Richard Zurawski

I hear that NASA is now getting ready to mount an expedition to Mars. Its going to cost trillions, take a small group of people away from the only place that we know of in the universe that not only has life, but may in fact, harbour all the life in the universe. And it’s going to take years and has a good probability that they may never return.

Meanwhile, back here on Earth, wars, pestilence, climate change, over population and a host of apocalyptic problems plague and beg for solution.

Why are we going, I ask? Why are we going to put a handful of people in a glorified tin can, risk cosmic radiation, solar flares, insanity, loneliness to voyage to a planet that may once have had oceans and water and atmosphere resembling ours, but has done without for perhaps three billion years? The answer I hear is this. We need a second planet to live on. Now, in my mind, this answer is so absurd, that I really do need to ask, “What planet are you from?!”

Here we have a perfectly good planet, one that has harboured and kept safely and continuously all the life we know of for some four billion years. Its much worse for wear and tear than it used to be, because of us, but its still a home where we can, if we want, make into a Garden of Eden.

And does anyone really believe that we would make a destitute rock, cold and distant, a livable home, while at the same time we trash and slash and burn the only home we have ever known. All in the name of survivabilty.

Really folks, if we really were searching for information and understanding wouldn’t it be easier and cheaper by far to send robotic spaceships and rovers, rather than trying to take human habitat with us across the frozen abyss between us and the planets? I mean, we have learned so much in the past 50 years from Voyageur et al without risking life and limb. And how much science have we really learned from all the Shuttle missions. Let’s refocus and haul our planetary egos back to Earth. Let the machines and computers do the travelling and let’s spend our money fixing the massive damage we have already done to what truly is a unique planet and the only home we have.

What is it about lawns and people? It is something that has escaped me over the years, the yearning to have a patch of Kentucky green that would make Tiger Woods show up with his putter in tow.

My approach has been minimalist to say the least, and I am sure some of my neighbours, whose mission in life seems to be to eradicate anything, with chemicals, and internal combustion machines, that infringes on their quest to green monocultures, rue the day I moved in.

To me dandylions are beautiful, the leaves can be left to compost, the weeds may thrive and in general if it grows, and can survive my dogs and me playing frisbee, then it is welcome on my lawn. In fact, I am working to reduce the amount of lawn that I have and have already created havens for squirrels, thistles, insects, spiders and all sorts of species who would never be able to live in the green deserts that we call lawns. Yes, indeed that is what lawns are. They are devoid of diversity, living carpets of thin bladed green imported from who knows where, that needs to weeded, sprayed, manicured, cut, raked and fawned over like some precious life.

Here is the lawn reality. The grass of almost all lawns in not indigenous, its imported and genetically altered to maximize its salability. An average sized lawn displaces, in Canada, roughly, 100 indigenous plants species, 50 species of insects, spiders and arthropods and trees. Amphibians, birds, small mammals and millions of microbes are also pushed out physically.

Then there are the pesticides. Mounting evidence shows that pesticides that are designed to keep the monoculture pure, also has an effect well outside its intended application. Our cancer rates are soaring, immuno-diseases climbing and still I can look out my window and more often that not see the backside of my corpulent neighbour administering yet another shot of some noxious chemical stew to the plucked and preened green called lawn.

And while he prisses away his time, with pesticide spray and lawn mower, I watch the wind blow dandy lion fluff and hope a seed escapes his notice.

With apologies to Steppenwolf, the sixties rock band, not the book by Hermann Hesse, I marvel at the internal combustion engine. About a century-and-a-half ago the first internal combustion engine, co-invented by Nicholas Otto, has gone from a handful of primitive blocks to now being numbered in the billions. The count is amazing. Two-stroke and four-stroke gasoline engines along with their diesel counterpart have multiplied in spectacular fashion. They are virtually a new species invading every continent and niche imaginable.

Now, it’s not just cars and trucks that make use of this device. The internal combustion machine can also be found in leaf blowers, weed whackers, snow blowers and lawn mowers. Anything powered by liquid fossil fuels using the things. Power generators, chain saws, motorcycles, airplanes, construction vehicles, motor boats, seadoos, bull dozers even toys make use of the internal combustion machine.

The internal combustion machine is why, some historians think that we gave up slavery. Instead of people, unreliable and prone to revolt, we have the all powerful fossil fuel machines, that never complain and happily take whatever we dish out. They can do anything and have transformed us and our world, especially in the west, and allow democracy to flourish.

Back about 100 years ago there were about one-million horses that used to do the work in New York City. One-million horses need a lot of care and even more shoveling. They made about 20-million pounds of horse doo-doo every day and in the summer it was a source of typhoid, cholera, dysentery and a host of other diseases. The car, the internal combustion machine, and its ability to do work and aid in transportation was seen as a god send. But in just 20 years we had fatalities, air pollution, traffic jams and road rage. The city became clogged with Otto’s autos.

Now its everywhere. Billions of the gosh darn things, and their pollution, noise and over use. We have gotten lazy. Whatever happened to raking the leaves, shoveling the snow, walking or playing without the aid of the “infernal” combustion machine??

I just recently got an old fashioned push mower for my lawn, at the behest of my neighbour who has been using one for years. Why I have a lawn in the first place is another question, but let’s leave that for now. I discovered to much surprise, how easy it was, and quiet and simple. Good bye Otto. Now if I can only convince my other neighbours, or better yet get rid of the lawns….but as I said that for another day.

Sorry Johnny Kay, loved your music, but its time to shut down the motor!

Nothing like a quote from Oscar Wilde to get started. I hear a lot of clammer about the aging demographics and how too few children being born and that we need to make babies to keep the economic engine rolling along. Not only is there clammer, but there is money as well. In Quebec they are paying folks to have more children, through their baby bonus. It’s even in the art. In Russia there are statues of pregnant mothers pushing baby carriages being erected (pardon the pun) as an ad for the virtues of procreation. Six-and-a-half billion people in the world and counting and somehow we still feel the need to make more.

I just finished a documentary mini series about a Persian philosopher and prophet named Zarathushtra. It took me to many places, but specifically, the relevant place as far as this ramble is concerned, is that it took me to Mumbai, the former city of Bombay in India. Nobody is telling the folks in Mumbai to get on the motherhood bandwagon. In case you didn’t know, Mumbai has a number of distinctions. It is the economic engine of India, home to Bollywood and has the largest slum in the world. Its population is 18-million, little more than half of Canada’s total all living in an area half the size of Prince Edward Island. And more than 17.5 of its fine citizens live in said slum. In fact, slums like Mumbai are according to the United Nations, the fastest growing segment of human population. More than a billion people worldwide now live in slums. That is one in six people on the face of the Earth. Sao Paulo, Rio de Janiero, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Manila, Moscow and the list goes on and on.

How is it that we can have the largest population of any species of animal ever, and still at the same time say that we need to make more of us! All in the name of consumption so that the economic forces that drive our society can stay stoked. Talk about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic! Here is another quote, this time from an ancient cartoon called Pogo. “I have met the enemy….and the enemy is us”!

As you may know, I am writing another weather book. This time it is about climate change and the Maritimes. I have just finished the first draft and it is now in front of my long suffering publisher and editor, who have to wade through the dire predictions and prognostications. And if all is well I will then inflict my thoughts on my readers.

Here is a nugget that will appear in the book, something that sent a cold shiver up my spine. We here in the Maritimes possess one of the great oceanographic institutes in the world, the Bedford Institute of Oceanography. Some 500 scientists study and research all things atmospheric, geologic and oceanographic. And in the course of my researches for my new book, their media expert, Carl Myers, set me up with a number of scientists to interview. Last Thursday, I had the pleasure of talking with Jim Hamilton, a scientist who has just returned from the iceless North West Passage. The pictures are daunting, vast stretches of open water where just a few decades ago the vistas were frozen solid even in the summer with ice five metres thick. As I marveled at the pics, Jim laid a stat on me while he was telling me about the trip. He said that it appears that the top 200 metres ocean’s of the world are now 0.5C warmer than they were fifty years ago. Not much I thought at first. But after I did a quick mental arithmetic calculation I realized that energy involved was huge. That half a degree of ocean warming in the top layer of the oceans contains the enough heat to raise the temperature of the atmosphere some 100C if it were released all at once into the atmosphere. Of course it won’t, but it stopped me in my tracks. All that heat tied up has to go somewhere. And it is. It’s melting the ice. What this ultimately means no one can say for certain. But I will bet not a whole lot on good will happen. Where are the nay sayers to counter this one?

Here is some food for thought on the global warming/climate change front.

In the Tuesday Sept 10 Globe and Mail, on the editorial page, there was an article about China and its contribution to the effluent that contributes to climate change. The statistic is this. China is now approaching the United States in terms of total greenhouse gas emissions. The editorial went on to imply that unless something was done to stop the run away industrialization of China then all efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions are a waste.

Well, that is just one perspective, one interpretation of the statistics. Here is another for you to ponder, as you whiz along in your SUV, drinking your disposable Timmy’s. Try this on for size. China has 1.3-billion people, the U.S. has 300-million. If the total emissions are the same for China and the US of A, then China is outputting per person, less than 25 per cent the emissions that the average North American does.

In fact, with all our much vaunted “Reuse, Recycle, Reduce” rhetoric I don’t know of anyone, personally, who has the eco-footprint of the average Chinese citizen. So perhaps we could make some reductions on our own and reduce the harping on the pollution that China, India and the rest of the world outside the west is producing. We, you and I, are far and away far worse in the eco-footprint game.