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My camera and I went tramping through the woods on Friday – Pine House Farm on Hwy 93 which intersects with Horseshoe Valley Road, home to some of Ontario’s favourite ski resorts. This area has a reputation as a snow belt. Typically, in January, everything is covered in a generous helping of the white stuff and I’d be out in my boots & toque. But this year I found green ferns in January. It’s so warm, the ski resorts can’t even use their snow–making machines. There’s no point in blowing snow onto the slopes; it would only melt. As a result, Blue Mountain has laid off 1,300 seasonal staff.

The foliage is green where it should all be dead, and the snails should be ice cubes instead of creeping along in the damp.

I had the company of three dogs as I walked through the maple bush. Two are sisters, Hattie & Belle, half black Lab & half hound. If it’s possible for dogs to horse around, these dogs did a lot of horsing around. The other dog is my snooty standard poodle named Kari. In fact, standard poodles are water dogs. Kari was just as happy as the other two to be running around in the mud.

Apart from layoffs, there’s another kind of talk in the air – global warming. The warm weather isn’t confined to southern Ontario. The weather is unseasonably warm across all of Canada, right into the Arctic. But I don’t accept the talk. Although global warming is a fact which I acknowledge, isolated weather patterns, even if they affect huge regions, are evidence of nothing. Meteorology is a statistical science. Single observations, while valid in a simple chemistry experiment (did the litmus paper turn red?), are meaningless when applied to climate unless they are subsumed within a larger model. Even tracking weather patterns over a hundred years tells us nothing. But drilling 800,000 year old ice samples is a different matter. Then, we get the first hints of Gaia’s larger rhythms. If Gaia were a human being, then ice ages would come and go in the same way that we breathe.

I wonder why we latch onto odd weather patterns as if they were portents of a great foreboding. Are we really so different from our ancestors who read the weather as the workings of greater spiritual powers? If we are so ready to divest the skies of their powers, if we are so willing to bestow upon ourselves the powers we once reserved for our gods, then it follows that there are two stupidities which we must take care to avoid.

First, we must avoid the tendency to invest what is, after all, a rather mundane mathematics (statistics) with magical powers. Unseasonable weather should never lead us to conclude that our lives are being directed by greater powers.

Second, we must acknowledge that the only greater powers directing our weather are the powers we have granted to ourselves. This is not a matter of congratulations; it is a warning. If we fill Gaia’s lungs with smoke, then it should come as no surprise when she coughs and hacks and sputters. While we may never “prove” definitively the relationship between our egregious consumption and a warm January, nevertheless there is one fact for which we have incontrovertible proof.

The other day, near the local high school, I noticed a teenager the same age as my son. He was walking with attitude, strutting, drinking from a can of Coke. When he was done, he tossed the can onto the grass behind the bus shelter and stepped inside. There was nothing particularly wrong with the kid; he was probably modeling behaviour he has witnessed a hundred times or more. Maybe not a Coke can. Maybe a cigarette butt, instead. Or the Styrofoam container that held a hamburger. His attitude was cavalier. What difference is a piece of aluminum in the grass? Maybe none. Maybe Gaia can absorb a piece of aluminum in the grass. Maybe a million pieces. Even a billion. We have no way of knowing for certain. But we do know without doubt what it means for us to be cavalier. We need only turn our gaze inward and we can see what it does to us as a spiritual people when we utterly disregard our surroundings, when we blind ourselves to the relationship we bear to the ground we walk.

There is a salvage and wrecking yard on Highway 93 just before you drive into Hillsdale. I make a point of visiting it regularly. I stare at all the scrap metal, all the familiar objects — the mirrors and chrome, empty cylinders and chains, worn out tires, rusted engine blocks. I have contributed more than my share to heaps like this. It shames me. Then I walk away and head back up the hill to the farm, sweating in a coat too warm for the season.

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