Making a bee-line toward a column topic

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/07/2021 (1695 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I WAS recently schooled by a honey bee.

Selecting an op-ed topic is difficult, because every day another possibility comes to mind. So, having just settled on what I was going to write next, I went outside to the garden to do some watering, mulling exactly what to say.

First, I decided not to pile on — enough other people were hammering Premier Brian Pallister and his newly-minted minister, Alan Lagimodiere, for their inane and thoughtless comments on colonization and residential schools. Lagimodiere’s Métis heritage was obviously a more important qualification for the premier than his in-depth understanding of “Indigenous reconciliation and northern relations.” (While tokenism is the first refuge of a colonizer with a guilty conscience, at least the new guy had the humility to apologize and ask for a chance to do better.)

Second, I also decided not to fume about Justin Trudeau’s callous opportunism, clearing the decks of the Liberal ship for an early and unnecessary federal election. The casualties on his watch (so far) have included Catherine McKenna, the best federal environment minister in a generation. After being demoted to cabinet responsibility for roads and potholes, by a prime minister still addicted to doing lines of pipe, she decided to work for a sustainable future elsewhere — and who can blame her? A third win in Ottawa-Centre would no doubt have qualified her to be minister for the status of women, instead.

So, I finally decided to reveal I had been a card-carrying member of the Col. Loonar Space Club from CFCN-TV in Calgary since the mid-1960s. This would set up an amusing riff on the old Muppet sketch “Pigs in Space,” to frame my reflections on billionaires Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk bloating in near-Earth orbit, while people died of drought, disease and starvation beneath their rockets’ red glare.

Space tourism has as much to do with space exploration as cruise ships have to do with ending child poverty.

But as I was thinking about what came next, as I bent down to get the watering can in the still-sweltering heat of early evening, a small honey bee landed on top, just as I reached out my hand. I’m not sure if I have ever seen a bee stagger before, but this one certainly did, reeling across the surface to reach a drop of water.

I watched it for a couple of minutes, as it collected the liquid, moving to the next drop with a steadier gait, and then — somewhat restored — as it struggled back into the air and slowly flew away.

It was humbling, even humiliating, to witness. All the things I had decided were important were dismissed in an instant, as I was reminded again of the crucial challenge of our generation — the growing planetary crisis of a changing climate — by an exhausted (but determined) honey bee.

It is far too easy to get distracted these days, by everything from COVID-19 case counts to Bill 64 education reform. It took that staggering honey bee to remind me that all these other issues won’t matter at all if we don’t take the climate crisis seriously enough to act — in immediate, strong and decisive ways.

I’m quite sure the people of Lytton, B.C., who narrowly escaped with their lives as the forest fire exploded through their town, would agree. So would the people in Barrie, Ont., part of whose town simply exploded in a tornado. So would the people in western Europe, especially Germany, where floods washed away centuries of history, as well as neighbourhoods and livelihoods.

In fact, I could offer a litany of similar examples of the havoc wreaked on people’s lives by extreme weather, long predicted as one of the outcomes of a warming world. More storms (and worse ones) rip across ocean shorelines; drought stalks other places inland, often followed by plagues of locusts. (Farmers in East Africa, for example, have a lot of misery in common with farmers in Manitoba this year.)

Our province has an over-abundance of leaders, but little real leadership on crucial ecological issues. The Progressive Conservative government no longer even tries to greenwash its ideology-driven agenda. Especially under Premier Brian Pallister’s leadership, it simply (and clearly) doesn’t care about a sustainable future. Nor do the other parties, whose opposition is mostly silent on concerns for future generations.

Unlike the instant public outcry in response to Lagimodiere’s gaffe, Sarah Guillemarde, Manitoba’s MIA environment minister, has escaped unscathed for two precious years by saying little and doing less, just the way Pallister likes it. So (for example), before much longer, northern communities will starve in the dark, as winter roads melt into environmental history, while Barry Prentice’s airships remain a dream, instead of being both an obvious alternative and a wise investment in a climate-changing world.

We dither, as the world burns. If you don’t believe that’s a problem, ask a honey bee.

Peter Denton is an activist, writer and scholar who gardens in rural Manitoba when he is not gazing at the moon.