Richard Zurawski

I have recently joined the ranks of the sailing crowd, with the purchase of my first sailboat. It is something that I have been planning for more than thirty years and finally I have taken the plunge, figuratively, not literally. The day of the final transaction, when the boat became mine, was, I was reminded by Silver Donald Cameron, one of the two happiest days of a sailor’s life. The other happy day, of course, is when he sells the boat! Thank you Silver Donald!

When I look at the wonder and marvel that is a modern sailing vessel, I cannot help but see the fantastic history that is wrapped in this amazing vessel. It is a wonder to me that more people do not become mesmerized by the simplicity of the ceaseless wind, how the breezes and zephyrs we take for granted, that rustle the autumn leaves, also powered the great ages of exploration from Europe, Asia and Africa, allowed the settling of the Pacific Islands and are part of almost every peoples of the world.

When the age of fossil fuels dawned some 200 years ago, it slowly strangled the great sailing traditions and tall ships became but an anachronistic euphemism for an outdated time. But out of the ashes, quite literally, a new age of wind is dawning. The movement of air, the wind, has within it the possibility to change the way we move our goods on this world. Imagine if we began to see sailing ships as not only a recreation, but as a mode of transport for people and goods. Quiet, non polluting and elegantly plying the waters, modern sailing ships could employ the latest polyfibres and incorporate the latest computerized programmes to squeeze every erg out of the endless wind. We could embrace the past and revitalize local and regional economies. In harbour, ships with sails and wind turbine blades could become power generators and bring electricity to any port the visited, selling the wind as it were.

Its not hard to see how trading a bit of time for the cost of pollution and fuel could make good economic sense. Our old economic engines have always treated the world as a dumping ground for our unwanted refuse. We never consider the exhausts of our gas, diesel and coal engine to have a cost. But they do have a cost and in the coming decades we will have to include that in the price of everything we produce. If we choose to invoke a cradle to grave economic system, where the cost of returning our garbage and pollution to a benign state is factored into our goods and if that is passed on to business and business is held accountable for effluent it produces, then perhaps a sailing vessel could again be competitive. If we could see past the “just in time” delivery systems, slow down a bit, we could quite literally have a return to a modern generation of tall ships.

When I sail out of the harbour, the wind in my face, I can’t help but wish for a return to wind powered sailing ships of every type. Instead of the steel, smoke belching behemoths that clog our ports, I envision a slower, but no less efficient pace powered by the never ending wind. I wonder how long it will take before what was old is new again?

This is a relatively new story as reported in the Globe and Mail

“Alberta is scrambling to come up with a backup plan to vaccinate girls against a virus that causes cervical cancer as more Catholic school boards opt out over a program they say condones premarital sex.

So far at least six of Alberta’s 20 Catholic boards have voted against allowing girls in Grades 5 and 9 to be inoculated against HPV in schools. More boards are expected to say no after Calgary Bishop Fred Henry spoke out against the program during a meeting with school trustees.”

When I read the article I was left speechless. I thought to myself, here we go again. And in fifty the years I suppose the Catholic Church will again trip all over itself to cover up another horrendous tragedy. Thousands of women who could have been spared a needless early death to cervical cancer will now receive a death sentence because church officials in with their sanctimonious pronouncements came up with the absurd suggestion that they should be denied a vaccine in the name of halting promiscuity.

Modern science is an amazing tool. It has given us a lifestyle that could only be described as miraculous. A few short centuries ago average life spans were less than half of what they are today. Bacterial diseases have been fought to a standstill with antibiotic agents like penicillin. Before penicillin even a scratch could become septic and ravage the body’s defenses and lead to death. Vaccines defeated scourges like Small Pox, the greatest mass killer in human history, making it the first disease ever to be eradicated.

We have unravelled DNA, genetically re-engineered cells, cloned cells, plants and animals and are on the verge of defeating horrendous afflictions. Nothing in human history has worked like western modern medicine. And yet superstitious silliness still seems to run strong. There are those who refuse blood transfusions, based on scripture, others take up a variety of charlatanous practices like the laying on of hands to cure illness and still others promote reflexology, raky and host of ridiculous and dangerous pseudo medical substitutes.

This latest salvo from the Catholic Church is as stupid as any that I have heard. With this vaccine the parasitical virus that cause cervical warts (Human Papillo Virus - HPV) and is the leading cause of cervical cancer is stopped in its tracks. The virus is passed from person to person during sex. The vaccine prevents the virus being passed on if the woman is inoculated with the vaccine. The vector is broken and the woman does not become infected with the virus which often leads to cervical cancer.

That a school board of any sort, Catholic or otherwise, should come out against the vaccine because they feel it promotes promiscuity, sickens me. It is the same twisted logic that allowed HIV to rip through the Gay community in the late seventies and early eighties with the justification that it was a revenge from a vengeful deity in response to an immoral lifestyle.

That this should occur in this day and age is again proof that a clique of powerful old men with anti female bias is still a huge problem in our world.

I have, for much of my life, lived outside the sphere of religion. Its not that it doesn’t affect me, (to say that would preposterous, quite frankly given the immersion our society has in anything faithful) it’s just that within my modes of thinking and feeling, it has no place. That does not mean that I don’t think that there are some aspects of religion that are worthy.

Pacificism and public service are two that immediately come to mind. But by and large, the idea that there could be anything that there could be an all knowing all seeing deity that “watches the sparrow fall” and “will strike me down” etc. belongs to my way of thinking in the fascinating and engrossing milieu of myth and legend of humankind. That is not a religious putdown, but rather a rumination of my perspective.

Its a very complicated relationship, but worth commenting on. Some of the most worthy people I know, and by worthy, I mean worth listening to, worth considering and who have a perspective that has worth, come from the deeply faithful. I am not talking George Bush theocracy or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad zenophobia, the two most notable Jihadists in the world today, but rather people who feel deeply for the human condition and try to make sense of it with empathy and heart and make the world a better place. Who am to say this is wrong or misguided?

Yet when all is considered, intellectually I have more akin to Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and Bertrand Russell, some of the most prominent atheists of my time. Yet, surprisingly, this does not stop me from accompanying my wife on Sundays to the solitude of a sanctuary to get what peace I can in quiet consideration, nor from being fascinated with the vast and spectacular religious pantheon that we have had through the ages. I am drawn to reading about myth and legend, about ancient faiths and am enthralled with the rich tapestry of faith that we had through all the ages, whether monotheistic, pagan or new age.

In that vein had to think about a particular group who had an interesting intellectual conjunction some 2500 years ago and brought together mathematics and faith.

I think it is safe to say that most of us are familiar with an ancient Greek mathematician, Pythagoras, whose main claim to fame rests with the theory in mathematics which bears his name, the Pythagorean Theory, dealing with triangles, and is a specific case of another theory made famous over the past couple of decades, Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Most people are not familiar with the notion that Pythagoras was, in addition to being a mathematical genius, a political and religious icon of his day as well. He and his group formed a faith around the number 2. And in its day it was quite influential and until a coup that basically wiped them out. Other Greeks of other religious persuasions took offense to the Pythagorean political machinations and the mixing of religion and politics, otherwise we might have had cathedral or two built with modern day adherents to the holy number 2. Stranger things have happened. But that was not to be. It is now just a twist of fate and the Pythagorean religion is just a footnote in religious history and quite forgotten.

So why was the number 2 holy? Their number 2 represented the male and the female, the two sexes of humankind, 2 was the first and only even prime number, the first even number, divided itself without remainder, into half of all numbers and the first nontrivial number. In fact, as far as they could see, the number 2 represented something holy and mystical about the universe and was worthy of worship. Hey, I’ve heard worse. A a scientist and a mathematician, this makes as much sense to me as any of the religions I have encountered. However like all religions they ran into controversy as they applied their general idea of the workings of the universe into the framework of their faith.

One day, one of their number (couldn’t resist the pun), playing with the number 2 as they were want to, discovered that in addition to all its other properties, 2 had some imperfections, or rather irrationalities. This person, whose name has now been lost in the mists of time, discovered that the square root of 2 was an irrational number and could not be written down numerically, only symbolically. It just stretched out on and on without end. Given all the perfections and conciseness of the number 2’s other properties this was a definite fly in the religious ointment and would be a serious problem to the less mathematically inclined of their flock. In an effort to expunge the obvious shortcoming to the holy of holies, the discoverer of the irrational side to their deity was dispatched by the more political of their group to the great hereafter with the help of a chunk of good Greek limestone providing ballast to make sure the concept sank into the Aegean as surely as he did.

What’s that about the road to hell and good intentions? The greater good etc?

I have always liked this story and whether it is entirely factual is up for discussion, but for some reason it does have the ring of truth to it to me and gives me pause. Like all religions, it is hard to create an all encompassing, inductive reasoning that perfectly fits the unknown in all contingencies. Every once in a while irrationality springs forth. Just a little food for thought.

I was having an interesting conversation the other day with a friend of mine and we were conjecturing why it was that we have had such hard time getting the majority of people to become active in changing their consumptive habits as it relates to climate change. We both agreed most people generally acknowledge the climate is changing, but for some reason people continue to consume, travel and behave as though they are not contributing to the problem.

As a, visceral example, of the palpable resistance to change, I present my attempt to affect a change on a purely local level, with a group of people who I thought would be most receptive to beginning to make a change.

I am in the throes of writing a masters thesis and am taking a course related to the writing of said masters. There are 17 others in this class, most of them working towards their masters degrees through coursework, and full time teachers as well. I thought that this was  perfect place to put to the test what my friend and I had observed. I had noticed over the first few weeks of the class that roughly half of my classmates came to class with some form of disposable beverage, the majority of those, from Canada’s largest fast food purveyor. A few brought thermoses with coffee or tea they had prepared themselves. I asked the professor of the class whether I might ask the class about this, since this group was a group of educators. I suggested that perhaps, as educators, we might set and example and for the during of the remaining classes refrain from bringing in disposable materials.

I was shocked at the response, taken totally unawares at the hostility, viciousness and the unwillingness to even consider the proposition. One harpy in particular, suggested it was totally inappropriate to even ask and I had no right even to suggest that we refrain from bringing disposable items to class. To a person, the rest of the class didn’t even respond and in a heart beat after the professor said that I had the right to ask and had done so with her permission, it was back to normal as though I and my suggestion had never existed. I was blind sided. I had expected some discussion, some discourse, some support. The harpy’s parting, sarcastic, patronizing shot was a victorious, “There, you’ve done your duty” as I sat there dumfounded. This was a group of teachers who mold and shape the minds of our children, in a forum of higher education a place to seek new ways to educate and enlighten.

I ruminated for a while, and this blog is part of the reflection. Aside from the sarcasm and hissing invective, I think this is what is going on. We are creatures of our evolution and environment and we respond to those things which are immediate threats. If we didn’t we would soon die off. Abstract threats or far off threats or random, infrequent threats are put off on a back burner, because we are too focussed dealing with the day to day issues that threaten us. Stock market plunges, gas prices, class essays all come in ahead of the climate change and its related consumption issues. The disposable coffee cup though intellectually tied to our environmental degradation, does not present a threat any more than the disposable appliances, Wal-Mart, or the factory abattoirs from which get our meats. Its called Bayesian statistics and says if we successfully navigate the immediate threats then we are likely to survive. What happens in times of unpredictable catastrophe is another story. Even though we see it looming and have all the facts we still don’t register that we have to change our habits to avoid impending doom.

And in the case of people who are supposed to be thoughtful and educated, it is hard to escape a million years of evolution.

As the summer, what little we got that qualifies as summer, winds down and we approach the winter season, I watch the inevitable changes with particular interest. The first tinges of autumnal colour in the leaves presage the inevitable snows, but not before the plethora of roadside farmers’ markets’ bounty pop up like mushrooms as the summer rains. Pumpkins, tomatoes, berries, potatoes, apples and preserves in makeshift stalls, displaying a local, yet exotic mix of of Maritime rural fair. Like magnets they pull me into their orbits and bid me to stop as I wend my way home, so often taking a longer, less direct route home. It is in my mind the perfect time of year, the perfect season, the season most blessed and I revel each and every year in its advent. The biting cold is not yet here and the summer swelter is just a memory and the spiders feast on what was a burgeoning insect population, getting ready for the seasonal slumber of winter.

Its not the blister of summer heat nor the frigid crack of winter that snares my keenest interests. Rather it is the twilight of the seasons that I find most compelling, especially the waning summer months and the eerie beauty of the autumn. And while I revel in the cool nights and toasty days, my affection also extends to the Maritime bluster and storms that churn the ocean waters and strip the browning leaves from the trees in prelude to the winter snows.

As I ruminate about the changing seasons, I can’t help but wonder whether it was always thus. Was the autumn of my childhood and youth as protracted as it is today and did it linger into the days of September and October the way it seems to me today? It is the curse of, if not a faulty memory, then of a memory subject to influence of time and wistful wishes.

It seems to me when I was young time never flowed in the torrent I experience now. Today the days are as short as thunderclaps and I wonder how it was possible that a summer day could hold all the wonders it did when I was young. I know the statistics tell me of the changes to the climate and that seasons are indeed becoming longer and are measurably so, but I suspect the changes are too subtle for my ken, making me rely statistics and the studies of others.

As I look over the science of climate change, a science no different from the science of my cardiologist or my auto mechanics, I wonder why it is such a hard sell and why we as a species do no believe we have to mend our ways to avert a catastrophe, when we have so much information on it. I know that in terms of even a long human lifetime and given the volatility of memory, an analysis of paleoclimate and climate change is not in the cards for any of us from a personal perspective, but surely we must be consistent and trust the science that has allowed us to create the mess we are in and believe its results.