About 35 years ago, I was sitting at a Back in 1969, I got to go to France as part of winning a provincial junior farmer contest. This started a year before, after our local agronomist found out that I had won an award at college for a story about what I wanted to do on the farm. I was asked to attend some meeting at the Experimental Farm in Ottawa to tell the same story. About a month later, I was asked to tell that story again to a group of agronomists at the University of Laval in Quebec City. Then, a few days before my marriage to Jeannie on Aug. 24, 1968, our local agronomist informed me that a week after our wedding we were supposed to be at a banquet in Quebec City to receive an award from the Quebec Minister of Agriculture. It took some interesting explaining to my soon-to-be wife that part of our honeymoon would be spent in Quebec City instead of in Western Canada. Well, we went to Quebec, and I was proud to present to our Quebec ag. minister my first big change on the farm: my new wife, Jeannie. Jeannie was proud to see me become the first English junior farmer in Quebec to win the gold medal for agriculture, but was not so sure about me going to France the next year for a month with a dozen more elite Quebec young farmers without any wives or best friends included.
It only took a day in France to realize that in Europe there was a huge difference in how the top one percent lived compared to “the rest.” Much of the farmland in France was owned by absentee landlords, who owned that big empty castle by the lake and lived most of the year on the French Riviera, while the real farmers lived in a cottage or often in the end of the barn. It was a common and accepted thing that the farmland was leased on a long-term lease, but any building, including that million-dollar barn, were owned by the farmer and financed by banks. Sometimes those long-term leases were willed to the next generation. Many of the farmers would never own the land if it hadn’t been willed to them by previous owners.
Today, throughout the world, too many people are blaming whatever government they have for the situation we are left in by the expense of recent pandemics, and the cost of trying to stop or reverse global warming. Too many people still cannot accept that either covid or global warming was or is real. This can be partially understood because during every drastic event (war, drought, fires, floods, etc.), the rich have always come out smiling while the poor have lost ground. The rich, whose money financed these events or the repairs required after, got richer: the chemical companies that made the nerve gas or gas for the gas chambers, or machinery of war, or even planes to water-bomb, all made money.
Even though the first research on a covid-like disease was started in a Canadian lab, with Canadians, USA and Chinese researchers involved before COVID-19 appeared on Earth, everyone has a different theory of how it got started. Covid was a new problem that no-one had tackled before. Many countries took a different approach and timeline to get covid under control. Again, it was the rich investors and pharmaceutical companies that seemed to come out the best in this fight.
This was the start of the burn-out of our over-worked health care workers. Being a doctor or a nurse was the wanna-be profession for many students. Now we see too many trying to switch to a different profession where there is less stress. Both the cost and time to recover from the covid pandemic are much more than a world war which was much worse in some parts of the world than others.
Although there are some very vocal climate-change deniers who think it’s just a blip in a hundred-year cycle, there are many true scientists who know many reasons why we are seeing a speeding-up of climate change. During the early stages of covid, when movement and contact of people slowed down and most airplanes, cars, train travel, and any other movement that resulted in petroleum usage was slowed to a crawl or stopped dead, the air quality in the entire world miraculously improved drastically, and even the hole in the ozone layer healed over. Cows and other ruminants still burped and farted normally, so I don’t think that they were the problem. Farmers noticed during covid that much less food was required to feed the consumers. When meals are prepared and consumed at home, only enough is prepared to feed the family, and leftovers are eaten the next day. Restaurants don’t serve leftovers.
For the readers who are old like me (a 47 model), you will remember when the snow was so high that we could climb up the snowbank and sit on the telephone wires. The first few years that I enjoyed snowmobiling, I could go from town to town and never see a fence that I couldn’t go over on the skidoo.
My grandfather never grew grain corn or soybeans because our season was too short. Today, grain corn and soybeans are this county’s largest cash crops. My grandfather only got one cut of hay each year. Today our growing season is long enough to cut four cuts of hay each year.
Yes there is climate change. Scientists with years more education and experience than most of us, tell us that extreme weather, such as severe storms, hurricanes and tornados, and wildfires, floods, ocean warming, and even long wet or dry times will be the norm, and some of the very best land in Pontiac County will become a desert.
We must realize that we have enjoyed the best time in hundreds of years. Maybe we don’t need that million-dollar home that cannot be managed without help. Maybe we don’t need that big SUV that only gets 15 miles per gallon. Maybe we don’t need to fly to a warmer climate every winter because the neighbours do.
Mom used to cross-country ski and didn’t need a membership to a gym. In the summer, she used a push lawnmower too. Mom taught us never to sweep the dirt under the mat, because sometime it had to be swept up and put in the garbage.
No, I don’t like the cost of reversing climate change, but whoever gets my vote better have a plan, and a very good one with a short time limit, because I want my great grandkids to enjoy this planet too. No, I’m not happy about the money we have to spend to help pay for the expensive covid pandemic, but I’m still alive and some of my friends can’t say that. Ask your wanna-be politicians how they plan to address this very large expense. Don’t take “we can do better” for an answer.
