Christmas was a relaxing break from our winter of great change.
When I’d finally finished dehydrating, pressure canning and sausage making, I started washing, repairing and painting walls. Instead of being floored by the enormity of the task ahead, I kept filling a pail with water and scrubbing.
Quite amazed by the cobwebs and fly crap that had accumulated while I’d focused elsewhere, I refocused and change happened fast.
Farmer came home, stood in the hall and surveyed the damage. I braced myself.
“I hope you’re done with the yellow,” he offered.
Several rooms caught paint. Farmer suddenly commented on how he’d like to put up baseboards that weren’t installed during our last renovation.
Never say never, except: never give up hope. This lesson can be more widely applied.
At night I finished “This Crazy Time” by fellow Canadian Tzeporah Berman. I cried like scientists at global climate change [CC] conferences, realizing just how insulated from the real impacts of human industries I really am.
I learned that Canada has been doing its best to kybosh climate change progress. Instead, my country is renovating earth with new toxic lakes and won this distinction:
“The Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center lists 207 nations by order of carbon emissions. The tar sands has higher emissions than 145 of them.”
Tar sands development requires removal of boreal forest (lungs). Then between two and 4.5 barrels of fresh water are contaminated, producing just one barrel of soon to be burned bitumen.
Canada’s carefully branded “ethical oil” produces toxic waste lakes, growing at 2.2 billion gallons of contamination per day.
But it creates jobs: oil company workers rake dead birds off the lakes. Spin offs in health care, too, as the Mikisew Cree First Nation is sacrificed to tar sands cancers. I cried.
Do turn down your thermostat because 300 million cubic feet of natural gas is required daily to extract bitumen.
Meanwhile, “Unlike most developed countries, Canada’s global warming emissions are still skyrocketing and fully half the growth is coming from Alberta” writes Berman.
So Saskatchewan still gets winter. But must we wait until we’re burned out, fracked out and poisoned out before admitting the CC connection?
CC is industry-created erratic weather, also fingered for tripling tornadoes in Saskatchewan during 2012.
I’m thinking renovating is a messy industry: drywall mud, dust and paint splatter...
What happens when Farmer’s wife joins the protestors?
