Dear Editor,
Are you tired of worrying about COVID-19? Me too. Here are a few other items of interest, which may offer your brain some temporary relief.
Our governments are sponsoring a giant landfill of radioactive waste, near the Ottawa River just upstream from here. A multinational consortium, including SNC Lavalin, are to create and maintain the site and we will pay them, in perpetuity. What could go wrong? There are several sci-fi movies and books which deal with such speculations. Remember, this material will be dangerous to be near for thousands of years.
In addition, there is the government-sponsored development of . . .
micro reactors, designed to provide electrical power to remote locations. The idea is, they work for twenty years and then are buried and forgotten. What could go wrong? The two projects share a common flaw; what do we do with the waste for the next 200,000 years? I have no answer for that, perhaps the genius engineers at Lavalin have a plan.
Then, if and when we come up with a good solution to the nuclear waste storage/disposal situation, we will still be faced with the real possibility of choking on plastic; the ‘disposable’ items we used once then tried, half-heartedly, to toss away. It’s not really a serious problem for us, here, yet. But some parts of the world are way ahead of us and people are dwelling in mountains of first-world waste, with no relief. When that waste stream backs up to its source — us — we’ll be knee-deep in useless trash. Already, it is estimated, every person in North America has ingested enough micro particles of plastic that we each contain the equivalent of a credit card. What could go wrong?
The reason COVID-19 is a pandemic, rather than a localized outbreak, is that the world’s food supplies are a nightmare of leveraged logistics. When the Quyon Dairy stopped producing butter, the next shipment of butter at the grocery store was from New Zealand. How is it economical to ship butter around the world, rather than 15 miles up the highway? Meat packing plants are way too big and the workers are sitting ducks for disease transmission and then so are the products. These are the obvious examples, but it may be the subtle snags in the system which devalues place, in favour of uniformity, which will catch us off guard. What could go wrong? Plenty.
If you’ve already solved these problems I’ve outlined, (feel free to let us in on the good news) there’s one biggie that is actually behind all our other problems, there are too many people in the world. Human population remained almost steady until the industrial revolution, which allowed the population to soar. World population has tripled in my lifetime and has doubled in my son’s lifetime. Again, here in the blessed island of rest we call the Pontiac, more population seems a desirable thing. I love seeing young families hiking or biking or playing together, and here is a good place to do that. It’s not like this everywhere in the world. There are millions of displaced people living in sub-standard conditions, fleeing war and/or famine, because someone decided there wasn’t enough room for us and them on the same land. When people in overcrowded countries swarm the borders, how will we deal with that?
Okay, back to thinking about how inconvenient it is for you to have to wear a mask; these other concerns are out of our hands — wearing a mask and keeping distance is something we can do ourselves. Think small and act silly — maybe that’ll work.
Robert Wills
Thorne and Shawville, Que
