Jim Poling Sr.'s Blog, page 29

Let them eat horses

It’s amazing what you learn when you open a book.
I thought I had a solid grasp of North American history, until I picked up Wild Horse Country by David Philipps.
I got the book because Philipps, a Pulitzer Prize New York Times correspondent, has a theory of how mountain lions can solve America’s wild horse problem. The read taught me something about wild horses, but more importantly how the horse changed North American history.
The wild horse, or mustang, is an American icon, and a problem that costs U.S. taxpayers millions, if not billions, of dollars. Eighty to 100,000 mustangs freely roam public lands in the West, exhausting grassland food supplies for themselves and other wildlife.
Their numbers need to be controlled but the U.S. government can’t decide how that should be done. Slaughter or mass sterilization are two options being considered but there is a dilemma: the wild horse is as much a symbol of America’s freedom as the bald eagle and the general public wants the horse left wild and free.
So the U.S. federal government rounds up hundreds of wild horses and puts them in holding areas where it pays to room and board them. Meanwhile, open range wild horses continue to breed and the overpopulation problem continues.
In explaining the wild horse issue, Philipps gives a fascinating history of the horse in North America and that’s where I got my history tuned up.
Horses did not always exist in North America. Ancient forms of small, horse-like animals did exist tens of millions of years ago but disappeared. Horses, as we know them today, did not appear on this continent until the 1600s, arriving on galleons with the Spanish Conquistadors.
To the Spanish the horse was a weapon of war that allowed them to conquer the Americas and enslave its indigenous populations. They brought horses by the thousands to the Americas.
Before then, North American Indigenous peoples lived in forested areas or southern pueblos near water needed for growing food. Their movements were restricted because the only transportation they had was their feet and various forms of dugouts and canoes.
The Conquistadors’ horses changed all that, and the history of the continent.

The Spanish conquered the Pueblo of the southwest and put them to work doing jobs they needed done, including looking after horses.
The inevitable happened. The Pueblo learned how to care for horses, how to treat them and how to ride them. They also learned how to steal them.
Horses wandering off, thefts and trades soon had horses showing up in the territories of other tribes. The result was the birth of the Horse Nations, tribes such as the Navajo, Apache, Kiowa, Sioux ,and the greatest horse people of all – the Comanche.
Horses freed these people from coaxing vegetables out of parched soil and chasing bison on foot. They hunted and explored on horseback and moved their villages to better locations as needed.
Tecumseh, the celebrated Shawnee warrior and diplomat, travelled thousands of miles on horseback organizing the pan-Indian confederation aimed at stopping American takeovers of Indian land. The Americans chased and killed him in a battle along southern Ontario’s Thames River during the War of 1812-14.
The horse, an animal unknown to any North American native before the Europeans arrived, allowed tribes to hold off total colonization for decades, if not a couple of centuries.
All that, however, is a historical explanation in Wild Horse Country. The book’s main message is that the U.S. government ignores the wild horse management potential of mountain lions.
Philipps has noted the federal agriculture department killed 305 lions in 2014, gave grants to agencies that killed hundreds more while private hunters, encouraged by government bureaucracies, killed almost 3,000 lions the same year.  Had those lions not been killed and had eaten three horses each that year, there would have been almost no growth in the wild horse population.
Government initiatives continue to promote killing lions in some areas where the government also wants wild horse populations limited.
Philipps says killing fewer lions so they can eat more wild horses will restore an important balance and save taxpayers money.
In other words, let nature do its work without more human meddling.
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What if no one voted?

I’m trying to figure out whether it was a wishful dream, or a nasty nightmare. Whichever it was, I know what prompted it.
Before bedtime I had been reading opinion columns on what might happen in the June 7 Ontario provincial election. One piece, by Margaret Wente of the Toronto Globe and Mail, noted the indigestibility of the choices.

,Although I don’t always agree with her opinions, I respect Ms. Wente’s work. So I was interested to read her view that Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals have zero chance of being re-elected and her labelling Doug Ford as a “blustering ignoramus” who has no grasp of policy, platform or budget.
The other choice was New Democrat Andrea Horwath, who Ms. Wente wrote “plans to run gigantic deficits for years and years, until Tinker Bell arrives with magic bags of money.”
All that reading heightened my anxiety over this election, and no doubt the anxieties of voters who can’t see a palatable choice among the three major parties.
Ontario is in trouble, and has been for some time. Its manufacturing sector is evaporating, its health care system is a mess, its hydro policy is sinful and its debt load is shocking.
It is doubtful that any party will make the hard choices needed to pull the province out of its nosedive and onto the straight and level. A Sir or Lady Galahad is needed to take charge but there are no such persons on the political horizon. They exist, but they are unwilling to enter the fanatically partisan circus that politics has become.
All that was floating in my mind when I went to bed.
 When sleep took me I found myself back as a junior reporter assigned to gathering lesser aspects of the election, what is known in the news business as getting colour. I decided to visit polling stations just before closing to interview last-minute voters.
I walked into one polling station and found the place as silent and still as a cemetery. The returning officer, various polling clerks and scrutineers all sat staring at the ceiling and looking bored. There wasn’t a voter in sight.
“Pretty quiet here. The rush must be over,” I said to no one in particular.
Several officials stared at their hands, Others began to look busy.
 I walked over to the table where you check in to vote. On the table was a sheet listing the names of eligible voters in that polling district.
When a voter approaches the table to get his or her ballot, one clerk checks the person’s eligibility and hands out a ballot. The other clerk, usually holding a pen and ruler, puts a line through the voter’s name to show he or she has voted.
The sheet in front of the poll clerk had no lines drawn through any names. No one had voted all day at that polling station.
I checked other polling stations. Same result. No lines through any names. No one had voted!
I went to the polling stations of the three major party leaders. No one, including the leaders themselves, had voted.
I ran down the street, searching building after building for a telephone. This was the biggest story any reporter could hope for and I needed to call it in.
Wherever I went there were no telephones. The more I searched, the more panicked I became. It was terrifying having a massive scoop and not being able to file it to your editor!
I ran until my lungs ached. I was sweating and screaming when a ringing telephone woke me. I never thought a marketing call could make me so happy.
It took me a few minutes to return to the real world, and I began thinking about the June 7 election. What if it really happened? What if no one turned out to vote?
That seems impossible, of course, yet just the thought is scary. We already are partly there. In the last two provincial elections combined, fewer than one-half of eligible voters turned out.
Troubling as it was, my dream gave me an important realization: There are times when we dislike our voting choices, but at least we have some.

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What’s killing our grouse?

At first it sounds like the muffled booming of a distant jet. Or perhaps a moose thumping through the open forest over the next hill.
It starts slowly, a muted thump, thump, thump then increases to something similar to a far off sonic boom.
I don’t hear that sound often these days so I can be forgiven for not identifying it instantly. It is, of course, a ruffed grouse pumping its cupped wings against the air and creating a drumming sound.
Male ruffed grouse, or partridge, stand on a log or rock in the spring and drum to attract females. As he drums, a ruff of dark feathers expands around his neck and he arches his tail feathers into a broad fan.
Witnessing drumming and strutting is a joy of the spring forest. It is one that I experience less and less with each passing year.
Ruffed grouse populations are down throughout much of North America. Many upland game hunters have stopped hunting them.
I am reluctant to shoot  a grouse in the fall, despite the fact they are one of the finest game birds around; fun to hunt and the best eating bird in the woods. I’ll take grouse over domestic chicken or turkey any day.
I can’t bring myself to shoot one because they have become so scarce in areas where I go. I figure every one I leave alive might help grouse populations get back to where they once were.
I saw a decline in my hunting area in the early 2000s. The small flocks I used to encounter were rarely seen. Then sightings of pairs and singles became less frequent.
Any wildlife decline in one area can be the result of localized conditions, so I assumed it was me just having poor luck. About the same time, however, hunters in Pennsylvania, where the ruffed grouse is the state bird, began noticing population declines. Then other northeastern U.S. states reported falling numbers.
Wildlife biologists always talked about eight- to 10-year cycles in which grouse populations waxed and waned. Population declines were attributed to periods of heavy predation, parasitic infestations or severe weather. As these periods passed, populations bounced back.
However, grouse populations have not bounced back in many areas. What is happening to ruffed grouse is more than regular up and down cycles.

Last year a U.S. game bird report said grouse populations in the northeastern states have declined at least 30 per cent in the last 30 years. It predicted continuing declines unless the causes are clearly identified and addressed.
The causes are the subject of much study and debate in the U.S. One of the main theories of cause has been habitat loss.
These birds survive mainly on buds, berries, catkins, soft leaves and seeds. They love clover when they can get it.
These succulent foods are abundant in new growth forests. Mature forests with large canopied trees have less ground cover growth and therefore fewer food choices for grouse.   
Logging and forest fires allow for new forest growth in many areas, so habitat loss as a main factor in general population declines is questionable.
A recent theory is that ruffed grouse are being hit hard by mosquito-borne West Nile disease. Some research has shown that 80 per cent of grouse exposed to West Nile die or are left sick enough to be unable to survive harsh weather and predators.
There has been little to no research to determine if West Nile is a major factor in Ontario’s ruffed grouse decline.
No one is able to say definitively what is killing Ontario’s grouse. It might be habitat loss, West Nile, parasites, or unusually heavy predation or combination of all these factors.
We need a definite answer to be able to do whatever is necessary to stop the decline and help grouse populations get back to previous levels.
The ruffed grouse is more than just a game bird. It is an important link in forest biodiversity.
As Aldo Leopold, the American environmentalist, wrote in his A Sand County Almanac:
“ . . . the grouse represents only a millionth of either the mass or the energy of an acre. Yet subtract the grouse and the whole thing is dead.”
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‘We are the change’

Most visitors to the San Francisco Bay area take in the usual popular sights: Fisherman’s Wharf, Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz.
Not me. I am in Moraga, a small town of about 16,000 nestled in the eastern hills overlooking the Bay area. It is the home of Saint Mary’s College of California, a small liberal arts college established roughly 150 years ago.
Saint Mary’s is the venue for a one-day college fair, one of hundreds taking place across North America at this time of year.
Spring is when universities and colleges send out their admissions representatives looking for the right future students for their institutions. For students, the fairs are a chance to gather information about course offerings, admissions policies, financial aid and college life in general.
In short, they are an opportunity for students to kick the tires of their post-high school education choices.
Post-secondary schools from more than half the U.S. states, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland are represented here. So are the Canadian institutions of Queen’s, Ryerson, McGill, Waterloo and the University of British Columbia.
Why I am here and what I am doing is not important. What I am seeing here is.
The young women and men talking with the college reps are much different from those of my blackboard jungle high school days.
These are not goofy teens going through the motions of being here because someone told them to be. They are interested and focussed, asking probing questions and taking close note of the answers.
You can’t identify them by uniform dress or look-alike hairstyles. They are more diverse – more individualistic – despite all being closely connected through online culture.
Many people say today’s kids are growing up more slowly than other generations. They often are viewed as social media addicts disconnected from the real world.
I disagree completely.
So does Dr. Lisa Damour, a psychologist, author and New York Times Well Family columnist.
“Those of us who live with teenagers and are around them can see something that is different about this generation,” she said recently.
These kids have been slapped hard and toughened – and enlightened – by significant changes in our society. They know about gunfire in schools, have seen the middle class evaporating and the gap between the haves and have nots expand into a chasm.
They have watched politics in their country, and other countries around the world, turn into clown shows in which unsuitable people work for themselves and their parties instead of the common good. They are growing up in a time of massive change that has brought economic upheavals, climate change and serious environment worries, plus catastrophic human displacements.
These are kids who appear ready to work hard and create a society that is more diverse, more cooperative and less partisan. They are concerned about equality and social justice and what is happening to the global environment.
We have seen a glimpse of this new and different generation through the ‘Never Again MSD’ teen movement formed from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shootings in Parkland, Florida. Seventeen students and staff died and 14 others were wounded when a former student stalked the school halls with a semi-automatic assault rifle.
Students from the school created the Never Again movement to demand tighter, common sense gun control laws. They succeeded in getting the Florida legislature to pass laws raising to 21 the age limit for buying guns, and establishing waiting periods and background checks.
They also exposed the dark side of the National Rifle Association, which funnels money to politicians who support its interests.
Tens of thousands of teens across North America joined the movement to stop gun violence and to influence the U.S. mid-term elections this fall.
“I am fascinated by the phenomenon we are seeing in front of us, and I don’t think it’s unique to these six or seven kids who have been the face of the Parkland adolescent cohort,” says Dr. Damour. 
Even more fascinating is a comment from one of the Stoneman Douglas survivors:
“We are no longer just high school students, that much is true,”  Delaney Tarr wrote in Teen Vogue magazine. “We are now the future, we are a movement, we are the change."

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In the stockyards of the sky

I am boot-horned into seat 37B at 31,000 feet, massaging numbness from my legs when I taste a wetness at the corners of my mouth. It is a salty wetness and I realize that I am crying. In fact, I am about to bawl.
This is embarrassing. My mind shifts to overdrive, thinking of how to conceal choking sobs from my fellow passengers.
Hide beneath a blanket? Airlines don’t provide them unless you pay for them. Bury my head in a pillow? They no longer hand out pillows either.
I am not wearing a hoodie so that’s no help. Eye drops? Good idea but they are in a carry-on buried in a hopelessly overloaded overhead bin.
I wipe away the tears furtively, then pull myself together and question why I am crying on an airplane.
Studies confirm that people are more likely to cry on airplanes than on the ground. A survey from Virgin Atlantic found that 55 per cent of people admitted to being more emotional than normal when hurtling through the stratosphere.
No one seems to know why. Some say it could be the general anxiety of flying.

It is storming below so the flight is rocky. Also there are recent stories about aircraft engines flying apart because of metal fatigue.
Then there’s the crowded skies. Aviation data companies that track all the aircraft in our skies report an average 9,728 planes, carrying 1,270,406 passengers, in the sky at any given time.
The lightest day for air traffic in recent times was Jan. 1, 2017, when there were a peak 3,354 planes in the sky at the same time. The heaviest air traffic day was Aug. 5, 2016, when 12,856 planes carrying 1,590,929 people made radar screens look like spider webs.
But I am a trained private pilot, and understand all this stuff so it doesn’t make me anxious. Certainly not enough to cry.Flight crews have observed that their passengers tend to cry more while watching movies.A survey by Gatwick Airport in London found that 15 per cent of men and six per cent of women said they are more likely to cry watching an inflight movie than at home.However, I don’t watch movies on airplanes. The movie screens now are in the seat back in front of you and the seats are so close that anyone wearing progressive lens eyeglasses gets a stiff neck trying to focus.I wouldn’t be watching today’s movie anyway because the guy sitting next me says it is called The Shape of Water and is about a woman who dates a fish.There is speculation that being in a pressurized cabin at high altitude affects levels of mood-regulating hormones serotonin and dopamine. The different atmosphere sends the hormones a bit wonky and the tears begin to flow.But it’s not flying anxiety or rattled hormones that are dissolving me into a puddle of tears. It’s nothing to do with the airplane. It’s all about getting to the airplane.Today’s airports are playgrounds for digital screens and torture chambers for passengers. The screens surround you, grinning and chortling as they dare you to approach.There is no avoiding them. You must approach. They control whether you get baggage tags, a boarding pass, even passport clearance. Only a digital screen can permit you to move into the next line of airport captives snaking its way through other banks of digital screens, humming scanners and silent hidden cameras. Seen from above the captives are unbroken lines wandering wearily through a maze in search of the Pharaoh’s Tomb.The reward at the maze exit is a corridor of food booths where the traveller can replenish the 10,000 calories burned during the airport passage. The $38 for a Panini, small salad and a bottle of water is enough to make anyone cry.The airlines say they are committed to reducing passenger stresses. Some are even considering sleeper berths for larger airplanes on longer haul routes. Just crawl in and sleep away the stresses and bad memories of the airport passage.Sounds sweet but you can bet the prices will have you bawling.
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The threat of untreated mental illness

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It became obvious very quickly when a rental van deliberately ploughed into crowds of Toronto pedestrians that this was not a terrorist attack. Terrorists do not jump in front of armed police and beg them to shoot them in the head.
Television media was wetting itself hoping it was a terrorist incident. Terrorism makes for sensational television. Politicians and others interviewed seemed similarly inclined, emphasizing the word ‘attack.’
In fact, this was yet another incident of a mentally ill person who snapped, producing a tragedy of unthinkable proportions.
Terrorism gets more prominence than deadly acts by persons who are mentally ill. The attitude is that terrorists are an inherent evil to be exterminated while the mentally sick are aberrations best left to health care professionals to deal with.
No one is immune from terrorist acts these days, but at least we are reasonably well protected by national security and law enforcement services. More attention needs to be directed at how society can better protect itself from what many see as a growing epidemic of untreated mental illness.
Mental health problems are a public health concern around the world. The Global Burden of Disease study found that in 2016 there were 1.1 billion people suffering mental health and substance abuse disorders. Also, major depressive disorders ranked in the top 10 causes of illnesses in all but four countries worldwide.
Some epidemiologists say that at any given time up to 25 per cent of  our population suffers from a mental health problem serious enough to impair normal functioning.
Our federal government says that one in three Canadians experiences a mental health problem or substance abuse disorder in their lifetime. Plus, only 57 per cent of adults and 43 per cent of youth report a high capacity to deal with day to day demands and difficulties.
The mental health industry goes to great lengths to promote the message that the mentally ill are no more violent than anyone else. This might be true but it is a message designed to prevent the stigma of mental illness, which in itself is a worthy goal. There should be no stigma attached to mental disease.
In trying to eliminate the stigma, however, the message ignores the fact that untreated mentally ill people are potentially dangerous and a threat to society. Emphasis on untreated.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that in developed countries 35 to 50 per cent of people with severe mental health issues do not receive treatment. The figure is 76 to 85 per cent in developing countries.
The result is that we see more violence by mentally ill people not treated or who have ignored the treatments or medications prescribed for them.
The man who shot and killed six people at a Quebec City mosque in 2017 was not taking his anti-depressants as prescribed by his doctors. The man who shot and killed three RCMP officers in Moncton in 2014 had a history of drug problems.
The guy who drove a van into a crowd in Muenster, Germany last month had mental problems that were not being treated. Similarly the driver of a car that ploughed into Christmas shoppers in Melbourne, Australia last year had a history of mental problems and drug abuse.
A doctor for the gunman who killed 58 in Las Vegas last year believed his patient had a bipolar disorder and refused to take a prescription for anti-depressants.
The growing number of these incidents surely tell us that our society needs new thinking and new approaches to untreated mental illnesses. Finding ways of getting the homeless off the streets and into decent housing where they can get treatment is one example of attacking the root causes of the mental illness crisis.
The root causes are many. Poverty, racism, global human displacements, changing economies and wildly widening inequality are among the issues creating more anxiety and more depression. Not to mention a noticeable rise in intolerance for other peoples’ customs and views.
Yes, terrorism is a threat and society needs to keep up its guard to protect against it. But untreated mental illness also is a serious threat to us all and it needs more attention, more new thinking and more resources.
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Burning hot, and crazy

I think I am going to be ill. My stomach is gurgling, starting to roll and its contents are about to take flight.
I’ve been researching what people put in their mouths, and why. What I have discovered is enough to make a cast iron stomach flip its pancakes.
For instance, earlier this year an Internet meme involving laundry pods surged in popularity and suddenly developed into the Tide Pod Challenge. Teenagers videoed themselves chewing and gagging on Tide Pods and posting the videos to You Tube where they dared others to do the same.
I’ve never snacked on Tide Pods myself so I wanted to find out why anyone would bite into a plastic packet of detergent. They contain polymers, hydrogen peroxide, ethanol and other nasty things that can burn the mouth, the esophagus and stomach.
The only answer seemed to be stupidity.
While researching I discovered the world of Internet food challenges. I guess I lead a sheltered life because I did not know there are hundreds of food challenges, ranging from eating the world’s hottest pepper to the Banana Sprite Challenge.
The latter involves quickly swallowing two bananas then chugging a litre of Sprite. The idea is to do that without vomiting, which is nearly impossible because the human stomach can hold only two cups of anything at any given moment.
There are a variety of hot pepper challenges in which participants are filmed eating the world’s hottest peppers. The preparations, including having large quantities of soothing milk at hand, are shown followed by the eating, then the reactions that can include intense sweating, pain contortions and hallucinations.
One guy who took  the hot pepper challenge landed in hospital with a burned throat and a collapsed lung.
Two years ago five middle school kids in Ohio were taken to hospital following a hot pepper challenge during lunch break.  The kids suffered skin rashes, sweating and unbearable discomfort. One boy temporarily lost his eyesight.
They had eaten Bhut Jolokia, also called the ghost pepper, which is a type of chilli pepper cultivated in India.
The ghost pepper was considered the world’s hottest pepper but apparently the Carolina Reaper now has that honour. Pepperhead, a hot pepper website found at https://pepperhead.com/top-10-worlds-hottest-peppers/, reports that the Reaper is 20 times hotter than a Habanero and 600 times hotter than a Jalapeno.
Imagine, 600 times hotter than a pepper that makes me sweat whenever I just drive past a grocery store that sells them!
There seems to be no end to the number of nasty food challenges. There’s the drinking Lemon Juice Challenge, the Chubby Bunny (stuffing numerous marshmallows in your mouth), the Gulping Milk Challenge and the Saltine Challenge in which participants try to stuff their mouths with crackers without spitting them out.
The list seems endless. These challenges are really stunts aimed at getting attention. Some are entertaining, even educational, but others are just plain dumb and can be dangerous.
Among the most gross and dangerous are the two Condom Challenges. These began several years back, presumably by beer drinking college students bored with studying, but have found renewed popularity this year.
One involves snorting a latex condom through the nose, into the back of the throat, then pulling it out through the mouth. Medical professionals of course warn that this is a really bad idea.
These things are rubbery and can easily get stuck in the throat, cutting off breathing and forcing a person to choke. Swallowing one can create serious medical complications.
That challenge went viral on You Tube in 2013 but You Tube later removed condom challenge videos.
The other condom challenge is the water drop. You fill a condom with water and drop it on your head. The idea is to have the condom envelope your head to leave the impression that you are immersed in the water inside the condom.
This kind of craziness is nothing new. Whacky challenges and bizarre stunts have been around for decades, if not centuries. They will continue and likely more elaborate and crazy than before.
We just hope that they come with some restraint and common sense. Because we live in a society that already offers too many ways to get hurt.
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A Tale of Two Nations

It was a lifetime ago but I still remember my father bending his tall and lanky frame, reaching down to clasp my hand and walking me across the invisible line dividing Canada and the United States.
There was no control gate, no border check, no passports. We simply walked into Minnesota and a little store where he bought me ice cream.
It was a different time. Smaller governments, fewer regulations, fewer fears. National identities or the lines dividing them didn’t matter much to us. Canada was where we lived; the U.S. was our ancestral home.
It was back then that I formed the view that Canada and the United States were little different. The latter was bigger, bolder, more advanced in many ways but we shared much and were much the same.
Last week I saw how different we really are. The Humboldt Broncos hockey bus tragedy brought the differences sharply into focus.
Canadians from coast-to-coast-to-coast set hockey sticks on stoops and porches to show their grief for the 16 killed and 13 injured, and for all those suffering from the losses. There was Jersey Day when tens of thousands of Canadians, and others around the world, wore sports jerseys to show their sorrow, their sympathy and their support.
A GoFundMe campaign to help the affected families raised $11 million and counting.

Humboldt showed that despite vast distances, wildly different geography and many conflicting beliefs, Canadians come together when it matters. It also showed that we have not lost all our small-town values.
While Canadians drew together for Humboldt, our American neighbours continued their descent deeper into a miasma of distrust and disunity.
The storms of discord in the U.S. are so fast and furious it is hard to remember on Thursday what happened on Wednesday. Last week alone saw police raids on the president’s personal attorney, confusion over Syria policy, presidential pardon of another convicted criminal, announced resignation of House Speaker Paul Ryan and a former FBI director calling the president a mob boss and the president calling him a slime ball.
Once a global beacon of enlightenment and hope, the U.S. is a wounded and confused state stumbling along a crooked path through a cultural, political and moral swamp. It is a nation that has lost its way.
Many blame Humpty Trumpty, the most psychologically unfit person ever elected U.S. president, but he is only a historical footnote. The descent began long before him, back in the 1960s that saw the assassinations of the Kennedys and King, the civil rights wars, Viet Nam, the cultural wars between liberals and conservatives and growing class inequalities.
The United States is no longer united. The bipartisanship that saw people work together to build the American dream has evaporated, leaving a void being filled by brainless noise and moral apathy.
Having lost the will to work together Americans never will solve the problems that are destroying their society: gun violence, deep-seated racism, a drug addiction and mental health epidemic and widening chasms of inequality.
Lost also is the will to shoulder the heavy responsibilities of leader of the free world. Considering the state of the nation, that probably is a good thing.
A major difference between Canadians and Americans is how they view compromise. Canadians are seen as a people who try to resolve conflicts through conciliation and compromise. Our willingness to compromise has been criticized as showing ambiguity and weakness - an inability to take a firm stand – but it is a valuable part of our culture.
Americans see compromise as losing. When you compromise, the other side wins and that attitude is particularly evident in U.S. politics.
Without a willingness to compromise the next option is force, which often leads to violence. The world has seen the U.S. in that movie many times.
The past two weeks have allowed us to see the best qualities of Canadians while witnessing the worst of America.
We should not be smug, however. Canadians are different from Americans but they are close neighbours and it is easy to take on their ways, good and bad.
Humboldt showed us who we are and why. We need to remember that.
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A growing dangerous view

If you’ve not heard, the world is entering a new epoch unofficially named Anthropocene, the Age of Humans. With that odd moniker has come equally odd and dangerous thinking that puts human greed ahead of conserving nature.
Scientists are arguing whether we now live in Anthropocene, a time in which humans alone have created long-lasting global impacts, or Halocene, the official current epoch that goes back 11,650 calendar years to when the last major ice age ended.
The debate doesn’t much matter to most of us. Let the Einsteins talk it out while the rest of us get on with the basics of living.
What does matter is the anthropocentric thinking promoting what is being called New Conservation Science (NCS). Basically NCS says that parts of the planet already are irreversibly damaged so forget trying to restore them and concentrate on conserving areas important only to humans.
NCS is a bad idea that views everything in nature inferior to humanity. Humans are the most important species so conservation efforts should be limited to things that benefit us. If orangutans don’t benefit large numbers of humans don’t waste time and resources trying to fix whatever is making them go extinct.

And, if opening a national park to mining and strip malls helps the economy, throw open the gates. Humans want and need coal, oil, mega cities and trillions of plastic bottles and bags and human wants and needs are more important than the environment.
The ultimate goal of conservation should be better management of nature for human benefit, say the NCS advocates. That means conservationists should ally with corporations and other economic actors, which is akin to allowing drug addicts management responsibilities in drug stores.
Anthropocentric thinking is not new. It has been used in the past to justify violence against the non-human world.
The danger now is that it is gaining traction in a world governed by more and more authoritarian politicians. These governments, now including the United States, want to alter long-standing conservation thinking and roll back the protections it created.
NCS is arrogant thinking. Humans are only one of millions of species on earth, all connected to each other and all dependent on each other in some way.
Of all species we are the most dominant and most developed, which means it is up to us to find intelligent ways to save the planet.
NCS says our resources are too limited to save everything. So we should save the things that are most important to human interests.
That is wrong headed. We can save the planet and still meet human needs. We have the resources but lack the willingness to accept lifestyle changes that require sacrifices.
Our two main obstacles to saving the planet are overpopulation and rampant consumerism. Overpopulation is recognized and being dealt with to some extent. (Current warlike talk might end up being part of the overpopulation fix).
Consumerism simply for the sake of economic growth is out of control. We need to stop overbuying tons of crap produced to build more profitable stock markets. We need to think sustainability instead of growth for growth’s sake.
Another part of our problem is a declining knowledge of the natural world. We have lost our previous close contact with it. Many of us have an appreciation of nature but few have a deep understanding of it.
Scientist Edward Wilson refers to this in his 2016 book Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life.
“A great majority of people have little awareness of the countless species . . that still envelops our planet. . . . common knowledge of the world-dominant invertebrates, the little things that run the natural world, has dwindled to almost nothing.”
Wilson says our working vocabulary of invertebrates consists of little beyond mosquitoes, butterflies, bedbugs, earthworms and others that affect us personally.
In fact there are millions of other invertebrate species that support world life, including human life, that we simply refer to as critters or bugs.
“Within this black night of ignorance we have suffered a massive failure of education and media attention,” Wilson writes.
We need to better educate ourselves about the natural world so we don’t get bamboozled by off-track movements like New Conservation Science.
Email: shaman@vianet.ca
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Toodle - luma luma

The first rain showers of April, scattered, brief and chilly as they were in the past week, have brought out something more than just the promise of May flowers.
Spring showers prompt us to drag from winter storage our most mundane and underrated item: the umbrella.
The rain umbrella, as commonplace and homely as a mud puddle, is a proclaimer of winter’s end. It signals hibernation for snow shovels and the appearance of summer fun brollies unfolded on patios, beaches and stuffed into golf bags.
Mundane as it is, the common umbrella has been around since just after the Stone Age and has intriguing stories to tell.

It is believed to have been invented in China in the 11th century B.C. as a parasol to shield people of high standing from the sun. Its name comes from the Latin word umbros, meaning shade or shadow.
Umbrellas appeared in ancient Greece and Rome in the first century BC, mainly as sun shades held by the slaves of nobles. Somewhere along the way someone figured out the umbrella could be used as a shield against rain if its silk was waterproofed.
The umbrella was seen as a feminine accessory until the mid-1700s when Jonas Hanway, an English philanthropist, became the first Londoner to carry an umbrella, suffering the indignities of coachmen who hooted at him and called him a sissy.  A visit to a rainy London street now confirms Hanway as a trend setter far ahead of his time.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of modifications and patents followed and brought us the collapsible umbrella, the telescopic umbrella; even an umbrella that can withstand winds of up to 100 kilometres per hour without turning inside out.
One especially notable modification was the $17,000 Kevlar umbrella carried by the bodyguards of former French president Nicholas Sarkozy. It would not stop bullets but would reduce their impact and provide some protection from stones or other materials thrown at Sarkozy from above.
That umbrella will not afford him much protection in prison, where he is headed if convicted of corruption and influence peddling charges laid against him recently.
Security agencies often used the umbrella in their secret work. They fitted umbrella shafts with retractable blades and even modified them to fire flechettes, steel-point projectiles.
Back in 1978 the KBG assassinated Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov with a poison-tipped umbrella. Markov was standing on London’s Waterloo Bridge when a KBG agent walked by him, stabbing him in the thigh with a ricin-laced umbrella tip.
When the Bulgarian government collapsed in 1989 umbrellas modified to fire little darts were found in one government building.
Most of the world’s umbrellas now are made in China. One town, Songxia, is known as the Umbrella City because it is reported to have 1,200 umbrella manufacturers with 40,000 participating workers, some of who work in factories while others work at home.
The Songxia Umbrella Industrial Park is said to have the capacity to produce 500 million umbrellas.
Umbrellas became symbols of the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement in 2014. Protesters carried them not just as a symbol but as protection against tear gas and pepper spray used by police.
There don’t appear to be any accurate or believable figures on how many umbrellas are sold worldwide each year. The number has to be in the hundreds of millions. U.S. statistics show that Americans buy 33 million umbrellas annually.
Sales flourish because so many people misplace their umbrellas. Last year 10,000 left behind umbrellas were turned in to the London, England public transit lost and found. Only a small per cent were reclaimed.
The umbrella is ubiquitous in song and movies. Who could forget Mary Poppins or Singin’ in the Rain?
The umbrella song that no one remembers, but the one I can never forget, is the famous pre-Second World War tune The Umbrella Man.
It was always high on my mother’s play list when she was in a singing mood. In fact, I am told she belted it out to a night club crowd in an impromptu performance after a few drinks. The nightclub patrons apparently went wild.
“Toodle - luma luma Toodle - luma luma Toodle - oh lay Any umbrellas, any umbrellas  To mend today?”
Email: shaman@vianet.ca
Profile: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K8FY3Y