NEWS FLASH!!

Posted on July 24, 2021July 25, 2021 by Peter Scott Cameron

Republican-led States Move to Limit Public Health Measures in the Name of Freedom!

At least nine Republican-governed states in the U.S. have passed laws, or are in the process of passing laws, that limit the ability of public health departments to impose measures to limit the spread of contagious diseases like Covid-19 in health emergencies, such as a pandemic. Currently, six other Republican states are considering such limitations.

It appears that they are taking the motto on New Hampshire’s licence plates – Live Free or Die – quite literally.

No state governed by the Democratic Party is imposing or considering such laws. If you are planning to move, this could be used as a handy way to discern which state to consider moving to, depending on which side of the continuum you come down on: Live free and die from Coronavirus and other epidemics, vs. Temporarily give up a little freedom for the good of the community and to live another day.

Montana has barred quarantines by local health authorities for anyone “exposed to or infected by a contagious disease.” Thus, an extremely effective public health practice used since plague times, specifically the “Black Death” of the fourteenth century, is now illegal. Remind me not to visit Montana again.

North Dakota has banned health authorities from “requiring a face covering for any reason.” Remind me…oh, yea, said that already.

Florida has given the governor the power invalidate any local health emergency order. That means the person who can decide what is in the public interest in the case of a major outbreak or other public health emergency, is, ah…Ron DeSantis. Uh, oh.

Perhaps, though, we should not be concerned about this; after all, this could be a textbook example of Darwinian selection at work. But no, please allow me to take that back: that notion is without human compassion, especially for all the poorer or disenfranchised people in those states who lack the resources to protect themselves.

Please! Remind me!

Source: Glenza, Jessica. “Republicans Bid to Limit Health Officials Could Cause ‘Preventable Tragedies’ – Experts.” The Guardian, July 23, 2021.

The Pandemic is Ending: I’m Disappointed

Posted on June 14, 2021June 16, 2021 by Peter Scott Cameron

Here in the U.S., the Covid-19 epidemic is winding down as more and more people are vaccinated. Canada is somewhat behind, but after the country’s faltering start in vaccinating, things are going well, and rates of infection are coming down there, too. This is wonderful news, and I am so very grateful. I hope to see my Canadian family and friends. And I am glad that people I know and love, and so many other people, are more-or-less out of danger. Vaccines are our way out of this, and they are working.

World-wide, things are less rosy. India is in trouble. Rates of infection are sky-rocketing in South America; Brazil, led by a fool, has a total death number second only to that of the United States, and the situation is worsening. African countries, despite remarkable competence learned from previous dealings with epidemics, are struggling with no vaccine supply to speak of. Still, even for these areas, there is reason for optimism; we, the wealthy and privileged, are starting to share vaccine supplies and help with cash and supplies for medical infrastructure, and our leaders including Uncle Joe and Justin are showing a taste to do exactly that.

And so, we can look forward to a time in the not-so-distant future when this terrible pandemic will be under control, at least, if not entirely wiped out. Most likely, just like the flu, we will get our annual shot, and go on our merry way. We will return to normal life.

Yet, I am disappointed. It is “normal” life that concerns me.

I had hoped – naïvely, perhaps – that the pause, as difficult as it was, and as much hardship as it caused, would give us a chance to rethink how frenetically we live, and about our relationship with the planet. (See my earlier posts: Imagine, Parts I and II in July and August, 2020.) I had hoped that we would consider the benefits of a more settled life, with more space and time to be human beings. More important (since what you do with your time is not my business), I had hoped that we would use the the experience of clearer skies, fresher air, and the uncluttered streets as an opportunity to change our behaviour and reduce our carbon output permanently.

But no. It is apparent that this is unlikely to happen. It seems that we can hardly wait to get geared up and carry on, with even greater intensity, a way of life that is devastating earth. I know: Debbie Downer.

A good friend, who is a New York State employee, has been working from home for well over a year. It has gone well. Productivity has been high, and life has been easier. Yet, it seems the department, and his bosses, cannot wait to get him and his hundreds of fellow cubicle-dwellers back under direct scrutiny. I can’t think of another plausible reason for it. The petite Mussolinis of bureaucracy and commerce cannot tolerate the thought of not having their charges back in the cubicles under “panoptic surveillance,” to use Foucault’s term, even though electronic monitoring could rather easily satisfy the neurotic compulsion[i]. And so, consequently, with that will come the stalled traffic, the time lost and the oppressive frustrations of commuting, along with the wasteful burning of fuel and the emissions of carbon dioxide and all that this entails.

It appears that we just can’t wait! We can’t wait to drive all over the continent. We can’t wait to cram ourselves into airplanes and start flying all over the place. We can’t wait to herd ourselves onto cruise ships, all the while burning shocking quantities of fuel (28 thousand gallons of fuel per hour, in the case of the ship, Freedom of the Seas).[ii] We can’t wait to pack ourselves into tourist cities like Barcelona and Venice, stampede into museums and cafés, and while we are at it, once again make these cities unlivable to the people who reside there. It would be comical, really, if it were not so destructive.

The great writer and editor E. B. White penned an essay in 1956 entitled Sootfall and Fallout, which focused on his concern, even then, about environmental degradation, but especially, at that time, radioactivity that was being put into the atmosphere by nuclear bomb testing. (The fact that we no longer do this is evidence that we can stop doing harmful things if we decide to.) In that essay, he talks about “forms” – meaning the standard, habitual way we do things, often despite all the evidence that these forms have failed us and continue to fail us. Here is what he says with reference to the end of WWII and the era (the fifties) that he was writing in:

“Are we for ‘new forms,’ or will the old ones do? In 1945, after the worst bloodbath in history, the nations settled immediately into old forms. In its structure, the United Nations reaffirms everything that caused the Second World War. At the end of a war fought to defeat dictators, the UN welcomed Stalin and Perón to full membership, and the Iron Curtain quickly descended to put the seal of authority on this inconsistent act.” [iii]

This is exactly what we are doing. Before the pandemic, our form was that we trapped ourselves in stalled traffic, crammed into cubicles, crowded onto cruise ships, packed into airplanes, and swarmed tourist cities like locusts – all maintained by alarming levels of resource consumption and emissions that threaten to make the world unliveable.

During the pandemic we had some respite from this. We experienced a new form. We had time to come back to ourselves. We travelled less, or not at all. Those whose work permitted it, did it at a distance, and commuted less or not at all. Monstrous cruise ships were docked. Airplanes were parked alongside the runways. Cities and other spaces suddenly became liveable once more, and quiet. Streets were free of cars. Oil and gas consumption reduced; there was a noticeable decline in the production of greenhouse gases. We slowed down and were in our world as human beings. Relatively speaking, it was a return to the Garden.

But are we keeping this form? Quite apparently: no. We are determined to go back to the old form – with a vengeance. It is reported that after declining during 2020, carbon dioxide levels have rebounded, and in May carbon dioxide emissions rose to 419 parts per million, “the highest such measurement in the 63 years that the data has been recorded.” [iv]

This looks like it will be an opportunity lost, and that is a great shame.

Many expect that technology will save us. Indeed, technological improvements are coming, and we need those badly. But the problem cannot be solved by technological fixes alone – and every new technology comes with its own, new set of problems. (Gas-powered buggies solved the problem of horse-manure pollution in nineteenth century cities.) Now, electric cars are touted as the fix-all so we can keep driving as we wish: but surprise! – they require power (coal? gas? solar? nuclear?) and their battery materials will necessitate mining on a scale that I doubt we have ever seen before. I know what mining is: I grew up in a gold-mining town.[v] Kirkland Lake was built in the nineteen-twenties on the side of a large, beautiful lake. I have a picture of my father rowing on it in the nineteen-thirties. By the fifties, when I was growing up, the lake was gone. It was filled in with a shiny greenish sludge that we called “The Slimes,” and that we, as children, played on: a mucky swill of crushed rock, chemical-laden tailings, cyanide, arsenic, and God knows what else. There are other such Slimes all over Northern Ontario and Quebec.

No: in addition to technological improvements, we need to change behaviour if we are going to fix this problem. We need a new form: a form of doing less and consuming less, a form of sustainable economics and sustainable life.[vi] As many have pointed out, it is not possible to obtain infinite growth from a finite system (earth). And so, what to do?

We can start by buying less stuff, and when we do buy stuff, acquire things that last longer and that can be repaired. We can travel less. Zoom to work; Zoom to out-of-town business meetings. If your recalcitrant employer resists, fight hard for the right to stay home. If we have travelled twice a year for breaks or vacations, make it once a year. I would say park the cruise ships, but if we must cruise, make it a biannual trip rather than an annual one. And we know the rest. Simply drive less. Combine trips. Don’t idle our cars while Suzie dashes into the 7-11 for a Big Gulp. Take the train. Go to into twenty-eight-day rehab, if necessary, to recover from our addiction to monster-sized SUV’s and pick-up trucks; drive smaller, more efficient vehicles. At home, if we mow our lawns once a week with a gas mower, make it every week and a half, or even two weeks. If we eat beef twice a week, make it once a week…and so on. It is not about denying ourselves. It is about moderating.

Canadians – and I know this will be painful – could get rid of their second fridges, those beer fridges in the basement, and recycle them. It is a lot to ask, I know, but we could hold ceremonies to assuage the grief.

While we are at it – if you are a person with an actual investment portfolio – dump the fossil fuel holdings and put your money in renewables or ask your mutual fund managers to do the same. And it goes without saying that we need to support and pressure our politicians to move aggressively on renewable energy infrastructure and climate improvement targets.

It is not easy to change habits; I more than understand this. It is all about human “wanting.” We all want to get ours. It is a trait built into us, and one that is cleverly exploited by marketers and the corporate colonizers of culture. Part of me (if I had the money) could jilt my trusting and faithful seven-year-old Subaru and trade it in on a hot, gas-guzzling, 800 horsepower Saleen “Black Label” Mustang and drive the beast at over a hundred-miles-an-hour all the way to Texas. A ’68 GTO with that saucy ram-air 400 cubic inch V-8 and the four-barrel carb would do also. Well, no wait – not Texas: too many gun-toting, Covid-denying, anti-masking, voter-suppression knuckleheads there, so no, never Texas. California, then. Yes! – a big road trip to California: I’ll roar across the Golden Gate and then I’ll floor it all the way back via Oregon and the Dakotas, thereby burning up a few hundred gallons of gas. Fun!

But in truth, I expect that I would feel no better after the binge. No doubt I would call up my Subaru and ask if I could come over, hat in hand, to see if we could reconcile and get back together.

In any case, if we want to save ourselves and the planet, those times are over, or ought to be over. Time to find other ways to have fun, closer to home.

There is a fatal flaw in our culture. It is that we share this tacit belief that if an individual wants to do something, and is able to do that thing, then that person should do that thing, or has a right to do that thing. But this is faulty logic, because it leaves out a very fundamental component: the consequences, intended or not, of the action. So, if you can afford a Lincoln Navigator, then by all means, get it. If you are billionaire Bill Gates and his soon-to-be-ex, Melinda, and want a 66,000 square foot home (Xanadu 2.0!) for two people, go for it! If you are smiling Jeff Bezos and want to fly yourself into space in your own rocket, do it! There is no thought at all for the social and environmental consequences of these actions. Of course, it is not just the wealthy and their extravagances; I include myself. We all do this, all the time, and salve our consciences by telling ourselves the consequences are small or don’t matter because we have a right to “ours.”

And so, it is a moral matter; but it is also a spiritual matter, a matter important to our simple human wellbeing.

We really know in our hearts that materialism and the acquisition of things, beyond an essential level of comfort and security in our lives, do not make us any happier.[vii] That is old news. We never run out of desire but satisfying every want does not necessarily benefit us. The Buddhists point out that desires are inexhaustible, and their practice is to vow to put an end to them, knowing that the best we can do, in fact, is to steward these. The great Yogic teacher, Paramahansa Yogananda said to “put a hedge around your wants.” However, we do not have to look to Eastern cultures for this wisdom; in the Western tradition, from the Stoics on, the philosophers have recommended not necessarily the abandonment of desire, but rather the regulating of it. [viii]

A moral matter: going forward, we must think of consequences not just for ourselves, but also, consider our children and grandchildren and beyond. In the aboriginal cultures of North America, a common precept when considering a course of action is to reflect on not just ourselves, but the “seven generations” that will follow. [ix]

We do know what we need to do, where we need to go. It is only a question of will, of whether we will do it. Many are doing this: people who are already moving ahead on this good path. I invite myself, and one and all, to accompany them.

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Notes

[i] Meaning, in its simplest terms, a state of constant monitoring. Foucault, Michael. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Pantheon Books, 1977.

[ii] De Santiago, Edward. “How Much Fuel Does a Cruise Ship Use?” Love to Know, www.cruises.lovetoknow.com /wiki/How_Much_Fuel_Does_a_Cruise_Ship_Use. Accessed 5 June 2021.

[iii] White, E. B. “Sootfall and Fallout.” The Golden Age of the American Essay, edited by Phillip Lopate, Anchor Books, 2021, pp. 171-182.

[iv] Gammon, Katherine. “Global Carbon Dioxide Level Continued to Rise Despite Pandemic.” The Guardian, 6 June 2021.

[v] McDonald, Joshua. “The Island With no Water: How Foreign Mining Destroyed Banaba.” The Guardian, 8 June 2021.

[vi] Victor, Peter A. Managing Without Growth: Slower by Design, Not Disaster. 1^st ed., Edward Elgar Publishers, 2009.

[vii] Long-term happiness studies, such as the Harvard study begun in 1938, have confirmed this repeatedly. As material wealth increased over the decades, median happiness stayed the same, and was related to other factors, such as quality of relationships, etc., not wealth and spending. Noethen, Robin. “A Study Lasting Over 80 Years Might Change Your View of Happiness.” Curious. https://medium.com/curious/a-study-lasting-over-80-years-might-change-your-view-on-happiness-33a28cdc6611. Accessed 9 June 2021.

[viii] Loori, John Daido. The Eight Gates of Zen: Spiritual Practice in an American Zen Monastery. Dharma Communications, 1992, p. 249.

Yogananda, Paramahansa. The Science of Religion. Self-Realization Fellowship, 1982, p. 28.

The idea of “moderation in all things,” is attributed to the Greek poet Hesiod (c.700 bc).

[ix] I first heard this in a workshop with Jake Swamp-Tekaronianeken, a Mohawk Chief, an ambassador for peace, and the founder of the Tree of Peace Society. It is a simple idea changes how one think about the consequences of one’s actions in the world.

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Resources

– 350 Org. https://350.org/. Founded by Bill McKibben and colleagues with the hope that knowledge and campaigning, we could limit carbon dioxide emissions to 350 parts per million. As noted in the essay, we are now at 419 parts per million.

– David Suzuki Foundation. https://davidsuzuki.org/. Suzuki is a scientist and a naturalist; his foundation educates, and advocates for sensible environmental policy. Suzuki himself, over 80, is a Canadian national treasure.

See “Ten Reasons to be Hopeful About Climate Action.” David Suzuki Foundation. https://davidsuzuki.org/what-you-can-do/ten-reasons-hopeful-about-climate-action/. I am not as optimistic as Suzuki is, but then again, he is smarter than I am! 🙂

– Gates, Bill. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need. Alfred A. Knopf, 2021. Ideas on technological fixes to help avoid catastrophic climate change.

– McKibben, Bill (Ed.). A Global Warming Reader: A Century of Writing about Climate Change. OR Books, 2011.

– Kolbert, Elizabeth. Field Notes from a Catastrophe. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006. A “boot camp” primer on the real situation we are in. Of course, it is now 15 years later.

– Norgaard, Kari Marie. Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life. MIT Press, 2011. Concerns the mechanisms that contribute to denial of the situation.

– Rosen, Julia. “The Science of Climate Change Explained: Facts, Evidence and Proof.” The New York Times, May 12, 2021. A terrific summary.

– United Nations Climate Action: Climate Reports. https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/reports. These reports are ongoing and updated regularly.

Imagine: Covid-19, The Great Opportunity (Part II)

Posted on August 15, 2020September 7, 2020 by Peter Scott Cameron

There is nothing surprising in the declaration that the world has changed during the Covid-19 pandemic. There is the enormous human toll of it: the illness, suffering and death of individuals, the grief of families, and the wear and tear on health care providers, the economic fear and devastation, and the psychic toll for many.

However, there has been another side to all this (Imagine, Part I). With exceptions for the misguided (to put it kindly) and more antisocial parts of the U.S., the world has become quieter, even where there is some reopening. There are fewer cars on the road, fewer airplanes in the sky, and fewer people on the streets. The gigantic cruise ships are sitting idle. The streets of tourist cities that were once crammed with people are suddenly liveable. Museums that were once filled with hurried and harried people snapping selfies are passable and calm; a visitor now can see and contemplate a painting or artifact. We are staying home, spending more time with those amiable companions – ourselves – and with our loved ones (not all of them, of course, as there are those whom we cannot visit under present circumstances). We have calmed down and this is a good thing.

And as a bonus, temporarily at least, we have also reduced our fossil fuel burning, with resulting lower carbon emission levels. The clear skies over cities have provided us with a glimpse of what is possible, what we can do to save our planet. As terrible as this pandemic has been, it also provides us with a chance to take stock, and to modify how we live in a way that will benefit both ourselves and the rest of earth’s creation.

(For any climate change deniers in my vast reading audience, for now I will just say: cut the bullshit.[i] I will deal with you another time.)

And so, I (and many others[ii]) propose that we seize this crisis as an opportunity to make permanent modifications in how we live, modelled on what we are doing now: not to change everything, but just to adjust and adapt. Slow down and make the recovery greener.

First is simply, once the pandemic ebbs, to stay home more and do less in the world. We, in the wealthy West and North, have been living like it is an ongoing party in our personal amusement park, complete with all the candy, rides and entertainment we could ever want. But this is not sustainable, and the planet is showing us that. And really, we must ask: is that how we want to live?

And so, my proposal is to do less in the world:

Drive less: For many jobs, we simply do not have to drive every day to offices or other settings, including educational. The pandemic has shown this clearly. Of course, this is not true for all work – caps doffed to all those brave souls, from the grocery clerk to the nurse, who show up every day to serve and help the rest of us. But stating the obvious, technology enables many to work just as, or more, effectively from home. Perhaps one day a week in the office would satisfy social and schmoozing needs, as well as the usual managerial obsession with employee surveillance. Hybrid teaching and learning models could cut education-related travelling in half. Couple that with the sensible idea of reducing the work week to four days – which also has the advantage of spreading the work and money to more people – and bingo, we are the winners of a big door prize. Imagine less commuting, more comfortable working conditions, and more time for creative indolence.

Travel less (we Baby Boomers especially): The crowded planes, the crowded ships, and the crowded cities are not doing anything for us anyhow. The streets in famous cities like Prague have become choked with throngs of jostling people; the museums of, say, Paris or London, are impassable thickets, and the cafés in Venice are sinking with the collective weight of thousands of wine-guzzlers. We could relieve all this simply by doing less travel. Baby Boomers for example: take a trip every second year, instead of one or two every year. Business travellers: cut it in half, use Zoom and the like instead. Imagine fewer flights: a bit more expensive, but without the cattle-calls in the airports, room to stretch and move in our seats, actual food to eat, and the end of nickel-and-diming us for our luggage and such.

Dock the cruise ships: Park half the fleet of these floating colossi. The carbon impact of the ships is horrendous. The Oasis of the Seas, for example, uses a gallon of fuel every twelve feet, or to put it another way, gets 0.0023 mpg. Imagine ships moored and converted into mixed populace condos and rental apartments with built-in public-access community centres, party rooms, swimming pools, and playlands.

Limit the cars and roadways in the cities: restrict access for cars and open the streets mainly for delivery, public transport, walking, cycling, including electric cycles and scooters, and sitting. Imagine our cities as accessible urban parks and living spaces, rather than mere travel grids for self-propelled metal containers.

Of course, there are so many other things we could add to calm ourselves and save the planet: buy less junk (and thereby owe less money), build smaller houses, drive smaller vehicles, and so on. We know what the list is. And, of course, these are only a part of what we need to do to address climate change. We know very well the items on that more extensive list are too. More on that another time.

Naturally, there are serious economic implications to consider. We have been living addicted to expanding consumerism and growth. If we make these changes, the economy will slow, and we will have to figure out how to live sustainably and support people more broadly than we have been, and probably with less money streaking in and out of our individual chequing accounts.

To its credit, modern capitalism has generated more wealth, health and human well being than humanity has ever seen. It must be complimented for that. Thank you, industrial capitalism. However, the current economic model of perpetual growth is simply not sustainable. It is simple, really, when you look at biology and nature: “Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse.”[iii] The planet is telling us clearly where we are headed, but we are living in a state of denial about it.[iv] In order to continue this growth, it is necessary to consume and dispose at ever higher levels, in order to keep the money machine going, so that, as Haruki Murakami, puts it, “waste [has become] the highest virtue one can achieve in advanced capitalist society.”[v] It is killing the planet, and seems to be driving us crazy as well.

The market fiction of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” will not save us from this. He was a smart fellow, to be sure, but the uncritical adoption of the metaphor constitutes magical thinking. It is a self-serving idea, that if we pursue our individual profit, that will result in the greatest good for all.[vi] It lets us off the hook of taking responsibility. It is not, in fact, the pursuit of our individual greed that will solve our problems, but rather it will be our capacity for a creative reimagining of the way we live. We are not without solid economic models of how to do this[vii], as I mentioned in Part I. But we have to change our vision of what constitutes a good life – keeping most of what we do but incorporating our experience during this pandemic.

And so, we can say that there has been a positive side to the changes we have made to cope with Covid-19. The reduction in climate-change gases is notable. But so are other modifications: buying and spending less, less rushing around, more time developing interests and talents, more time reading and thinking, more cultivating of home life overall – even literally, more gardening.

Imagine incorporating these things into our post-pandemic lives and enjoying ourselves in a quieter, less frenetic and less anxiety-riddled way. Imagine, at the same time, doing our planet, its creatures, and Gaia, a great favour.

Imagine greater freedom. Imagine less worry about the state of our planet – for ourselves, for our children and grandchildren, or as the North American Aboriginals put it, the Seven Generations to follow. Imagine more serenity in our lives. Imagine more time to be our still human selves.

“You can say I’m a dreamer…”

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[i] Frankfurt, Harry G. On Bullshit. Princeton University Press. 2005. Pages 16-17.

[ii] Proctor, Kate. Just 6% of UK Public Want a Return to Pre-pandemic Economy. The Guardian. June 28, 2020.

[iii] Powers, Richard. The Overstory. W.W. Norton & Company. 2018. Page 321.

[iv] Kolbert, Elizabeth. Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. Bloomsbury Publishing. 2006. And Friedman, Thomas L. Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. 2008.

[v] Nurakami, Harruki. Dance Dance Dance. Vintage Books. 1994. Page 19.

[vi] This is partly a distortion of Smith’s ideas in any case. He thought that governments should intervene sensibly as needed in order to optimize free markets.

[vii] “By simulating a variety of scenarios, we have seen that ‘no growth’ can be disastrous if implemented carelessly…we have also seen that slower growth, leading to stability around 2030, can be consistent with attractive economic, social and environmental outcomes: full employment, virtual elimination of poverty, more leisure, considerable reduction in GHG emissions and fiscal balance.” Victor, Peter A. Managing Without Growth: Slower by Design, Not Disaster. 1^st ed., Edward Elgar Publishers, 2009. Page 183.

Developing a Hobby in the Time of the Coronavirus

Posted on August 2, 2020September 7, 2020 by Peter Scott Cameron

Pastinaca Sativa

Max Ehrmann (of Desiderata fame) had it wrong. Deep-down, we all know we are not good enough, and so self-improvement is required, and despite what the poet claimed, we should not be gentle about it. The good news is that Covid-19 provides the perfect opportunity to focus our self-improvement efforts. The pandemic has forced people, sensible and otherwise, to stay home if they can do so: no visits to unpopular relatives, no frying in a traffic jam on the Jersey Turnpike, no bagpipe concerts, no heaping plates of fries followed by hot fudge sundaes in diners, no heavy drinking at the curling rink – no nothing. It can be very trying, certainly.

Mental health experts have come on television to advise that it is important that people fill their time positively, in order to avoid a bad case of ennui during this pandemic. They get money for this advice. One of the best ways to both fend off ennui and to improve our inadequate selves is to develop interests and hobbies that heretofore have lain dormant. Seize the day and move up the Maslovian pyramid! Take steps toward blissful self-actualization, as personified by these mental health experts on the evening news.

And so, what is this period of Covid-19, but a time finally to learn the Cantonese that you have put off for so long? Perhaps you can renew your high school Latin, and finally translate those racy bits about Caligula. It could be cooking: time to actualize your inner gourmet and turn those family frowns upside down! Imagine the family’s excitement when you serve up Canard à la Rouennaise – Duck in Blood Sauce? Or if more intellectually inclined, you could discover a third form of indefinitesimal calculus to rival the two invented by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz in the late seventeenth century. If otherwise deficient, but kinaesthetically intelligent, you could take up limbo dancing, and thereby not only become fitter, but also amuse your mate during endless hours in the living room. Is it to be music? You could pick up the contrabassoon, or if you live alone, the bongo drums. There is no end to possibilities.

I am doing no less, and in my case, my new hobby benefits both me and the larger world.

Wild parsnip (Pastinaca Sativa), an invasive species of plant originally from Eurasia, now grows in Upstate New York and other parts of the U.S. and southern Canada. The original plants appear to have escaped captivity, like that celebrity fugitive capybara did a couple of years back in High Park in Toronto. It grows along roadsides or other areas where the soil has been disturbed. Normally it will not invade established meadows and fields; however, it can do so from areas that have been troubled, usually by men riding machines that they recently acquired at the John Deere store on the payment plan, and which they use to inflict insults on Mother Nature.

Mature wild parsnips have a yellowish-green stalk with vertical grooves. Leaves are in pairs and reach a length of about six inches. Each plant produces hundreds of small yellow flowers arranged in compound umbels (an upside-down umbrella shape). The plants are big, often standing five feet in height. The evil parsnips tower menacingly over the beautiful daylilies. For my new self-improvement hobby, I have taken to hand-cutting these alongside our gravel road, which stretches about a mile between two paved county roads.

I must be careful while doing my hobby. Contact with the sap from the wild parsnip will produce an intense burning rash, with severe blistering and skin discoloration. It is called phytophotodermatitis; you look like you have leprosy, only unlike that disease, it is painful. As a result of this experience, you will come to remember your days of childhood poison ivy contamination as “the good times.” It is a burn, there is no cure, and it can last two years.

And so, twice a week, I suit up: long-sleeved shirt, long pants, leather gloves, and work boots with tall white socks up over my pants. Eye and head coverings are important too, for sun and the mobs of horseflies. At first, I used sunglasses and a baseball cap, but these were inadequate and so now I’ve settled on tinted aviator goggles complemented by a rather stylish Panama hat.

Perhaps you wonder: why white socks? Answer: to be able to see the tiny deer ticks of course! The ticks pounce on you as you lumber along in the roadside weeds, while the horse flies are attempting to eat your face. The ticks burrow into your skin to suck your blood, and while at it, they give you Lyme disease and anaplasmosis. City people especially, say nature is wonderful, but it is not quite true. That is why I do not watch those dreadful nature shows on PBS. Too much poisoning and exuberant gnawing on the limbs of fellow creatures, as far as I am concerned. Show me that stuff, PBS, and you can forget about asking for money!

And so, I suit up and spray my boots, socks, and pant-legs with cancer-causing deet, with a lighter bug repellent for my face as a first coating, and sunscreen as a second. Then off I go with my clippers and a sickle, making my way up and down the sides of the road while singing inspirational songs, such as La Marseillaise. I sever the plants as low as I can, but no matter how low or high, there is great joy in watching the umbels tumble.

There are moments of embarrassment, naturally, when neighbours drive by. Fortunately, this is rare, as there are only three other neighbours on the road and one of them, Lloyd, doesn’t come out since his goat died. You have to go see him and take soup and beer with you. The worst is when Charley, who is a dairy farmer, goes by in his yellow tractor. He is a nice guy, but for some reason he is always laughing and shaking his head. I try to be casual about it, drenched in sweat while lopping the heads off the devils. I give a jaunty wave and continue working in a casual fashion. People naturally view casualness as a sign of normalcy.

Speaking of: one must be careful not to let this develop into an obsession. Like many hobbies, such as eBay-bidding, Facebook-checking, coupon-clipping, socializing in adult-only chat rooms, or marijuana-smoking, one must keep things under control. I limit myself to twice a week. That works – it means that only half the time do I have to restrain myself and wait the full four days before cutting again. Ah, yes, it is true: this is not a one-time thing – the parsnips grow right back.

I know what you are thinking: Sisyphus! However, this is not so different from other things that moral people do in life. There will always be good and evil, but what we do is to stand for the good, knowing we will never totally defeat Beelzebub, whether the demon himself or his minion, Pastinaca Sativa. We keep the lights on in the tool-shed of the virtuous. In the face of Covid-19, we shrink not away. We do not allow it to push us into ennui. We declare: “no, never!” We stand tall and at the same time, improve our hapless selves with a beneficial hobby.

And so, if you drive along a gravel road in Upstate New York, near the Vermont border, and see an old, very hot man alongside the road with clippers in one leather-gloved hand and a sickle in the other, wearing long sleeves, with white socks over his pants, sporting aviator goggles and a dashing Panama hat, do not be baffled or perturbed.

It is just me.

I am practicing a useful hobby. I am defeating that old Coronavirus ennui. I am improving myself and saving the world.

Imagine: Covid-19, the Great Opportunity (Part I)

Posted on July 14, 2020September 7, 2020 by Peter Scott Cameron

It is a strange situation when a trip to a plastic surgeon for a basal cell removal feels like a big day out. So it is in the time of Coronavirus. For many people, this is a time of terror and tragedy: mainly for those who have gotten sick and those who have lost loved ones. But it has also been a nightmare for others: people who have lost their livelihood and their businesses, and the brave people who risk themselves by choosing to help, such as health care workers. And there are all those deemed to be “essential” workers, who have to go out in a dangerous world to work in order to pay their bills, and so that the rest of us can buy our groceries and get our prescriptions filled. It is shameful, indeed, despicable, that we pay most of them the minimum wage.

Me? I am doing fine. I am out in the country. It is easy to isolate here. Aside from my partner, there is nobody to interact with other than the ancient dog, the two cats, the deer in the fields, and the wild turkeys. We have a big yard to sit in and watch the Green Mountains of Vermont do their thing. I have nowhere that I really need to go. My monthly Social Security continues to show up in the bank account. I may lose my job as an online adjunct professor this fall because of low enrollments due to the Coronavirus, but I will be alright. I shop for groceries at 6 a.m., during the seniors’ hour at the local Price Chopper in the village. It is pleasant: uncrowded and there are no pudding-brained libertarians swaggering the wrong way down the aisles without masks. (They come out later in the day.) Occasionally I go to the drug store or the boozer’s, both deemed essential businesses. That is it. It is all easy and I admit: I am so very lucky. Of course, I miss seeing friends, my sisters, my daughter, and the grandkids, and I miss hearing live music a couple of times a month. I miss a good walk on the gritty streets of one large city or another, and once in a while I yearn for a turkey club with a big load of fries at the old silver-sided diner on Western Avenue. But the rest? I don’t miss much of it at all.

I am helped in this in that I have the gift of an introverted temperament. (More on this asset another time.) I do feel sympathy for the extraverts and their pain due to their compulsion of proximity and unmet needs for talking. Although, as compensation, they do have Zoom, and appear to enjoy it. I have seen some quite fun representations of it on television, such as Irish harp concerts conducted with people thousands of miles away from each other. But I feel no urges there. By contrast, my video camera on the laptop has had a cookie fortune taped over it for years now. I was invited to a Zoom meeting once, but I just said no, and that was that.

I am pretty happy to read, think, garden, talk with my mate, write a note to or call up a friend or family member, take a walk, play “hassle your cat” with Dudley, who loves the game, and then watch streaming shows when the shadows grow long. I do miss seeing my dear friends and family very much, but I trust circumstances will change. The car sits in the driveway: no gas to buy, no oil changes, no fumes spewing out the tailpipe. I don’t spend much money. After basic expenses, the bit I have left sits in the account and accumulates.

I repeat: I know that I am so lucky. The people of Yemen or Syria have it hard. The migrant workers of India both in this time and any time, have it hard. The poor people of Columbia, or of Brazil, with their runaway infection rates and their lunatic president, have it hard. I do not.

The relative easiness of this quiet life, along with certain news articles in The Guardian and such, have gotten me thinking. We have seen pictures of the streets of our cities blessedly free of automobiles. Beautiful: we see just a few pedestrians, a handful of bicyclists, the cities clear of smog, and sometimes there is a family of ducks or a deer crossing over. There is no maddening, gnarled tangle of streets filled beyond capacity, with all that roiling humanity on the move. The skies above are clear and there are not even any jet vapour trails marring the pristine blue. The pictures and articles, coupled with the serenity of sitting at home without much feeling of need, beg a question:

Once this is over, do we have to resume living entirely the way we have been living?

Must we return to being so busy, roaming around, fighting each other for space, sitting, frustrated and stressed in gridlocked cars, flying all over the place in jam-packed airplanes, packing ourselves on monstrous cruise ships, travelling to foreign places to trudge around with millions of other tourists on choked sidewalks, gawking at artifacts for a few seconds between line-ups at yet another café?

Do we have to burn so much carbon? Do we have to cast off so much plastic detritus and other effluent, just because of the way we live?

Imagine: what if we used this Corona-virus-imposed pause to take stock of who we are and how we live. Can we imagine a way to live that is quieter, less busy, one that draws more lightly from the planet’s core, one that touches more lightly on the planet’s surface, and one that, in the end, allows us more serenity? It would take a different view of economics, to be sure: a move from our pathological growth fixation, to a sustainability model.[i]

I am not talking about absolutes here. I am not saying that we should stop everything. Rather I am saying that we should moderate and do much less than we have been doing. We could take this dip in fossil burning as an opportunity to shift toward green energy and a green economy.

Imagine not having to go in every day of the week for those whose work allows it, fewer commutes and commuters, streets that are for walking and cycling and enjoyment, and fewer airplanes and room to stretch out on them when we do fly. Imagine our great cities – Barcelona, Venice, Prague – free from the mobs of sightseers. Imagine the Queen Victoria parked at a wharf, and instead of wandering around burning its usual 293 gallons of fuel per mile, it becomes floating housing replete with recreational facilities for an entire community’s use.

Imagine a planet that is no longer burning up. Imagine sitting at home, with plenty of time to be with our sweet, unfettered selves.

You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.

PSC, July 13, 2020