Good reading

I’ve finished two books in the last ten days. The first was an audio version read by its author Rachel Maddow entitled Blowout. It’s a history of the fossil fuel industry.

She is not someone I watch regularly on TV - but what I have seen suggests that she comes with strong views, a focus on facts and a wry wit. These are all borne out in the recent book - which I first heard about at the end of 2019 at an environmental seminar.

Her view is hardly unbiased and starts from the premise that the point of the industry is to make money come hell or high water and basically do as it pleases. No government anywhere has ever come close to controlling it.

She alternates between its development in Russia and in the United States and focuses on the fact of industry greed without having any idea of the consequences of its actions. Part of its success relates to its size and reach across the entire planet.

A blowout happens when the pressure of an oil or gas well builds up beyond the limits of its control system and backs up in an explosion. In the process blowouts have affected water systems and have caused earthquakes though the development of horizontal drilling. Never mind killing pets and making countless people sick who reside close to wells.

The book ties together a number of fascinating stories ranging from incompetent Russian spies, to a multimillion dollar playboy from Equatorial Guinea who enjoys giving his girlfriends $80,000 for shopping trips in Malibu, while three quarters of the citizens of his country starve. We move through entrepreneurs in Oklahoma, Texans who want to secede. Always lurking behind the scenes is Vladimir Putin who will do whatever he can to stir the pot. From Standard Oil to the present, one of the inevitable results is all countries depending on industry support for the election of its officials - who then use government money to return the favour in the form of government subsidies to the most profitable industry on earth.

Changing this will be an enormous challenge everywhere. What will count, Maddow says, is paying attention and asking questions. Our futures will undoubtedly depend upon that.

Vaccination adventures

Sometimes things work well. In the constant noise about pandemic procedures and cures, here is one story of a solution that went the way it was supposed to - at least for a start.

In Canada, health care is regarded as a right - and public health is a priority. The first group to be vaccinated were seniors in care homes and their caregivers. That group has largely been accommodated. The next group specified in my province, Ontario, are those 80 and over. I’m computer savvy - and until this week totally mobile - after a minor fall that created a tiny fracture - painful to walk a couple of blocks for an Xray to learn this - but it could be much worse.

The rollout for us 80 plus group hasn’t been the smoothest. My GP has really worked hard to keep us up to date and recently provided two possible avenues to get there. One was a pre-booking tip for two local hospitals. I signed on with the closest one and got straight in with providing basic information including a provincial health card. A friend tipped me off that she and her husband already had an appointment at a nearer one - and that same contact came a day later from the GP’s office. They were already accepting bookings - but every day was filled. An insider tip from the friend let me know that new dates became available on Thursdays at 7:00 pm, and I was primed to go online. Naturally the system was overloaded and wouldn’t let me in, so I waited an hour and tried again. This time there was a message - “You are now in line, your screen will update automatically so stay on”. I did and sure enough within minutes I was at the registration site and went for the furthest available date to save time. There were several choices and I signed on for a convenient one. The next morning I received a confirmation and instructions to proceed.

The pre-booking also offered a place the next day to register. It gave me 96 hours to respond. What it didn’t allow was a chance to refuse the appointment, since I now had one elsewhere. I hope that doesn’t mean I deprived someone else to register. It would have been easy to have a link to say, “I don’t need this appointment.”

The day dawned and a caring daughter-in-law drove me to the hospital. I entered the large main floor unit and was greeted by someone who noticed me sporting a cane and immediately took me to a seat in the closest section. My appointment was for 9:30. I handed over the letter with my information and they orally confirmed that I had consented. They found me in the system by last name immediately. I received the shot - totally painless so the needle must be really fine tipped. - at exactly 9:29. I was asked to wait for 15 minutes and texted the daughter-in-law that she could come back soon. After chatting with the staff attendants and thanking them, I was back in the car at 9:46. A copy of proof of vaccination identical to the one I had been handed at the hospital was sent and in my email when I arrived home

The only bad news was a sixteen week wait for the second shot. We are now following the British pattern of getting as many first doses into arms as possible to lessen the serious infection rate. I commend that strategy. I awakened this morning glad that things worked out well - and grateful that I started using a computer in 1984 and explored the mysteries of internet and the like soon after. When technology tools are understood and implemented well, live becomes easy. Would that that were always the case.

Gratitude

Last year on the day after Christmas, family members and I boarded a plane in Toronto. Five and a half hours later we were enjoying a late lunch at a lovely Chinese restaurant in Richmond, British Columbia. We texted relatives that we would catch the six o’clock ferry to join them on Bowen Island and anticipated the celebration of marriage of a family member and her new husband the next day.

This year some of the same family members picked me up to transport me to the one permitted household - with presents for exchange,, a floral arrangement sent from the BC relatives, home-made cookies from an exchange among Toronto friends, and my dinner contribution of an English trifle.  We settled in for a leisurely lunch, while my son did the cooking and viewed an interchange on his laptop in the kitchen and the rest of us visited with extended family members on another one in the dinning room – one from a recently purchased schoolhouse getaway in Eastern Ontario, one from a dacha outside Moscow, another from an apartment in Winnipeg, Manitoba at minus forty degrees – where Fahrenheit and Centigrade temperatures actually meet – colder than the home of one of the residents from Finland – and another stuck in Ottawa where the meeting of the Canadian Senate kept him from flying home in time. 

 On Christmas Eve we had gathered on Zoom for an even larger gathering where another family member read “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”.  Three generations of one family had lived there, either teaching at or attending one of the United World Colleges. Members were now spread out in different countries but still seeing one another on the screen.  Another presented a radio presentation, where he acted as Trinculo in Shakespeares’ The Tempest - reprising a performance that his grandfather had done decades earlier. Another accompanied himself on a guitar while singing a Psalm in both Hebrew and English. His sister played and sang a carol. His aunt played a clarinet to show us what she could do after working with one for only six months. I read my Covid parody.

And all this is seen as possible – and normal during a pandemic. And we would never have thought to connect with so many at once - until we couldn’t do so in person.

 How different it is from the pandemic of 1918. My father was 18 years old that year and my mother was 15.  I never thought to ask them what that pandemic was like for them. This morning’s paper details some similarities with the present one.  The number of patients strained the hospital and the number of deaths - 50,000 in Canada – 50 million around the world – meant the large number could not be interred quickly enough.  Businesses were shut down.  Prime Ministers caught the flu.  The Stanley Cup was postponed.  But there were differences too.  Children and young adults were the most threatened. There was little government help – either national or provincial – and local governments had to work on their own.

 Let’s hope that some of the patterns don’t recur.  There were swings between opening up and needing to shut down again.  There was initial avoidance of the severity of the pandemic. There was resistance to closings.  Public health officials were both congratulated and denigrated.  Health workers were infected and shortages were severe.  Quack cures prevailed.  Indigenous communities were hit hardest. The disease faded away in most countries but Canada continued to have sporadic outbreaks until 2020.

 The key difference is the development of vaccines. Some were developed in 1918 at Queen’s University and by Connaught Laboratories at the University of Toronto.  What scientists did not know then was that the disease was produced by a virus.  Their vaccines did reduce the severity but vaccine development with both new understanding and speed of production were decades away.  We are so fortunate to live in the new century where over time we will overcome the effects of the current one.

 The amazing opportunities afforded by technology where we can see each other from a distance and be safely together in new ways is so taken for granted that we forget the creators of so many inventions.  I searched for a timeline and found one here

 And I was fascinated by those with impact on my own life:

My Mediaeval Manuscript

The handwritten page from a psalter hanging above my electronic piano had some precursors. Anod of course they were followed by the printing press to allow books to spread through the known universe, open up learning and change the world

My great grandfather hated the telephone

When the family in Parry Sound installed on the first in the town, he hated the idea of people intruding on his privacy. Now I text my grandchildren.

This doesn’t even show how I do it now

A Google Nest responding to my oral request to play some Christmas Carols on Combo - with a number of the best ones sounding in three different rooms on three small units.

My TV watching at home started in 1950

Now I ask my TV to head toward Prime or YouTube on the big screen with hundreds of choices in spectacular colour - or switch back to one of the many cable stations - not exactly like the small screen of the past.

Communication machines

In university, the weekly newsletter in my college was printed on a ditto machine - and I still have a purple version. Then came the fax machine in the 80e where in 1985 one board member had one - and 1986 where only one member didn’t - and no parctically no one does. I’d still like it better if my all in one printer would print in colour even though only the demo does.

From turning on a desktop in 1984

To meeting the family on Zoom in 2020. It’s been an amazing journey through it all.

As I write, I am restricted to my apartment but my life is both safe and rich.  It is so easy to forget how fortunate I am compared to most of the world during a pandemic.  Mu family came up with an innovative way to enjoy company on my balcony in cold weather – electric fleece throws. The view from there of the canopy of trees is beautiful even missing their former leaves and the lake and sky still dominate the extensive built environment.

An obituary of  famous nature writer Barry Lopez reminds me to put all this technology in perspective.  We, like the wolves he spent time with and wrote about so lovingly, are also creatures of the planet.

 The New York Times quotes the British writer Robert Macfarlane as he  put it this way in The Guardian in 2005 writing about the author. “Throughout his writings, Lopez returns to the idea that natural landscapes are capable of bestowing a grace upon those who pass through them. Certain landscape forms, in his vision, possess a spiritual correspondence. The stern curve of a mountain slope, a nest of wet stones on a beach, the bent trunk of a windblown tree: These abstract shapes can call out in us a goodness we might not have known we possessed.”

 The technological and the natural are part of our lives in the Anthropocene and both bring us grace..  Many of our journeys this season involved a much smaller carbon footprint, though they depended on electricity and that is a small benefit to the planet.  The human connections in my small world were made well – while all around us there are evidence of such connections and care that are made badly. So much will depend on our choices and sense of a sacred that we must receive with grace as we move ahead.

Solstice - A Universe Birthday

This is the solstice, the still point of the Sun . . .
where the past lets go of and becomes the future; the place of caught breath.

— Margaret Atwood

 The Canadian poet and novelist kicks off the site of the Deep Time Network, a place that celebrates the larger creation story than the one usually told in European traditions and the countries that emerged from it. The Christmas ritual relates to it in terms of timing.

 As the Network site notes,

 “From time immemorial, humans have honored the winter and summer solstices, as sacred and rich times, to align our personal and collective lives with the movement of celestial bodies.  Some of us are heading into the darkness of winter while others are headed into summer and longer days.  Wherever you are, the solstice is a planetary event.”

 A solstice occurs when the Sun reaches its most northerly or southerly excursion relative to the equator. Two solstices occur annually, around June 21 and December 21.

The term solstice can also be used in a broader sense, as the day when this event occurs. The day of a solstice in both hemispheres has either the most sunlight of the year (summer solstice) or the least sunlight of the year (winter solstice) for any place other than the Equator, where the days and nights are equal in length all through the year.

The word solstice is derived from the Latin sol (“sun”) and sistere (“to stand still”), because at the solstices, the Sun appears to “stand still”; that is, the seasonal movement of the Sun’s daily path (as seen from Earth) pauses at a northern or southern limit before reversing direction.

 And this year there is an added bonus, if you are in a location with a clear night. There are likely to be meteor showers but there is also the best chance in 400 years to see two planets, Jupiter and Saturn, appear closer than usual – not that they are actually close to us. Saturn is 1.6 billion km. from earth, while Jupiter is about 885 million away. They appear to meet in the night sky. The last time this happened so visibly was in 1623.  Binoculars may make it visible in the south west sky just around sun down. Through right now, and for the rest of December, they will appear to be super-close in the post-sunset night sky. 

 And though it’s a shorter interval, the great Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City has celebrated the solstice for the past 41 years with a performance by the famed Paul Winter consort. I sang in the chorus when they came to Toronto for a performance of the Missa Gaia in 1989 and it still happened again this year at the Cathedral.  NPR offers a reprise of the 2019 concert and you can listen and watch excerpts of it here..

Airborne - Revisiting the Black Death Now

As we settle into a marathon rather than a sprint of Covid-19, the word “plague” is on the rebound. Jill Lepore outlines several in her New Yorker article “Don’t’ Come Any Closer”. She notes that in 1666 people weren’t very different from us as they examined their bodies for possible changes. They prayed, raged and poured over “books that frighted them terribly”. While journalists wonder today whether they should cover the meandering utterances of the president, the British government then thought that banning books would help. People in Britain fled to Hampton Court rather than the Hamptons, and shortages of horses for travel parallel our empty shelves of toilet paper. Instead of Zooming, some people in Italy fled to quieter realms and told the stories of the Boccaccio’s Decameron while in hiding from the Black Death.

It reminded me to look at what Thomas Berry said about that same Black Death in his article, “A New Story”, written in 1978 — the first of many works that influenced a rethinking of theology in many quarters. Berry saw the Black Death as a turning point in human understanding.

The Christian world up to that point, he observed, had been predictable. Seasons arrived and passed in the mediaeval world and it was not without hardship and suffering, but there appeared to be balance and renewal. But in a Europe where a third to a half of the population was wiped out, things changed forever. To many, the Black Death was a punishment from God. That perception enhanced a need for redemption and emphasized personal salvation through repentance. This change in emphasis from reliance on the original creation story happened long before the Protestant Reformation, Berry notes, but the reaction to the plague set in motion the individualism that would later question the power of corporate Catholicism and a move to Protestantism.

The other change of direction was almost like being drawn to a fire in spite of fearing it — a fascination with the cause of the plague that led to exploration and ultimately to the development of modern science. It gave birth to geology, a science that explored the origins of the planet and initiated our ability to move beyond history, Its sister science. paleontology, with its new ways of extracting bones of our ancestors, enhanced our understanding of history even more. The telescope and the microscope gave us entry to new worlds not previously imagined, and we gained a growing understanding that humans as a species evolved from simpler life forms. Our growing consciousness gave us the additional sense of being a species with a right to dominate the earth. Medicine and biology could save us,

Those times resonate today. One the one hand we have thought with confidence that we are in control of the environments that surround us through our growing advances in biological research — but suddenly we’re not. On the other hand, we have individuals who resolutely say they are “washed in the blood of the Lamb” and can go to their megachurches no matter what. When asked whether these folk might put others in danger by getting infected, they simply don’t care - because they are saved. The more secular adherents of capitalism want everything to open up and if that means sacrificing the elderly, even including themselves, — well fine.

The impact of the modern virus is small compared to the loss of life in the Black Death, but today’s news travels with the speed of the virus itself. Viruses have always moved along trade routes. In another New Yorker article, Kate Brown notes that the modern crowding of humans and animals in some parts of the world has contributed to zoonotic disease transmittal not only from east to west, but quite possibly through American megafarms. Their monocultures sent diseases from chickens and livestock to other parts of the world. Viruses have little respect for border or walls.

The poor in crowded cities, Brown notes, are often dependent on foraging on urban borders to find wild animals to eat and survive. Their manufactured factory goods travel the world. More affluent modern traders include people who exchange their boring local lives for more exotic foreign shores on planes and cruise ships — hothouses for viruses to grow and penetrate. We congregate in conference centers, concert halls, restaurants, bars, and some of us even in churches. We’re totally focused on our self created worlds and pay no attention to corona viruses unless we are research scientists. And the news that reaches every point is processed selectively. We like the metaphor of butterfly wings flapping on one side of the world having a direct impact in organizational seminars as a neat idea without applying to us — until it does.

I also can’t help getting Clive Hamilton’s book, Defiant Earth, out of my head. Has Gaia looked around and pondered, “I sent them hurricanes, I sent them floods, I sent them tornadoes, I sent them fires — all with increasing intensity. While the environmentalists moan and the politicians deny or ignore, what do I have to do to get their attention? Are they not seeing what they are doing to despoil the earth? Maybe I should try something that they can’t see but has a universal effect to scare the bejusus out of them”.

One of the effects is that climate change and the Anthropocene have almost disappeared in favour of the viral scene front and centre. The omni-present press can talk of nothing but medical disaster and economic disaster in an endless news cycle and when there is no news, they turn to analysis to assign blame. The battle between economics and health can suck up all the oxygen. If that is isn’t enough, add in the drama of federal versus state. Paying attention to the news these days is a disaster leading to outrage or despair. It’s as though climate changes and its ongoing danger have disappeared. The only odd glimmer that “Hey the air is cleaner now that there are fewer cars on the road” disappears as we now decide that the contamination of the virus isn’t caused only by travel and congregating. It’s in the air.