HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2008-07-10, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, JULY 10, 2008. PAGE 5.
Bonnie
Gropp
TThhee sshhoorrtt ooff iitt
Those hippies
M an has turned his back on silence.
Day after day he invents machines
that increase noise and distract
humanity from the essence of life.
– Jean Arp
It is very hard to find silence on this planet.
I came close twice – once when I was several
thousand feet under the earth in a hardrock
mine in northwestern Ontario. The guy who
was showing me around shut everything down
– the elevator, the generator, even the carbon-
arc lamps. Then he killed the ignition in the
buggy we were riding in.
That was pretty silent – but I could still hear
my pulse.
The other time was scuba diving. Sixty feet
under the waves with the Pacific Ocean
pressing down on you is a pretty silent
environment too – until you inhale. Drawing
a breath through a scuba hose sounds like
marbles rattling in an empty milk jug.
Fact is, total silence would creep you out
and probably drive you bananas if you got too
much of it. That’s not likely to happen to any
of us any time soon. Silence is a commodity
that’s vanishing faster than good manners and
the polar ice cap.
Every morning I walk my dogs through a
forest that is far from streets, houses, factories,
schoolyards – all the usual noisemakers of
modern life. But silent?
Hardly. It’s a cacophony of sound. The
ravens croak, the chickadees tweet, the
squirrels twitter, leaves flutter and the
branches sigh and moan…
And that’s all fine, of course, because those
sounds are an improvement on silence. They
are the sounds that balm our nerves and
medicate our frazzled souls.
Problem is, no matter how deep into the
forest I go, I know that sooner or later other
aural interlopers will bull their way into my
earholes. Sooner or later I will detect the
scream of a not so far-off chainsaw or the
groan of a logging truck grinding its gears up
Lees Hill.
Or overhead I’ll hear the thocketa thocketa
drum solo of a Sikorski helicopter ferrying a
sixpack of Business Suits up the coast for a
look at some marina/golf course development.
And it’s not just happening in my neck of
the woods. Bernie Krause is an Australian
who’s been walking wilderness areas
of the world for the past 40 years. He doesn’t
take his dogs with him – he packs a tape
recorder.
Krause makes recordings of the wild sounds
he hears out there and he’s come to an
alarming conclusion: not only are the wild
sounds increasingly having to compete with
intruding man-made sounds – they’re losing
the battle.
And they are vanishing.
According to Krause, the random animal
yips, bird songs and insect buzzings we hear in
a walk through the woods are infinitely more
complicated than we realize – and anything
but random. He says it’s more like a divinely
orchestrated symphony.
Krause creates spectrograms of his
wilderness recordings. They are visual
printouts that show all the ‘noises’ of a given
wilderness area arranged according to musical
pitch.
It looks like an orchestral score – the
woodwinds here, the horns over there, the
strings off to the side.
“No two species use the same frequency,”
says Krause. “That’s part of how they co-exist
so well. When they give mating calls or
warning cries, they aren’t masked by the
noises of other animals.”
And when man joins the party? With his
bells and horns and whistles, his grinding
gears and thundering motors and wailing
machines?
It’s like a German Oompah band crashing
the London Philharmonic. Man-made noise
jams the natural airwaves, cancelling out
whole sections of the natural soundscape.
Suddenly, entire species in a given area can no
longer make themselves heard.
Krause says anthrophony – man-made noise
– is wreaking havoc all over the world.
Sometimes it's screamingly obvious – like
squads of low-flying jets traumatizing caribou
herds in training flights over Labrador.
Sometimes it’s not so obvious. Ever stuck
your head under the water at the lake as a
motorboat goes by? Imagine what seals and
walruses, salmon and other fish stock
endure with the marine traffic off our
coasts.
When Europeans first came to these shores
they caught cod off Newfoundland by simply
dropping baskets into the sea. A century ago,
passenger pigeons could block out the sun,
endless buffalo blackened our plains and the
noise of migrating whales kept Vancouverites
awake at night.
Now the East coast cod fishery is a fading
memory, the passenger pigeon’s extinct, the
dwindling buffalo herds don’t roam very far
and the west coast orca are but the flick of a
fluke away from a spot on the Endangered
Species list.
Gee, you don’t suppose…
Arthur
Black
Other Views The sounds of silence are no more
Why isn’t the most articulate,
fearless, colorful and sometimes
most effective member of the
legislature running for the vacant leadership of
the New Democratic Party?
Peter Kormos has had these attributes for
years, but rarely is mentioned among possible
successors to Howard Hampton, who is
stepping down after leading through three
elections in which he showed a lot of heart, but
won few seats.
To know how dominating Kormos has been
in the legislature the past decade you need to
have been there. He was House leader for his
party when it had an average of only eight
seats, so he spoke in almost every debate. But
second bananas in the third biggest party
rarely are reported by news media.
Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty has just
announced Ontario will pay for an expensive
drug to treat colorectal cancer, the second
deadliest cancer in Canada, and Kormos led
the push for it.
He typically was able to dramatize his cause
by finding a constituent having to rely on
community fundraisers to pay for the drug and
keep himself alive.
Kormos led the call with Liberal Gerry
Phillips for a public inquiry into the fatal
shooting by police of a Native demonstrator at
Ipperwash Provincial Park in 1995 that a
decade later showed a Progressive
Conservative government demanded police act
and produced new guidelines for avoiding
such conflicts.
When former Conservative minister John
Snobelen escaped leniently with an absolute
discharge for carelessly storing a restricted
weapon, so he could continue jaunts to the
United States, Kormos was the only MPP who
broke the legislature’s clubby atmosphere and
criticized the judge.
The Liberals and Conservatives properly
expressed concern on International Human
Rights Day that rights were being violated in
Zimbabwe, but Kormos reminded that Ontario
forbids farm workers forming a union, an issue
on which there are pros and cons, but does not
get much debate.
Kormos spoke in technicolor castigating
McGuinty for failing to prevent lottery ticket
retailers cheating buyers: “Back when I was a
kid living in the south end (of Welland), Nick
Penkov ran his craps game upstairs at Bill’s
Pool Hall on Saturday night.
All the Niagara Falls guys came in and they
had names like Joe Mountain and names like
that. Thousands of dollars passed the table
and, let me tell you, every single bettor got
paid off when they won.
Nick ran a straight game and everybody
knew it. That’s why guys were prepared to bet
Nick’s games upstairs at Bill’s Pool Hall.
The pool hall’s gone now. Nick’s gone too. I
was a pallbearer at his funeral.”
This is a little livelier than the yarns other
MPPs tell of high times at the Rotary and
Kinsmen’s clubs.
But Kormos in his early days at the
legislature was somewhat wild with invective,
accusing two surprised businessmen appearing
before a legislature committee of being slime
and lying like rugs.
Kormos got in Premier Bob Rae’s cabinet,
but was soon out for posing as a newspaper’s
Sunshine Boy, which may have seemed
harmless but boosted a feature many felt
normally demeaned women, and for hiring an
aide convicted of wife-beating, whom he
hoped to rehabilitate.
Kormos got back at Rae, pointing out he
reneged on promises to set up public auto
insurance and ban Sunday shopping and
muzzled his own and opposition MPPs by
changing legislature rules.
In a leadership campaign to succeed Rae,
Kormos made his main theme an attack on Rae
for re-writing public servants’ sacred
collective agreements to save money, but
could not win much support.
Kormos has since undergone a remarkable
transformation and been almost a statesman.
But a party would be wary of choosing a
leader who once showed such tendencies to
turn on its establishment.
Kormos seems resigned to this and told this
writer recently that politicians can’t do their
own thing as leader and have to choose where
they are most effective – and Kormos doing
his own thing is something the legislature
should not lose.
Eric
Dowd
FFrroomm
QQuueeeenn’’ss PPaarrkk
There is an odd, but perfectly wonderful,
little ritual I perform during the summer
months. It happens on the days when the
sun is shining overhead and the birds beckon me
outdoors.
Despite its regularity it has become an almost
unconscious diversion. Barefoot I move off the
deck, delighting in the earthy lushness of the
grass against my skin. My trek takes me first to
the new flowerbed to see how last fall’s
plantings are coming. I touch, I count, I look,
then feeling satisfied, by what specifically I
can’t really say, I turn towards my lavender.
It is here where actions that may seem
peculiar to others begin. I run my fingers
through this fragrant herb, then cup them to my
nose deeply inhaling the residual gentle aroma.
I will do this several times before moving to
some of its pungent cousins, lemon thyme and
rosemary, where I follow the same steps,
enjoying the mingling of scents, and the
resultant effect. I feel my mind relax, my cares,
if not banished, then at least soothed to a quieter
rhythm.
And think... there’s still a bit of the hippy in
this old girl.
Then, the other evening, like a bolt out of the
blue sky, another thought tagged its way onto
the end of that... just like my grandmothers. It
came to me so clearly that I’m surprised it took
so long to see it this way, that all the good things
in the late 1960s and early 1970s had been
represented in that generation of women.
Clearly the subculture of free sex and drugs
was not indicative of the kind of life these tight-
laced ladies followed, but there was a
communal feel to their existence. The close-knit
community of church and family was home.
They had respect for Mother Earth, cared for
her and enjoyed the benefits of the partnership
they had with her. They planted seeds and grew
wholesome food for their loved ones and for
their own well-being. They planted seeds and
grew beauty, flowers to appreciate and adorn
nature.
They were nurturers, non-materialistic,
content in an uncomplicated life, rarely taking
more than they needed, giving back in ways
they could. They managed most of their lives
without modern conveniences.
The next generation found an easier
approach. They welcomed television and the
dinners to go with them. Packaged foods
became popular for convenience sake. The need
to spend hours in the garden planting and
picking went away, as did the need to preserve
the bounty with steamy hours in the kitchen.
They began to embrace a materialistic
lifestyle far removed from the ones their parents
had.
Certainly I, and my peers benefitted from
that. We grew up with advantages our
grandparents only enjoyed late in life.
And I’m not so foolish as to say I wasn’t
grateful to have them. Nor am I so foolish,
however, as to not admit there were many things
my grandparents had right. Unencumbered by
the trappings of modern life, they were able to
appreciate the things that were truly important
in the world. There was always a minute in a
busy day to be, to watch fish in a pond with your
granddaughter’s hand in yours, or stroll through
an abundant garden, the heady fragrances of
peonies and roses surrounding you.
They may have lived by a strict moral code,
they never kicked off their shoes to run barefoot
in the grass, but my grandmothers... well, I’ve
come to see there was definitely a bit of the
hippy in those old girls too.
Best performer not running
A positive attitude may not solve all your
problems, but it will annoy enough people
to make it worth the effort.
– Herm Albright
Final Thought