Dancing on the edge

I am sitting here watching the rain sprinkling down from a grey sky onto the lake. It is a quiet rain. There is very little wind and that adds to the laziness of my morning.

I am nestled in the midst of a vast wilderness and kilometres upon kilometres of pine tree forests. I imagine the rich green forests and all the foliage welcome this rain. The lake will be a little chilly for a few days so my daily swim should be refreshing. That is okay.

I love swimming in northern lakes. The more isolated they are, the more pure and unpolluted. Esker lakes are my favourite as normally they are the remains of a glacial past, when kilometre high sheets of ice once moved on and covered the landscape. The banks of these lakes are large deposits of fine sand, which act as giant filters to help create gorgeous turquoise bodies of water.

There hasn’t been that much rain this year, even in the far north, but things could be worse. The mid west bread basket of the United States is experiencing a terrible drought. This year we have seen many floods and huge storms in places where these are usually rare, while a drought has come to what is normally a bountiful farmland.

Weather systems are very important. Even little changes in temperature can affect large parts of the planet in tragic ways. The drought over the farmland will mean a food shortage on the world market and that will drive up the prices of all grain products. That will be hard enough for the lucky 10 percent population of the world that lives in the First World. For populations in developing countries, it could be deadly: there may not be enough food to go around.

When it comes to climate, we are teetering on the edge. As a matter of fact, right now we have been enjoying a moment of balance but if you look at weather on earth over thousands of years, most of the time things have been quite violent with periods of great warmth and then terrible freezing.

We know that in the distant past, events like the impacts of comets or meteors have resulted in huge changes in weather patterns for all kinds of reasons and wiped out a lot of life on the planet. Scientists can also point to vast eruptions of volcanoes in our history that resulted in weather changes primarily because of the great amount of dust, debris and ash that are sent up into the atmosphere and block out the sun.

For the first time, however, we humans are having an impact because of the large-scale destruction of major forest areas on the planet, the out-of-control production of greenhouse gases and wonton carelessness when it comes to taking care of the land, the water and the creatures of earth. Compared to colossal events, our negative activities are not all that great but when you consider the accumulated impact of every careless thing we have done over the past couple hundred years; we play a role in tipping the balance.

It should not be so difficult for us as human kind to work together and try to limit the ways we pollute our planet. We should not let the very shortsighted one percent of our population who are only concerned with making a profit decide our future. You would think that we are intelligent enough at this point to realize that we are really space travellers and living on this wonderful planet while drifting across the universe. It is the only home we have. Somehow through the magic of life we have evolved on this beautiful Mother Earth. Compared to the time line of the existence of our planet, we as humans have only been here for an instant, yet more than any other creature, we have had a greater negative impact than any life form before us.

As humans, we are creatures who generally don’t look very far into the future. We don’t react until we are being banged over the head. How many severe droughts or terrible storms will it take before we realize we are part of a problem in regards to climate change? Native Elders tell us that we should learn the ways of survival on the land from our ancestors. They say this for many reasons but one of them has to do with the reality that life could get very hard and set back many generations because of our greed and insensitivity.

The rain is still dancing lightly across the lake in a million tiny splashes. For the moment, I am one of the lucky ones to enjoy a region with few people but my world is rich in life.