The Last Post

Thanksgiving is a time to celebrate the harvest of the growing season, and to acknowledge the perpetual circle of life on this planet. As one season dies and bears fruit, the seeds become dormant, waiting patiently through the long winter’s night for a chance of rebirth next spring. It is the miracle of life – unique in the known universe.

This Thanksgiving, I have the bittersweet task of passing the seeds of my thoughts onto others, hoping that they germinate and bear fruit. After more than 20 years, this will be my very last Your Earth column.

The best way to end anything is to start at the beginning.

In the summer of 1989, I was a young mother living in the country with our two small sons. When the eldest had been born, my husband Brian and I flipped a coin to see which one of us would stay home and be the caregiver, while the other trekked into the city to earn our keep.

We have often joked about which one of us won the toss that day, but suffice to say, I stayed home. I took my new job very seriously, and like most new moms, I worked hard to create a safe haven for our babies. Once I’d childproofed our home, I stepped outside to our little piece of heaven - the two remaining acres of my husband’s family homestead. There I encountered such non-urban threats as deadly nightshade, stinging nettles and hawthorn trees.

Beyond our driveway lay another potential threat – the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station – the largest of its kind in the world. Soon after came the threat of a new low-level radioactive waste facility and a proposal to expropriate nearby farmland to accommodate 11 million tones of Toronto’s garbage.

These were the very early days of the environmental movement. I soon found myself on the phone for hours every day, fielding questions from my neighbors about how we should be reacting to the changes that we saw happening around us.

It was Brian who suggested that there was a need to get information out to the public in a more efficient manner. This was long before the Internet or email, so I approached our local newspaper about writing an advice column on environmental issues. I gave them a couple of samples and suggested that people could write in their questions (rather than phoning me at home) and I would answer them in print.

To my absolutely amazement, the column was accepted. I was totally elated for about 10 minutes, until I realized that I might run out of things to write about. Forget that I had virtually no experience as a writer!

That was 20 years ago.

It has been my greatest joy - and my greatest sadness - that I have never run out of things to write about. I learned to love the pure joy of writing very quickly. My first efforts were unnecessarily long and poorly crafted, but I persevered. As my awareness of environmental issues grew, so did my concern for this brilliant blue jewel we call Earth.

My writing took me to the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, and to the Biosphere in Arizona in 1998. On September 11, 2001, I was traveling to New York City with my family to participate in a special United Nations session on Children, Peace and the Environment when terrorists cut a gaping hole in that city’s skyline and changed the world forever.

I have had the opportunity meet some of the greatest environmental heroes of our time, many of whom I have had the privilege of calling friends: Dr. Rosalie Bertell, Irene Kock, Dr. Sandra Steingraber, Dr. Steven Schneider, Paul Hawken, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Elizabeth May, Dr. David Suzuki, Chris Winter and Dr. Ursula Franklin.

I have also had the gift of getting to know many of my readers – many of whom I now call friends. We are kindred spirits, called together in the race to save the planet. I thank them now for the gift they have been to my life, and to my work.

Sadly, as George Harrison once wrote, “All things must pass.”

The world is changing rapidly, and so is the medium in which I write. My column will no longer appear in print locally. In exchange, I will have a chance to write nationally for Sun Media – not as a columnist with a heartfelt opinion, but as a seasoned writer, providing much needed information and tools for the task at hand.

The goal of my column has always been to empower others to take action and ownership. What I have learned over the past 20 years is that the environment is not something else to worry about – it is the context in which everything happens. Caring for the environment is the most selfish and altruistic thing any of us can do.

It’s time to say goodbye and thank my readers and the editors who have provided me with the space each week to speak to the heart of everyone about the need to save the seed that contains the future of all.

And so I pass the torch to you, dear reader. May you carry it well. It is, after all, your Earth.

The End

Thanksgiving is a time to celebrate the harvest of the growing season, and to acknowledge the perpetual circle of life on this planet. As one season dies and bears fruit, the seeds become dormant, waiting patiently through the long winter’s night for a chance of rebirth next spring. It is the miracle of life – unique in the known universe.

This Thanksgiving, I have the bittersweet task of passing the seeds of my thoughts onto others, hoping that they germinate and bear fruit. After more than 20 years, this will be my very last Your Earth column.

The best way to end anything is to start at the beginning.

In the summer of 1989, I was a young mother living in the country with our two small sons. When the eldest had been born, my husband Brian and I flipped a coin to see which one of us would stay home and be the caregiver, while the other trekked into the city to earn our keep.

We have often joked about which one of us won the toss that day, but suffice to say, I stayed home. I took my new job very seriously, and like most new moms, I worked hard to create a safe haven for our babies. Once I’d childproofed our home, I stepped outside to our little piece of heaven - the two remaining acres of my husband’s family homestead. There I encountered such non-urban threats as deadly nightshade, stinging nettles and hawthorn trees.

Beyond our driveway lay another potential threat – the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station – the largest of its kind in the world. Soon after came the threat of a new low-level radioactive waste facility and a proposal to expropriate nearby farmland to accommodate 11 million tones of Toronto’s garbage.

These were the very early days of the environmental movement. I soon found myself on the phone for hours every day, fielding questions from my neighbors about how we should be reacting to the changes that we saw happening around us.

It was Brian who suggested that there was a need to get information out to the public in a more efficient manner. This was long before the Internet or email, so I approached our local newspaper about writing an advice column on environmental issues. I gave them a couple of samples and suggested that people could write in their questions (rather than phoning me at home) and I would answer them in print.

To my absolutely amazement, the column was accepted. I was totally elated for about 10 minutes, until I realized that I might run out of things to write about. Forget that I had virtually no experience as a writer!

That was 20 years ago.

It has been my greatest joy - and my greatest sadness - that I have never run out of things to write about. I learned to love the pure joy of writing very quickly. My first efforts we unnecessarily long and poorly crafted, but I persevered. As my awareness of environmental issues grew, so did my concern for this brilliant blue jewel we call Earth.

My writing took me to the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, and to the Biosphere in Arizona in 1998. On September 11, 2001, I was traveling to New York City with my family to participate in a special United Nations session on Children, Peace and the Environment when terrorists cut a gaping hole in that city’s skyline and changed the world forever.

I have had the opportunity meet some of the greatest environmental heroes of our time, many of whom I have had the privilege of calling friends: Dr. Rosalie Bertell, Irene Kock, Dr. Sandra Steingraber, Dr. Steven Schneider, Paul Hawken, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Elizabeth May, Dr. David Suzuki, Chris Winter and Dr. Ursula Franklin.

I have also had the gift of getting to know many of my readers – many of whom I now call friends. We are kindred spirits, called together in the race to save the planet. I thank them now for the gift they have been to my life, and to my work.

Sadly, as George Harrison once wrote, “All things must pass.”

The world is changing rapidly, and so is the medium in which I write. My column will no longer appear in print locally. In exchange, I will have a chance to write nationally for Sun Media – not as a columnist with a heartfelt opinion, but as a seasoned writer, providing much needed information and tools for the task at hand.

The goal of my column has always been to empower others to take action and ownership. What I have learned over the past 20 years is that the environment is not something else to worry about – it is the context in which everything happens. Caring for the environment is the most selfish and altruistic thing any of us can do.

It’s time to say goodbye and thank my readers and the editors who have provided me with the space each week to speak to the heart of everyone about the need to save the seed that contains the future of all.

And so I pass the torch to you, dear reader. May you carry it well. It is, after all, your Earth.

Climate Refugees

Someone recently asked me if I believed in climate change. My immediate reaction was one of mild amusement. Climate change isn't something that you believe in, like the Easter bunny, nor is it something that will go away simply because we stop having faith in what the weatherman is telling us.

The problem, to paraphrase Albert Einstein, is that it's difficult to see our way out of a problem when we're unmistakably caught in the middle of it. And while some of us clearly acknowledge the connection between bad weather and our bad habits, for others all this extreme weather is just an interesting subject of conversation.

So, for those who still think that dire predictions about climate change are simply fabrications of a left-wing group of eco-terrorists attempting to rid the hard working middle classes of their SUVs, it's time to rethink that arrogant assumption. It’s here.

Last week, the world’s first climate change refugees made it official. The people of Carteret Islands off the coast of Papua New Guinea have become the first people to be forced to completely abandon their homes because rising sea levels have poisoned their drinking water and crops.

At a press conference held in New York City, island resident Ursula Rakova made a plea on behalf of the 1,700 residents of Carteret. She spoke passionately about seeing her ancestral homeland disappear beneath the waves of the Pacific and called for global action.

“We don’t know much about science. All we know is that our shores are being eaten away by the Pacific,” she said. Over the next few years, the gentle Tuluun people will be forced to evacuate the Carteret Islands and its 1,000 year history.

"Climate change is not just about statistics. Climate change is not just about science,” she said. “Climate change is about human rights."

Rights that we have clearly been ignoring. To borrow from renowned climatologist Dr. Stephen Schneider, for several decades we have continued to conduct an uncontrolled experiment on our primary place of residence, despite the fact that we really didn't have a back-up plan if things went wrong. And now things are really starting to run amok.

"There's nothing normal anymore," said Environment Canada climatologist David Phillips, Philips. From here on it’s a brave new world, one that will be filled with every possible extreme imaginable. What’s happening to the Tuluun People is literally the tip of the rapidly melting icebergs.

We've known for more than a half a century that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were rising at unprecedented rates. Yet we have consistently ignored reasonable science that would have given us the time to take reasonable actions.

Roger Revelle discovered in 1957 that the long-standing argument that seawater would absorb any excess carbon dioxide produced globally was wrong. It was the opening shot in the climate change debates. He spent the remaining thirty-four years of his life trying to convince us of the dangers that lay ahead. We ignored him too, and instead chose to back the economic argument that reducing the burning of fossil fuels would somehow hurt our economy.

Well here's a lesson in linguistics. The word "economy" and "ecology" both come from the same Greek word, "oikos" meaning house. You can't have a healthy economy without a healthy ecology. They are inextricably linked – the former is content, the later context.

So while our world leaders bicker all the way to the global conference in Copenhagen in December, Ursula Rakova and her people will begin the painful process of relocating to the neighboring island of Bougainville.

“The island is getting very small now, people are preparing to go,” said Ursula. “We know that we are not alone in this fight about climate change. We know this is happening all over the world.”

Conservative estimates are that by 2050 there will be between 150 to 200 million climate refugees. Are we ready to believe yet?


RELATED WEBSITES

For more on Ursula Rakova’s story, and the plight of the Tulunn people, visit www.oxfam.org.uk.

The United Nations Climate Change Conference is being held in Copenhagen from December 7 to 18, 2009. For more information visit en.cop15.dk

Morning Glory

When dementia stole my mother-in-law’s ability to live in the present, we would often try to comfort her with the past. She was born in the sitting room of our old farmhouse, so visiting us was like a trip back in time.

Most Sundays Brian would pick Elsie up from the retirement home where she lived and bring her to the one place that was still familiar to her. She would often just sit in the bay window of our kitchen and gaze wistfully out over the fields where she once played as a child.

“I used to run in those fields forever,” she would say. “Back when my legs could carry me all day without stopping.”

When the weather was agreeable, she would sit in a chair on the front lawn and enjoy the sunshine. On a very good day, when the pain in her legs relented, she would walk over to our vegetable garden and inspect her son’s work with a beam of pride.

A child of farmers, Elsie had spent most of her life dallying in the dirt. Until time and circumstance forced her to move from the house that she had shared with her husband Jack for almost 50 years, Elsie always had a very practical vegetable garden. Her flower garden, on the other hand, contained a wonderful collection of plants that I’d never seen – vibrant red nicotina and pastel four o’clocks, snowdrops and delphiniums. By mid-summer, her labors would fill their acre of property with a riot of color and their freezer with enough vegetables to get them through the winter.

One spring, a few years before she died, we decided to help Elsie revisit the joy of gardening. I purchased one of those plastic mini greenhouse trays and a packet of morning glory seeds. When Elsie came to visit for Easter Sunday, we put her to work, helping us to plant the tiny seeds. The arthritis that crippled her hands was no match for her determination. She seemed to come alive as she painstakingly placed a seed in each of the small little boxes and carefully, lovingly, covered them with dirt.

We placed the tray in a sunny spot in our kitchen window, with the hope that the seeds would germinate and sprout in time for May planting.

We didn’t have long to wait. The tiny shoots burst from the soil in a matter of a few days. Within a few weeks the plants were ready for the garden, weeks ahead of schedule. Brian placed a couple of plants at the base of each of the porch posts, underneath the deck on our garage, and even at the base of our basketball net.

By midsummer, the plants had taken over, wrapping their delicate stalks around anything they could to climb. Everywhere you looked there were ribbons of green, waving in the slightest breeze, covered with a riot of purple, pink and lavender flowers. It was spectacular.

And then one morning, at the very first frost, they were gone. The vines had shriveled into a crushed darkened thread, and the flowers had somehow disappeared into themselves. Just like that.

Brian collected the seeds that the morning glories had left behind, and replanted them the next spring. Experience had taught us that life that eager to explode didn’t need help to germinate.

This spring, there wasn’t any need to replant. The fragile, stoic, brilliant little remnants from last summer’s bounty had already reseeded themselves. Once again, every upright is covered in a mass of waving, gentle vines, covered in beautiful little pastel trumpets that very soon will disappear.

Too soon, as the first frost of autumn kisses each magnificent plant, it will fade into a sunny memory, like my good friend, Elsie.

We are each given one dance on this Earth. We can choose to plant flowers and watch them grow – reveling in their beauty. We can mourn their loss and let that grief wrap its darkened thread around our spirits, or we can take joy in the hope of renewal – remembering that even as the days grow darker and colder, somewhere tiny seeds wait quietly to bring life to a new spring.

RELATED WEBSITE

Heritage Flower Farm has an amazing selection of heritage plants and seeds.

Giant Invader

It all started about four years ago. My kids were walking through the abandoned orchard next to our rural property when they discovered a very unusual plant. It looked remarkably like the dried out remains of a dandelion puffball – except it was well over 2 meters in height.

Intrigued by its one-of-a-kind towering presence, we joked about it being the remains of some ancient dinosaur’s dinner. When the plant was finally identified by a wildlife biologist as Giant Hogweed, we soon discovered that it was no laughing matter.

Giant Hogweed is native to Central Asia where can grow up to 6 meters tall. Hogweed plants have large fanlike leaves that can reach up to 1.5 meters in diameter and white flowering heads that very closely resemble Queen’s Anne Lace when in full bloom.

The plant, like so many other invasive species has no known predators. It spreads quickly because it is a perennial tuber that also produces between 1,500 to 100,000 seeds per plant. In the four years that has since transpired, that single dead flower has grown into an infestation of between 10,000 and 15,000 plants.

The real danger of Giant Hogweed is its sap, which can cause Phytophotodermatitis – a severe inflammation of tissue - when exposed to sunlight.

When our daughter Sarah unknowingly brushed up against a plant, the skin on her leg immediately broke out in large watery blisters that resembled chemical burns. While the very painful blisters receded after flushing her skin and treating her with topical and oral antihistamines, the area can remain photosensitive for up to twenty years. Even a small amount in the eyes can cause temporary or permanent blindness.

After Sarah’s unfortunate brush with the plant, my husband Brian leapt into action. Convinced of its danger, he honestly believed that once the rapidly growing threat was identified to the authorities, immediate action would be taken before it seeds had a chance to mature. That was early in May.

A corporate developer owns the vacant land where the hogweed resides, so Brian contacted our local municipality to see what could be done. After an inspection by a friendly and helpful by-law officer, the municipality’s position was that it would only take action if the province listed the plant as a noxious weed.

The Regional government took a similar stand, so Brian contacted our MPP, who was very helpful in trying to get the province’s attention. We were told that the paperwork to designate Giant Hogweed was sitting on the Environment Minister’s desk.

“Everyone is looking for someone else to manage the problem. They are hoping upon hope that they will also have the financial and human resources to deal with it,” said Brian. “But hope, is NOT a project management tool.”

Brian contacted the local conservation authority and various environmental groups, but none had the resources or the will to take on the considerable challenge of dealing with this Asian invader.

“We are more than willing to take the advantages of globalization,” said Brian, “but when it comes to dealing with the disadvantages, we want somebody else to manage it.”

Finally, after weeks of emails and phone calls, Brian received official word from Leona Dombrowsky, Minister of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, the ministry responsible for protecting agricultural land from noxious weeds. In an act that might make Pontius Pilot blush, Dombrowsky washed her hands of the problem. Her solution – have the municipality designate the weed as noxious and deal with it locally.

“I understand from Ministry staff that, while very prevalent in some municipalities, giant hogweed is not widespread throughout Ontario,” Dombrowsky wrote in a letter dated July 14th.

The problem is that it soon will be. One plant four years ago has translated into 15,000 plants that have the potential for dropping up to 1,500,000,000 seeds in a creek bed that is less than 3 km from the shoreline of Lake Ontario.

Once it reaches the lake it could quickly become a full-blown ecological disaster. Cutting the plant (in protective gear) will only makes its roots spread faster. The only way to eradicate it is to apply the pesticide Round-up for up to seven years in succession. This isn’t an option for a shoreline infestation.

The window of opportunity to literally nip this problem in the bud has passed. The flowering heads have matured and will begin to drop their seeds any day now. The experiment has performed itself.

RELATED WEBSITE

For more information about Giant Hogweed, visit www.invadingspecies.com