It's a Small World After All...

It used to be that you could run away from everything when you came to the north. Many people escaped the crowds of the big city up here. After the horrors of the first World War many veteran pilots came to the peace of the north to become bush pilots. Years ago young men would come from the poverty of Scotland to join the H.B.C. and earn a decent living and many stayed the rest of their days in the north. But it's not like that any more. Like Joe Louis said "You can run, but you can't hide". The world has shrunk. It used to be that you could get away from the noise and crowds and smog of the city and escape to the pristine wilderness of the NWT. Our waters ran cold and clear our air was sweet to the nostrils and our stars shine bright in the clear night sky. Most of that is still true and yet, the permafrost is thawing. Our ice cap is melting our caribou herds are dwindling. Beluga whales are showing up with traces of an antibacterial chemical in them used in dish soaps and disinfecting wipes. Fish in James bay are contaminated with mercury from hydro-electric dams. Elders are noticing climate changes they have never seen in their lives nor have they ever heard of these events happening in past generations either. The perverse truth is that climate change is happening even faster up here. Life in the north has always had to work harder to thrive in this marginal climate. It is somehow ennobled in this process and is even more remarkable and more special. Like a veteran of the war or a holocaust survivor our wildflowers and lichen, our snowshoe hares and lynx, our eagles and owls all are more precious. Their loss is even more crushing, more disturbing. We must not, we cannot let events continue on their current course.
When I was young I worked for McDonald's. We were required to take a food handling course. The course was taught by public health officials. One of the things they did was to bring petrie dishes with them. There were three dishes, containing Agar a medium that is, I think, made of egg yolk and is the perfect growing ground for bacteria. We were asked to place a coin, a hair and my thumb print onto the petrie dishes. Over the next week or so the little trays festered into full bloom of bacterial cultures. Each one had it's own hue, depending on the predominant species of bacteria therein. They were very effective we all watched with rapt disgust as the colony thrived, point taken, the three dishes were set aside and forgotten. Another week later I happened to notice the little dishes were barren, bereft of life. I picked one up, the one that had originally had my thumb print in it. "Where'd they go?" I asked Bill Stone, my friend who knew just about everything. "They died. They either eat all the available food resources or they poison themselves in their own excrement." he sounded so clinical. Typical Bill.
I was out for a walk last night, along the banks of the mighty Mackenzie river. How like that petrie dish are we? Are we, like those colonies of bacteria eating up our own agar? Or are we going to drown in our own industrial excrement? Will petrie dish earth someday be as void of life as those plastic discs? The sun streamed through the golden leaves of the trees, changing with the season. The air had a nip to it. The breeze made me pull my lapels a little closer to my neck. I quickened my pace and my mind opened up to the idea of how small our world has gotten. How events and practices thousands of kilometers away were having a very real effect here in the Arctic. Dene elders can tell you of changes they have seen with their own eyes, while our politicians and business leaders continue to argue and bicker over whether global warming is real or not. Wake up! How stupid can they be? When will we start to do something? When it is already to late? When we are already choking on the air we breathe? When we can no longer drink the water? My God, how long do we have to wait before our leaders do what we all know is right? Yes, we will all have to make changes. We will no longer have little wipes that kill all bacteria, big deal. How healthy are we in an aseptic world where our children all have asthma from all the chemicals in our carpets and press board furniture. maybe we will have to pay more for our food. We already eat about one third too many calories anyway. We don't need bottled water. We need to be able to drink the water in our rivers and streams without ingesting chemicals we can't even spell. We all need to make changes, turning down thermostats, switching to front load washers, hanging our clothes out to dry, switching to LED lights and compact florescents. I hope that someday a hundred generations from now someone will walk the same banks of the Mackenzie and gaze on the changing of yet another season and be able to enjoy the golden leaves of the trees glowing in the evening sun. Life is so fragile here, so precious, so tenuous. We are the canary in the coal mine and we are calling out to the whole world. Hear our song...