A painted turtle shows off its colours while it basks on a pond log
Apologies folks! I was so busy last week prepping for a family dinner on Easter weekend that I lost track of my blog post schedule. But today is perfect timing to celebrate Earth Day, and in honour of the event, this week’s post features green things on our planet. Green is the colour of nature, of growing things, of hope. As Spring very slowly makes its appearance in my neck of the woods (we had snow again just a few days ago!), burgeoning green plants are a signpost that the change of season is really happening.
The theme of this year’s Earth Day is “Invest in Our Planet”. Check out the website for listings of global livestream events as well as a map of any local events that may be taking place near you.
If there’s nothing near you, I encourage you to take a walk in nature and appreciate its richness and beauty. Be grateful that we still have so much greenness to enjoy and celebrate.
Bright daffodils with their rich green leaves and stems
Green mixed with shades of burgundy and purple on tulips pushing out of the ground
A carpet of green grass studded with blue flowers under a venerable old tree waiting to unfurl its leaves
Spectacular unidentified shrub, possibly a kind of bamboo?
The soft jade of a sedum cluster
Even water can be green – here the Niagara River as it flows under the Queenston-Lewiston border bridge
So many shades of green! Let’s all do our part in preventing that colour from going extinct.
All photos are by me unless otherwise specified and all rights reserved. E. Jurus
Faithful readers will have noticed a lot of wildlife photos on this blog. My father had a great love of animals — we were regularly rescuing injured birds and feeding area squirrels — and instilled it in me. In high school I loved my first biology class, and decided that would be my career path. I entered university with the idea of eventually doing cancer research, but I landed my first summer job with the Ministry of the Environment, and that changed my focus. I majored in Ecology: the study of how the entire world, from the creatures that hang around a pond in a forest to everything on this planet, is interconnected. Every segment is critical, and we humans have arrogantly ignored that for the most part.
People often speak of the ‘circle of life’ in Africa, where it’s obvious and transparent. In the photo above, taken in the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, a large pride of lions had killed a zebra and were enjoying dinner late in the afternoon. Scenes like that epitomize life in Africa: the loss of a zebra feeds an entire family of lions. This was an important meal for the lions, as their species is listed as ‘vulnerable’, only one step away from ‘endangered’. Yes, the top predator in Africa isn’t doing well at surviving.
As we watched the lions eat, other species gathered around. First the jackals showed up. They’re called “opportunistic” predators — they’ll hunt small animals and birds, and will scavenge from larger kills.
It didn’t take much longer for the vultures to arrive.
Both of these serve as cleaners in the ecosystem. By the time they’ve finished off what the lions haven’t eaten, there’s no longer any meat to decay and attract pests. They’re an essential segment of the circle of life.
And while we feel awful for the animal that was killed, we understand that if the lionesses don’t make the kill, their little cubs won’t eat either.
We permit species to die off at our own peril, not to mention losing the beauty and gift of their existence.
It’s hard to convey how beautiful lions are when you see them in the wild. Their rippling golden fur and mesmerizing golden eyes just can’t be adequately captured by a camera. I took a lot of photos trying.
Can you imagine a world without lions? Within our lifetime that’s a real possibility. Future generations may never be able to go and see a lion walking the plains of Kenya, or Botswana, or South Africa. And every species that we lose is one more piece out of the global ecosystem that supports all of us. If we lose enough pieces, that ecosystem will no longer work.
On World Wildlife Day, you can help by adding your voice to the groups doing their best to prevent further species erosion. You can find out more on the Global Citizen website.
A new year, but same old pandemic. We get our booster shot and continue to make the best of things, because that’s how we weather tough times.
This past Christmas, we actually got to have family over in small bundles — which meant days of cleaning up so many dust bunnies in surprising corners, multiple trips to the grocery store, and laying out a timetable for the entire final two weeks of December. It was all worth it, though, to be able to share some holiday time with the special people in our life.
The theme around our house was warmth and relaxation. Menus were unfussy, curling up on our living room furniture under lap blankets was completely allowed, an eclectic mix of holiday music played softly in the background.
Our nieces and nephews wanted to turn last year’s Christmas picnic into an annual tradition, so once again we took our hot air fryer to a nice spot in the vicinity to heat up a pot of Honey Mustard Sausages. We lit a fire in one of the barbecue stands that stay there all year (photo above), laid out all the food on a picnic table, and went back and forth between the food and the toasty warmth of the blazing wood. Apart from the sheer fun of doing something outdoors, one of the things that makes this occasion really special is the opportunity to just shoot the breeze among the six of us — something that doesn’t happen at big family gatherings. The picnic only lasts a couple of hours; once the sun starts to set the temperature drops dramatically. But it’s quality time that can’t be replicated in any other setting.
So, as we soldier on through more months of pandemic drama, find ways to create that kind of atmosphere — the kind that gives you a warm glow inside. Be mindful when you go out and about. Pay attention to other people around you; we’re all in the same boat and making life more pleasant all around will go a long way to helping each other get through these times. Turn grumpiness into kindness; it’s the best cure I know.
If you’re having trouble finding your inner kind person, I’d like to share with you two offerings by the organization Action for Happiness:
Their Happier January calendar, with daily suggestions for small ways to feel better
And don’t forget to be kind to yourself while you’re at it. Nobody loves what’s going on, but we will get through it, just as generations before us have done.
Apologies for the late post. I’m laid up with a nasty migraine from something I bought at a new bakery yesterday — what the triggering ingredient was is yet to be determined. So in lieu of my regular post, I’m offering a link to some information recently released by “Visual Capitalist, a data-driven media site focused on making the world’s information more accessible“.
If you’ve ever wondered about our place on Earth among the staggering 8.7 million species that make up our planet, or even if you haven’t, the graphic in the article by Nautilus magazine, All the Biomass on Earth, will blow your mind. Humans comprise only a tiny portion, which will be an eye-opener to anyone who thinks we own the planet 😉 Hope you enjoy the quick read, and see you next week, hopefully in better shape.
Maple leaves in autumn, by E. Jurus, all rights reserved
Today was Remembrance Day in Canada. Officially it commemorates the ending of hostilities in World War One, also called the Great War. Very few people from that time period are still alive today, and the impact of that event on the world is fading. We have to read a history of it to comprehend how terrible it was — over 8 million soldier deaths, and up to 100 million associated deaths, including the infamous ‘Spanish Flu’ epidemic in 1918 that originated in an American military facility. It spread around the world quickly through troop movements and public events like the Liberty Loans Parade held in Philadelphia to promote war bonds (an outbreak from that event killed 12,000 people alone). As bad as our current pandemic is today, I don’t think we can in any way understand what the world went through during that time.
For a lot of Baby Boomers, World War Two has more presence in our consciousness. My mom was a nurse in Europe during the war, and some of her stories of holding her post in a surgical theatre while bombs were falling are hair-raising. Even though both my parents survived the war, it’s impact never left them, whether via deep emotional scars or medical fallout from food rationing and years of stress. My dad never talked about the war much; his outlet was to write novels about it, which I suspect weren’t entirely fictional, but I imagine it was easier to write as if it all happened to someone else.
And of course there have been veterans of many more conflicts, localized but just as terrible to go through. I have a friend who served as a Peacekeeper for a time; what little he’s told me about it sounds traumatic in a way that those of us back home will hopefully never experience.
The poem written by Dr. John McCrae after a friend of his was killed in the trenches in Belgium during the spring of 1915, less than a year into WWI, has become an icon of that first global battle. In Flanders Fields is deeply moving, as the dead who sacrificed everything to preserve freedom ask us to carry the torch they’ve passed through generation after generation.
Today we’re engaged in our own global battle, even if it hasn’t been given a name. We live in a world of amazing technological and medical advancements, but we’re still fighting greed, selfishness and prejudice — governments and corporations that are destroying the environment for profit, people who put their own desires over the greater need to prevent COVID from causing many more deaths, and people who treat badly anyone different from themselves.
So we carry the torch, continuing the fight against fear, ignorance and oppression a century later. We can’t let our lives be defined by fear, whether it’s of a viewpoint or way of life that’s different from ours, or of an incredible medical advancement that’s allowed hundreds of thousands of people to get vaccinated against the most devastating disease of the 21st century to date, or of doing the right thing, even when it’s challenging. Take up the torch, each of you, and let’s continue the fight to make the world a better place. Together, we can do it.
In Indigenous culture, staghorn sumac has been used for a number of medicinal remedies, dyes and tobacco blends
In Canada today, September 30th, is now officially the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. It was chosen to coincide with an earlier commemorative day begun in 2013, Orange Shirt Day. It’s a step towards our country’s acknowledgement and reparation for of the awful legacy of our Residential Schools.
I began learning about the Residential School system through presentations by the Indigenous counselor at the college I was working at. As time has passed, more and more information has come out, including the grim discovery of the remains of hundreds of Indigenous children who disappeared through those schools, after the kind of suffering that makes its way into horror movies.
It saddens me that so many lives were damaged by that reprehensible period in our history, but also that the rich culture of our Indigenous people has been rejected, a way of life that is close to nature and could teach us a lot about respect for the world around us. I was introduced to a little of it at the seminars.
One thing I particularly remember is a lovely daily ritual of gratitude to the Earth and its creatures. I found this document online which sounds like what I experienced, if you’re interested in finding out more (Source: Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian).
The Indigenous Tourism Association of Canada (ITAC) has released a Indigenous Culinary Directory of places in Canada offering Indigenous culinary experiences. As the directory states, “We want to make it easy for the world to find and fall in love with our Indigenous culinary community.” Scrolling through the PDF, I can say that the food looks amazing, and I’m only sorry that the seven locations in Ontario aren’t anywhere close to us, but hopefully we’ll have the opportunity to try one out some time.
I wore an orange top on my hike today in honour of the event, and I saw a smattering of others doing the same; in future years I hope the practice will have much wider support.
Lion Tail Magic 
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