As a teenager growing up in Ontario, I always envied the kids who spent their summers tree planting; they’d come back from the bush in September, insect-chewed and leathery, with new muscle, incredible stories, thousands of dollars, and a glow imparted by the knowledge that they’d made a new forest with their own blistered hands.
I was too unathletic to follow them into the bush, but I spent my summers doing my bit, ringing doorbells for Greenpeace to get my neighbours fired up about the Canadian pulp-and-paper industry, which wasn’t merely clear-cutting our old-growth forests – it was also poisoning the Great Lakes system with PCBs, threatening us all.
At the time, I thought of tree-planting as a small victory – sure, our homegrown, rapacious, extractive industry was able to pollute with impunity, but at least the government had reined them in on forests, forcing them to pay my pals to spend their summers replacing the forests they’d fed into their mills.
I was wrong. Last summer’s Canadian wildfires blanketed the whole east coast and midwest in choking smoke as millions of trees burned and millions of tons of CO2 were sent into the atmosphere. Those wildfires weren’t just an effect of the climate emergency: they were made far worse by all those trees planted by my pals in the eighties and nineties.
Writing in the New York Times, novelist Claire Cameron describes her own teen years working in the bush, planting row after row of black spruces, precisely spaced at six-foot intervals:
Cameron’s summer job was funded by the logging industry, whose self-pegulated, self-assigned “penalty” for clearcutting diverse forests of spruce, pine and aspen was to pay teenagers to create a tree farm, at nine cents per sapling (minus camp costs).
Black spruces are made to burn, filled with flammable sap and equipped with resin-filled cones that rely on fire, only opening and dropping seeds when they’re heated. They’re so flammable that firefighters call them “gas on a stick.”
A 16th century German ‘oath skull’ (a human skull on which defendants swore their oath in Vehmic courts) engraved with the 'magical’ Roman 'Sator square’, mysterious palindromic word-squares found across the Roman world, comprising the words SATOR, AREPO, TENET, OPERA, ROTAS
I have to like. titrate how often I watch NJB videos bc the stuff he talks about makes me SO ANGY and then I have to go outside and DEAL with the stuff he’s talkin about on a regular basis and I just combust into a ball of rage. but one thing that is comforting is that he seems to be just as furious especially since he also has to deal with asshats in his comments who have no listening comprehension or ability to think outside their own consumerism-addled brains
anyway fuck these stupid ass fucking trucks ✌🏿
If you are curious about why so much is bad/broken in North American Cities, NOT JUST BIKES will open your eyes.
We have been so indoctrinated by more than a century of car culture, it never occurs to most of us that there is anything wrong with designing the places we live to accommodate vehicles rather than people.
And considering that many of the government policies that contribute to these NA urban problems were due to deliberate policy? I mean who would deliberately set out to make our world worse just to make money? As it turns out: an awful lot of people.
The very idea that vehicle manufacturers would build these stupid trucks that are not just more dangerous for the people outside them (as the thumbnail image demonstrates drivers literally can’t see children, animals, people in wheelchairs right in front of them) but more dangerous to the people inside them ON PURPOSE is mind boggling. But they do because they can make more money and avoid regulations.
Please watch the video; this is something everyone needs to see.
I wrote this as an introduction to a book, by Giorgia Grilli, about Mary Poppins. Currently I have a small son who is determined to go up the chimney, like Bert, and is determinedly trying to get into every fireplace and up every chimney he passes. It seemed like a good time to put this piece of writing back out into the world.
I encountered Mary Poppins, as so many of my generation, and those that followed it did, through the film; but I saw the film as a very small boy, and it stayed in my head as a jumble of scenes, leaving behind mostly a few songs and a vague memory of Mr Banks as a figure of terror. I knew I had enjoyed it, but the details were lost to me. Thus I was delighted to find, as a five or six year old, a Puffin paperback edition of Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers, with a picture of pretty Julie Andrews flying her umbrella on the cover. The book I read was utterly wrong – this was not the Mary Poppins I remembered – and utterly, entirely right.
Not until I read Giorgia Grilli’s book on Mary Poppins did I understand why this was. I am not sure that I had given it any thought previously – Travers’ Mary Poppins was a natural phenomenon, ancient as mountain ranges, on first-name terms with the primal powers of the universe, adored and respected by everything that saw the world as it was. And she was a mystery. Mary Poppins defies explanation, and so it is to Professor Grilli’s credit that her explanation of and insight into the Banks family’s nanny does nothing to diminish the mystery, or to lessen Mary Poppins’ appeal.
The patterns of the first three Mary Poppins books are as inflexible as those of a Noh play: she arrives, brings order to chaos, sets the world to rights, takes the Banks children places, tells them a story, rescues them from themselves, brings magic to Cherry Tree Lane, and then, when the time is right, she leaves.
I do not ever remember wishing that Mary Poppins was my nanny. She would have had no patience with a dreamy child who only wanted to be left alone to read. I did not even wish that I was one of the Banks children, at the Circus of the Sun or having tea on the ceiling, and perhaps that was because, unlike many other children in literature, they did not feel permanent. They would grow, Jane and Michael, and soon they would no longer need a nanny, and soon after that they would have children of their own.
No, I did not want her for my nanny and I was glad the Banks family, not mine, had to cope with her, but still, I inhaled the lessons of Mary Poppins with the air of my childhood. I was certain that, on some fundamental level, they were true, beneath truth. When my youngest daughter was born I took the older two aside and read them the story of the arrival of the New One. Philosophically, I suspect now, the universe of Mary Poppins underpins all my writing – but this I did not know before I read Professor Grilli’s work.
It would not be overstating the case to suggest that Professor Grilli is the most perceptive academic I have so far encountered in the field of children’s literature, and I have encountered many of the breed. She understands its magic and she is capable of examining and describing it without killing it in the process. Too many critics of children’s literature can only explain it as a dead thing in a jar. Professor Grilli is a naturalist, and a remarkable one, an observer who understands what she observes. We are fortunate to have her, and we should appreciate her while she is here, before she too walks through a door that is not there, or before the wind blows her away.
As I get older I’m starting to let go of the guilty urge to build permanent habits. Like, a while ago I decided I would start jumping rope every day. I did it for like three weeks and felt good about it. Then I got bored, because of course I did, because I’m a human person. So now I do a bit of kickboxing because that’s what I like now. The other week I cut all sugar from my diet, just for a week, to challenge myself. Now I’m back to eating sweets but I don’t crave them as much.
Growth is about stretching, trying new things, and setting small, realistic goals for yourself, not picking a “good habit” you’ve decided you will be doing always and forever from now on. That’s not discipline. That’s pointless self-torture and unhealthy resistance to change.
What’s good for you today will not necessarily be what’s good for you tomorrow.
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