High tide at Falling Downs

We’ve been having some screwy weather in these parts. Could that be a symptom of “climate change?”

There’s no doubt winter is lingering. We woke up to -10 C this morning, and spring officially arrives this week. Last week we had a couple of days of rain. That washed out the Burgess Sideroad and also brought Indian Creek up four or five feet. For a few hours on Saturday afternoon the water was actually going over our bridge instead of under it, which we’ve only seen once before in the ten years we’ve been here.

I remain what might be called a climate change skeptic. According to the experts, ten or twelve thousand years ago Falling Downs would have been under a mile and a half of ice and snow. Obviously a lot of climate change happened long before humanity went wild with the fossil fuels. Climate is constantly changing whether we burn fossil fuels or not.

Which is not to say we shouldn’t be trying to minimize our carbon footprint. Tread lightly on the earth, and leave things better than you found them has always been my mantra. But when you see outfits like Goldman Sachs promoting carbon tax solutions to our alleged climate crisis… that’s always struck me as the equivalent of an obese person paying an anorexic not to eat…

I think there’s a certain amount of unacknowledged hubris involved in the climate change debate.

“We are the master species and we can kill off all life on earth.”

Well, I doubt it. I don’t think Mother Nature gives a shit one way or the other if our species survives or not. Here at Falling Downs we’ve got pre-historic snapping turtles climbing out of the marsh every spring to lay their eggs in our driveway. They were doing that a million years ago and they’ll be doing that a million years after we humanoids drive ourselves to extinction. They’ve survived cataclysmic volcanic eruptions and asteroid strikes.  They roamed the earth in the age of dinosaurs and they’re still here.

My favourite environmentalist isn’t Rachel Carson or David Suzuki. It’s Wiebo Ludwig.

Wiebo was what you might call a “direct action” kind of environmentalist. He was also a fundamentalist Christian. Oddly enough, neither Christians nor environmentalists have ever embraced the guy…

So we had the water going over the bridge and then the rain turned to snow and things got colder. The water level dropped over the course of Sunday. By late Sunday night, when I went out on the stoop for a breath of fresh air, you could hear the ice sheet cracking and collapsing all through the marsh and down to Bass Lake. It’s an eerie sensation. A dead quiet night punctuated with the groans of fracturing ice and sudden crashes.

But, it’s forecast to warm up this week. Another couple of weeks and I’ll be able to put the canoe in across the way and paddle down to Bass Lake.

By then, the snappers should be digging their way out of the marsh.