the boundaries of empire¹—it’s entirely likely we will carve out a cozy time of it for a few more decades. AS THEY SAY, it’s nice work if you can get it. Let’s hope the world will indulge us for a little while longer. MEANTIME, we are creating a strange new world for those who will follow us. Let’s hope they learn to adapt. Let’s hope they won’t curse us for what we bequeath them. "So it goes."

 

Cheers, Jake

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* The iconic Monarch butterflies derive their sustenance exclusively from these plants.

 

1. As I write this, war in Ukraine continues, along with blusters and blundering on the part of the “collective West” and its pit-bull, NATO, and now we have for our viewing enjoyment the spectacle of the American politician, Nancy Pelosi, the octogenarian Speaker of the House of Representatives, arguably the third most powerful political figure in the United States, visiting Taiwan, despite warnings from China (of which Taiwan is a province, whose status as such is recognized by the United Nations) that such an action would be considered by the Chinese government as extremely provocative and a blatant interference in its internal affairs. U Go Girl! Show them Orientals just who’s boss around here! Mrs. Pelosi would be up for the DUMFUK OF THE YEAR award, if her visit to Taiwan wasn’t fraught with such danger.

It remains to be seen what China’s response to this unnecessary and reckless and hawkish action on the part of the United States will be. Is this the right time to “tickle the dragon’s tail”, so to speak? Do we really want military conflict with a second nuclear-armed state? We’ll watch what happens and whether cooler heads will prevail. All-in-all: shameful and shameless!         

 

 

 

Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. Tim Duggan Books. Penguin Random House LLC. New York. 2019.

 

 

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