Never forget

This will be another very personal post. If you're here only for nature photos, you might want to come back tomorrow.

I have been writing at this since last November; here's where I am right now.

I was a war baby. 1942: WWII had been going on for three years already. Even the US had gotten involved by then. Dad was away in the Canadian Air Force, working on radios. He was almost 30 when I was born; they were calling up older men by that time. When Dad came home, "demobbed", we ended up on the west coast. There was no TV; I hadn't seen any movies, but I must have heard stories; I cringed when airplanes flew overhead, half expecting bullets or bombs. I was 5 then.

We took in a refugee family from Ukraine; Johnny had seen his father shot and killed. Dad took us to the lookout tower where our soldiers had watched for enemy submarines.  In our one-room school, grades 1 to 8, we watched Canadian government films about the "war effort"; I ran the film projector. The war was an ever-present memory.

In my teens, I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Twice.  I met survivors of Hitler's camps and Japanese prisons. Later, I read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. I read Babi Yar; in my dreams I saw the pits where today's dead and dying bodies lay piled on yesterday's dead.

Life has been good to me. I have a loving family, decent health, beauty all around me. But always, always, there is that dark remembrance deep inside. War, torture, prison, death. "Man's inhumanity to man," they say, but it is all too human. Never forget.

A quote from the ending of Babi Yar: "Let me emphasize again that I have not told about anything exceptional, but only about ordinary things that were part of a system; things that happened just yesterday, historically speaking, when people were exactly as they are today."

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The world around us has changed since then. We no longer die - usually - of minor injuries, things like an ingrown toenail. Most children survive their first five years; half of them didn't in my grandmother's day.  We have vaccines; we don't all catch the measles or chicken pox. (I caught both, so did my son, but I  was spared mumps and polio, which my brother caught.) And we have antibiotics; I'm here today due to sulfas and then penicillin when it became available. I don't personally know anyone whose mother died in childbirth, the ever-present fear of days gone by.

But, "historically speaking, people were exactly as they are today." Turn that around; people today are exactly like the people in our history books.

We, here in Canada, are not currently at war. For that, I am grateful. But we have challenges our forebears missed out on. Climate change. Global warming, the not-so-appreciated term for it. Sea levels rising, slowly for now, but accelerating. Pandemics; Covid wasn't the first, won't be the last. People haven't changed; if we don't like the facts, we deny them, refuse to change our behaviour, attack anyone who keeps insisting that we do something to correct the situation. But the fact remains; disasters are accumulating, and our very survival is threatened.

I have seen this with my own eyes. I have been watching the life around me for decades, and the changes are evident. The weather patterns have changed. Flowering plants and their pollinators are out of sync. Huckleberries bloom unvisited and there are few berries. On the shores, there are dead zones; they stink. Starfish, in the millions, died of an unexplained illness. Flocks of birds that used to darken the skies and the water now are reduced to a few dozen here and there. The insects the birds fed on have disappeared, and with them, the spiders. A great kelp forest I saw on my first visit to Campbell River, over 10 years ago, no longer exists. 

And the response to this has been, in large part, to attack. Not the warming, but the science. The scientists. The writers who try to alert us. And even the children pleading with us to save their world while there's still time. 

And there's still the war. Not here, not for the moment, but the war wherever. Or, to call it for what it is, the genocide. Wherever it is, no matter how far away, it still affects us here. (And adds, immensely, to the global warming situation.) 

And next door, the US is rapidly turning itself into a banana republic. I try not to doomscroll, but I can't miss the daily updates. And what I'm seeing is a repeat of the run-up to WWII.

I remember seeing the news about 9-11. I was standing in my daughter's cabin on the hillside above a rural lake, watching her TV. I was not surprised; disasters like this had been happening around the world. Just not here. But it was inevitable; no one nation is immune. I was, instead, dismayed. "Here we go again," I remember saying. The panic, the scapegoating, the paranoia, the calls for revenge; it's a basic human pattern.

I remember standing at my window listening to the radio as George Bush's "Shock and Awe" attack on Iraq went down. How many people, how many children, how many nobodies, died in those moments? I felt sick. "Here we go again." Will we ever learn?

I doubt it.

And now, the blatant attack on law, on science, on medicine, on anyone "different".  The deportations, the internment of people the wrong colour in camps. The sudden expansionist theme; Greenland, Canada, Panama; where next? They're following HItler's playbook, Stalin's programs. How many millions died of starvation because of Stalin's denial of so-called "Jew science"? How many good people died in Hitler's prisons for telling the truth?

Here we go again.

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This is a nature blog. I write about mushrooms and birds, rocks and trees and shores; the world as I find it where I am today. So, how does all the above tie in?

Just this: it seems to me, in my more pessimistic moments, not as rare as they used to be, that we are coming to some kind of an end. Each war, each "little" skirmish, is more violent, more destructive than the last. The unravelling of the advances in medicine of the last century is accelerating. And each of the climate disasters, the fires and the storms and the disappearance of our food stocks, is worse than the preceding ones. We, all of us together, seem to be running full-tilt towards a cliff to fall and drown like lemmings. Yes, I know lemmings don't really do that, but we are providing them with a good example to follow.

In mid-summer I look for the beautiful orange-backed cross spiders around my garden, where they used to hang their webs. Not one. Not even a small one. There are no fat Steatodas, like glossy brown marbles with legs, either. On the beach at low tide, under a rock, I find a half-dozen purple starfish. One seems to be sick. I drive and drive, on the empty north-bound highway, watching the skies for dark wings, an eagle, a turkey vulture, a raven; after a couple of hours, going and coming, I have seen one.

And I feel like giving up. Am I now just documenting the disappearing act of the world I have known? Making some sort of a record; things as they were, so they won't be completely forgotten? Is it worth it? Will anyone be around to remember?

Some days it seems just too hard to look at photos and process them, to ask questions and search for answers; what is this, why, how, when? What's the point?

I have been writing this at intervals since mid-November.  Yesterday, in an interview with Ed Yong, I read this: "These ... ideas anchor me in these moments when it feels like the gulf between what we hope the world should be and what it actually is seems vast and growing. That gulf is agonizingly difficult to bear, but we bear it nonetheless."

And he is writing a book about life at different scales, "The Infinite Extent", the third in a nature trilogy. Bearing that gulf.

If he can still hold on to hope, who am I to wimp out? Onward! Maybe there is a tenuous hope; maybe we'll make it. Chastened, maybe, sadder and wiser, I might hope. Maybe we're not lemmings, either. Maybe.

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Otra vez estoy subiendo un poste muy personal, sin, por el momento, una traducción. Apenas hoy subí la traducción del poste anterior. Este seguirá en unos dias.