Good Producers

April 23 2020

Beyond our back fence

and the next yard

and one street over

were farmers' fields.

Where cows roamed freely;

heads bent to the grass,

bristly tails

swishing at flies.

And not standard cattle

like the big black-and-white Holsteins,

those good producers

of industrial milk.

But rather Jersey cows,

who are smaller

and have soft brown eyes

with long delicate lashes.

Who are known for their butterfat

which no wants anymore.

Now overrun

by low-rise walk-ups,
fast food and strip malls

and 4-lane roads.

Because the mega-city has sprawled

since I was a child,

the distant suburbs swallowed up

by a ravenous metropolis.

So Old MacDonald's cows

are now penned into feedlots,

and the halcyon fields

zoned and paved.

And I have become

an official old-timer

lamenting my long-lost days.

Listened to indulgently

and gently patronized.

So that even I

find it harder and harder

to believe it was so,

when it seems easier to imagine

I've simply submerged the past

in a tepid bath of nostalgia.

I now live

in semi-wilderness,

on a protected shore

in the boreal forest

north of Lake Superior.

When there are 5 billion more of us,

and what few wild places are left

have become all the more precious.

And when what our children will remember

of these final days

will also seem incredible

to future historians.

The end of nature

or the end of growth?

Fields paved over

or wild and slow?

Big

and black-and-white

and bred to be faster?

Or small brown cows

with liquid eyes

and girlish lashes?

This poem was written in the midst of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. A time when that farmer's field would seem incredible to a child living in Toronto's North York. But that world exists in living memory. As does a world where there were “only” 3 billion of us.

I think that childhood suburb makes a good metaphor for the environmental crises we are now facing. And it was a good way for me to ventilate; to make my point without being too heavy-handed – too preachy, hectoring, direct. Which I get to do now! (Not heavy-handed, that is, except perhaps when I said these final days: which could be read as the final days of this pandemic; but could (and should) be read as the end of us!)

As we overpopulate, encroach on nature, want more and more, and believe we are exempt from natural law, the planet becomes less diverse, less resilient, and less sustainable. And our civilization, more perilous. Until we begin to regard ourselves as part of nature, instead of separate; stewards, instead of masters; and more humble about our place in the universe instead of at its centre, we are destined to fail. Until we become more modest in our appetites and our consumption, we will inevitably run into immovable limits.

This is the common denominator of the two great crises we face: both climate change and pandemic. One is a result of our filling the oceans and air with carbon. And the other is a result of our we encroaching on wild places; deforesting, displacing bats, and exposing ourselves to novel zoonoses. One is slower moving, the other fast. But both are inevitable as we continue as we have. They are absolutely not the improbable or even hypothetical events we tend to see them as. Anyone who was caught off guard by Covid-19 was not paying attention. And those who dispute or discount the seriousness of anthropogenic climate change will be condemned by history ...if there are any historians left to notice.

I'm not sure how much of this memory is actually mine, and how much confabulated by what I've been told. As usual, I'm suspicious of memory. But whether it belongs to me, or is more in the realm of family lore, I know the facts to be true: Redmount Road, then Palm Drive, and then a line that was the outskirts of Toronto, beyond which there were farmer's fields and – presumably – cows. If not when I was a child, then right around when I was born.

When I say protected shore, I'm referring to “my” lake (Hazelwood), which is a conservation area and therefore free of motorized vehicles: no outboards, jet skis, or snow machines. So hardly pristine (which was the word I used in my first draft), since the area was logged many years ago and is fully road accessible; but “protected”, in a relative sense, from the full onslaught of modernity.