I was born in Windsor, Ontario, but lived, went to school and worked most of my life in North York. When the North York Board of Education built the beautiful Mono Cliffs Outdoor Education Centre near Orangeville I moved northwest and spent ten years working there in the spectacular Headwaters Region of Dufferin-Caledon. After a brief return to the Toronto area to teach at York University, I was once again asked to manage an outdoor centre. This time it was at the Bolton Conference Centre and Camp location in Caledon.

That was in 1997, and this marks our 20^th year here in Caledon, so I can safely say that Bolton is now my Home Town.

When we moved here the housing boom hadn’t started and in February we could still hear the coyote packs singing from the farm fields to the south of us. A lot can happen in twenty years, and as old industrial areas and development lands were rezoned, the little country Town grew. But not too big – just big enough to attract the attention of Toronto Life Magazine and get voted as one of the Top Twenty Hot Neighbourhoods in which to live. Here’s their evaluation of my rurban home town:

“Anyone who yearns for rustic small-town life with the convenience of the big city should consider a foothold in Bolton—it’s quiet and picturesque, with plenty of modern amenities to keep it vibrant. Bolton, the densest chunk of Caledon, has a small cluster of restaurants and cafés that quickly give way to an expanse of strip malls and big-box stores. The housing stock is largely made up of newer homes on narrow lots, and while it’s a bit further from Toronto than Brampton, it’s both prettier and cheaper. Among the area’s most enticing rural charms: the Bolton Fall Fair, an agricultural expo with midway rides, giant gourds and a tractor pull.”

Not to mention the Humber Valley Heritage Trail, the Trans-Canada Trail (The Great Trail), the Caledon Trailway, the Bruce Trail, the Albion Hills Conservation Area, and the Albion Hills Community Farm, where local residents can grow their own local produce and learn the benefits of local food production.

So, how do we keep our Home Town “rustic” but with plenty of “amenities” as the pressures from Toronto and Brampton push north looking for healthy space and more affordable housing? We espouse sustainable development over exponential growth.

There are limits to growth, but there are no limits to development. Let me explain: a human being can only grow to a certain size, but that same human being can learn to write, sing, build rocket ships, dance, train a horse, compose a symphony, paddle a canoe, deliver a speech, design an energy efficient building, develop green technologies to take us beyond fossil fuels, turn swords into ploughshares. There is no end to the development that one simple human being can achieve.

How do we nurture sustainable development over growth? We keep our citizens well-informed about the current and future state of our community. We elect a Municipal Council that is intelligent and aware of the big picture beyond their own limited self-interest. We avoid being drawn into misinformation debates and inflammatory social media rants by a rabid minority who would find fault with the way the Little Drummer Boy played his song to a baby in a manger.

It has been my privilege over the past few months to interview the administration team in the Town of Caledon. From the Chief Administrative Officer to the Town Clerk, these are people who are dedicated, hard-working and more than competent at their jobs, who work daily with the best interests of the entire population of Caledon in mind. They are not in the slightest the tax-dollar wasting, entitled incompetents that the rabid misinformed minority, and a few partisan journalists would have us believe.

The good news is, this Town of Caledon and it’s urban centre of Bolton are doing just fine thank-you, and we know what we need to do to get better. We need our GO Train. We need to dedicate Queen St to local traffic only, and divert the through traffic to the Emil Kolb by-pass it should be taking. We need to ensure all future developments, residential, employment, and industrial are built to LEED standards – energy producing, greywater reusing, and waste recycling. We need to apply a Prince Edward Island style of pride and beauty to our store fronts, our heritage buildings and our homes.

We need to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, and don’t listen to or re-elect the rabid in-between.

My Home Town – it was once voted “the Greenest Town in Ontario” and now we’re one of the hottest.  If we want to claim both of those titles in the future it will come through leadership focused on sustainable development, and a citizenry that is well informed and takes pride in their community. The mud-slingers? As the old Conestoga wagon masters used to say when the covered wagons got stuck in the mud, “Either get out and push, or get out.”

***

Skid Crease, Caledon

A version of this review was first printed in the King Sentinel newspaper, October 19, 2017

***

“If you consider the vastness of this universe, this Planet Earth is just a small boat. If this boat is sinking, then I think we will all have to sink together.” 

Ban KI-moon, former Secretary General of the United Nations

This somber message was delivered to a rapt audience of King and Caledon citizens in King’s magnificent Country Day School Performing Arts Centre. The occasion was a viewing of Leo DiCaprio’s film Before the Flood presented by National Geographic on Wednesday evening, October 11, 2017. A partnership consisting of the Oak Ridges Moraine Land Trust, the Arts Society of King, and the Country Day School brought the movie and Chris Ballard, Minister of the Environment and Climate Change, together to learn and to dialogue.

The movie opens with a story and a painting that hung on the wall of Leo’s childhood bedroom. It was titled “Before the Flood” by Dutch Renaissance master Heironymous Bosch. The original was on three hinged oak panels that closed to reveal an unusual outer painting of Earth as a single globe, an amazing intuitive feat when you consider that Magellan had yet to complete his first circumnavigation of the planet. The three inner panels depict the innocence of the Garden of Eden, the Seven Deadly Sins of humankind, and the wasteland that follows our overindulgence and consumption.

The film expands on that theme as DiCaprio takes us on a journey of celebration and degradation. We see the magnificence of this gift of life called Planet Earth and then we bear witness to the squandering of resources that our very selfish species has inflicted on all of the other systems with which we share this Home Planet.

This journey is inter-spliced with clips of DiCaprio speaking with Ban Ki-moon and taking the podium at the United Nations as their UN Messenger of Peace with a special focus on climate change. He also meets with Pope Francis when the Earth Encyclical was enacted, and talks with President Obama in the heady days of environmental hope following the world’s commitment to the Paris Accord.

The movie is a cautionary tale, much like the British TV series “Black Mirror” is to the dangers of the electronic drugs of cell phones and flat screens. Before the Flood shows us the garden of Eden that we inherited and what we have done with it in a few short millennium. Will we descend into social chaos as the many without food, water, health care and shelter turn their anger towards the 1% who seemingly have it all? And like the ancient Romans that didn’t get it until the Barbarians really were at the gates, will we realize too late that we could have turned the tide?

The hardest part to watch, of course, is the build towards a positive ending with the hope of the Paris Accord being signed by united nations equally concerned about the impacts of accelerating climate change on their countries and the global commons. There was real hope seen in the sincere conversations between DiCaprio and John Kerry and Barack Obama, and in the innocent cry to cast your vote for a secure future.

But as the film concluded, the audience sat in silence, and in the depressed knowledge that the U.S. had just elected a science illiterate as President, who then appointed climate change deniers to head the Environmental Protection Agency and NASA. A President who withdrew his country from the Paris Accord, quickly began to dismantle every environmental security advance made over the last decades, and reinstated the glory that was coal to the US economy – a fossil fool for the fossil fuel industry.

Of course, the film is not without its critics either. One of the most poignant segments is when DiCaprio tours Indonesia and meets displaced peoples and animals from the areas that have been deforested. Deforested so that they can grow lucrative plantations of African palm oil trees that provide the palm oil that saturates almost every one of our processed foods. However, it turns out that a lot of the financing for DiCaprio’s movie, “The Wolf of Wall Street” came via palm oil profits from an Indonesian investment group linked to their Prime Minister, prompting cries of hypocrisy and asking DiCaprio to step down from his UN role.

However, for the purposes of raising sensibilities for this move night, those details were kept from the audience. Instead, at the end of the film, the audience got to turn their angst towards our newly appointed Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Chris Ballard. MP Ballard had already fielded pre-film questions from the audience and some very intelligent questions from Grade 11 and 12 Country Day students that left him responding, “Look, I’ve only been on this job for ten weeks. I promise to get back to you.” And to be fair, Chris Ballard’s portfolio is huge. As an educator and journalist, it has taken me 25 years to come close to understanding the science and anti-science surrounding accelerating climate change and its impacts, so we should be more than willing to give Chris a few more weeks.

The realities of energy production – and Ontario can be quite proud that we have no more coal fired power plants – was one of the things that Ballard touched upon, acknowledging the anger that many Ontarians were feeling over high electricity rates. He also explained that part of that increase was due to the fact that the government had to replace thousands of kilometers of aging infrastructure, including the basic wires, that previous governments had simply passed on to the new kids at Queen’s Park.

The Minister tried to calm the audience’s fears about accelerating climate change impact by telling them some good news – that human related CO₂ emissions had stabilized. However, he forgot to mention that the atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ were continuing to rise, possibly because the natural ocean sinks were saturated. Besides fielding questions, Minister Ballard also got a lecture from renowned climate scientist Hans Martin – probably the smartest guy in the room when it comes to understanding accelerating climate change. Yes Chris, a lot to learn, and no time to waste.

This event was a classic in partnership planning between the King City, Country Day School, the Arts Society of King (ASK), and the Oak Ridges Moraine Land Trust (ORMLT) whose MC, Susan Walmer, was an articulate host. As a special guest speaker, Chris Ballard did a fine job of handling questions as honestly and as completely as he could. Steve Pellegrini, Mayor of King City, was gracious and brief in his welcome to guests, and Mr. John Liggett, Head of School for Country Day School, gave a warm greeting and a strong endorsement to the role that “grumpy scientists” play in our modern world, acknowledging that he preferred hard science to analogies and stories.

Interesting, that meteorological and climate change scientists at Environment Canada contacted me to translate their hard science into analogies and stories that the public could understand. As Albert Einstein once said:

“I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

We’re going to need both if we are going to get through the next flood safely.

***

Skid Crease, Caledon

When a storm is coming, there are usually warning signs. A drop in temperature,  a shift in the wind, a greenish tinge to the sky, and a feeling in the backs of our necks that something big and nasty is coming. If we are aware, we will have been watching the warning signs building, have prepared ourselves for the storm, stocked up on supplies, and taken shelter.

There are equally warning signs when the collapse of civil society is about to happen. In Syria over the past decade, it occurred when thousands of  people moved from the drought stricken countryside  into the cities and exploded in a civil war. In Europe it happened with the rise of the far right and their fear of “the others” as expressed in their anti-immigration rantings.

In Venezuela it happened in an instant with the sudden rise of a brutal dictatorship. In North Korea, it built slowly over fifty years from narcissistic bombast to nuclear bombs. But the signs are all there: a big storm is coming.

In the United States of America, it is more than obvious in the tragi-comedy playing out daily on The Trump Show. But the irrational tweets and rally rants from a misogynistic, megalomaniac, white supremacist President are only the tip of the iceberg. More frightening are the cheers of support and chants of fanaticism coming from flag waving crowds of “the base”, the deplorables who enable this emperor who wears no clothes to rule over what was becoming one of the greatest democracies in the world.

When 96% of practicing climate change scientists say we’ve accelerated the natural process to catastrophic levels, and the President of the United States appoints climate change deniers to head up the Environmental Protection Agency and NASA, a really big storm is coming.

When crowds of chanting Nazis are given a free pass, and opponents of racial inequality are ridiculed and insulted in public, and the mothers of every NFL player who took a knee are called a bitch by the President of the United States, a storm is coming.

When a Stanley Cup winning hockey team thinks it is an honour to accept an invitation to the Trump White House, not only is it confirmation of how serious brain damage concussions are in the NHL, it is proof positive that a storm is coming. That’s right, Sid the Kid, not a lot of white hockey stars getting swept up and shot by police in Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia. Wake up boys, a storm is coming.

When Ball Boy and Rocket Man start trading insults about how they are going to destroy each other’s countries with nuclear bombs, you had better believe that a storm is coming and the rest of us are all downwind and downstream of the chaos that will follow. So, just like Winston Churchill read the warning signs and tried to warn England and Europe about the rise of the Third Reich, take it from an old storyteller. You might want to get  ready for a reallly, big nasty storm.

****

Skid Crease, Caledon