Hamilton and NOTL

It is heart-warming to have friends with whom I feel as comfortable and relaxed as I would if they were members of my own family.  It's like this with Karen Trollope Kumar and her husband Pradeep Kumar who have been living in Hamilton since they returned from the Himalayan foothills in the late 1990s. I flew to Toronto island airport last Friday and home to Ottawa yesterday, Monday. Karen drove to the airport to collect me and again to drop me off.  On Saturday and Sunday we drove to Niagara on the Lake, known and pronounced as NOTL by many of its aficionados. We saw two light frothy comedies, very suitable summer fare, especially in the stifling heat wave conditions we have endured lately: a Noel Coward play, Present Laughter, on Saturday, and on Sunday His Girl Friday, a play based on a marvellous screwball movie comedy that in turn was based on a successful Broadway play called The Front Page. Karen's 90-year-old mother, Bernice Trollope, joined us on Saturday and we met David and Desre as well.  Conversation revealed that Bernice Trollope's late husband and Desre's father were engineering students in the same year at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg. It's a small world.

Every time I travel along the Queen Elizabeth Way from Hamilton to NOTL I'm distressed to see how that once bountiful orchard and vineyard district, the Niagara Peninsula, is being relentlessly eaten up by exurban sprawl and industrial development. I've been travelling that road since the early 1970s, close to 40 years and the change in this period is depressing. Since I last passed that way about 4 years ago, some spectacular architectural structures have appeared, but they are no substitute for the fruit trees and vineyards that they have replaced.  Bricks and mortar and paved parking lots can never replace fruit trees. Instead we import fruit, and grapes, and increasing quantities of wine, from South America, with no thought for the carbon fuels combusted to fly produce all the way to Canada. It's all adding to the climate forcing that is  pushing the world closer to a tipping point from which there will be no return. This whole north east sector of North America is also afflicted this year by unprecedented heat and drought conditions. The country everywhere is dry and parched, like South Australia in high summer, not a blade of green grass  to be seen in many lawns. The grape vines near NOTL look good, but they are heavily irrigated.

It is worrying, and a sign of the corrupt times we live in, that the government of Canada, in thrall to the oil industry in Alberta, has systematically dismantled the data gathering and monitoring systems that in some cases have been operating for over 50 years; they do not want evidence of environmental damage and deterioration to impede the political decision to accelerate development of  the environmentally destructive tar sands. This ultra-conservative government is so scientifically illiterate that they don't understand that greenhouse gas emissions and stratospheric ozone depletion are two entirely different processes. They have shut down not only carbon dioxide monitoring but UV radiation detection services in the high Arctic, the early warning system that can advise all north Americans when UV radiation levels are becoming dangerously high. As for the tar sands, an area about the size of Florida has already been devastated and emissions from the refineries and extraction plants is the largest single contributor to fossil fuel emissions on earth. We know this only because the Canadian government can't stifle data sources outside Canadian jurisdiction. Their policy is enriching oil companies and the ultra-conservative party now running affairs in Canada. For the sake of future generations here and elsewhere on earth, I hope this government is soon swept from office, but I fear that their appeal to simple-minded people to reduce taxes could keep them in office until it is too late to save the world from passing through the climatic tipping point that will lead to irreversible changes, perhaps to mass extinctions, including extinction of many humans. As Aeschylus put it in Medea, "Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad."

How did I ramble off on that tirade? I've said nothing about how splendid it was to see and stay with Karen and Pradeep, and to have conversations with them and with their two splendid young adult offspring, Sonia and Raman, both of whom are students at McMaster University, Sonia about to start her MBA, Raman half way through his medical course.  I feel optimistic about the future after talking to these two bright youngsters.