As I slid past a thir­ty meter-high gran­ite cliff in my kayak this week, I noticed a slash of white just below a small cave-like crack in the rock. It brought to mind the proverb: “It’s an ill bird that fouls its own nest”, a typ­i­cal­ly human way to char­ac­terise fool­ish­ness by cast­ing unmer­it­ed aspersions.

The white stain is excre­ment from the osprey that lived there for sev­er­al years. Like all birds, they nev­er make a mess in their nest.

We humans, on the oth­er hand, spend as much time invent­ing and prac­tic­ing ways to foul and defile our nest — the entire plan­et — as birds spend hunt­ing for food, which, if the screech­ing sound I kept hear­ing was a hun­gry chick, entails pret­ty much every wak­ing hour.
It was hid­den in the trees high­er up. Osprey build, expand and relo­cate nest­ing sites to suit their needs.
Human needs seem to be ruled by greed and stu­pid­i­ty. Accord­ing to a recent Pew Research Cen­ter sur­vey, 69% of U.S. adults “pri­or­i­tize devel­op­ing alter­na­tive ener­gy sources, such as wind and solar, over expand­ing the pro­duc­tion of oil, coal and nat­ur­al gas.”
A new analy­sis has dis­closed that the oil and gas indus­try has deliv­ered $2.5bn (£2.3bn) a day in prof­it for the past 50 years. Nev­er­the­less, accord­ing to the Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund, the fos­sil fuel pro­duc­ers ben­e­fit from $16bn in sub­si­dies a day.
We’re in effect pay­ing them not to do any­thing about one of the major caus­es of glob­al warm­ing. That they get away with it is, to para­phrase Jim­my Buffet’s “Mar­gar­i­taville”, “our own damned fault.”
How “foul” is that?

                                       WILLFUL SELF-INTEREST

One would have thought that the heat­waves scorch­ing much of Europe and North Amer­i­ca would con­vince even the most ardent dis­be­liev­ers that cli­mate change is real, that we all need to “do our bit” to cur­tail it. But on what was not even one of the hottest days we’ve had this week here in “cot­tage coun­try”, I saw a man sit for ten min­utes in an SUV, parked in the shade, with the win­dows up and the engine run­ning to keep the AC blast­ing while he wait­ed for someone.
Still, he was being self­ish in big-time com­pa­ny. In 2015, the Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can reported that Exxon, (now Exxon Mobil), the world’s biggest oil and gas com­pa­ny, “was aware of cli­mate change, as ear­ly as 1977, 11 years before it became a pub­lic issue.”
Today, Exxon claims it is “com­mit­ted to pro­vid­ing afford­able ener­gy to sup­port human progress while advanc­ing effec­tive solu­tions to address cli­mate change”.
The tag line of a crude say­ing from my youth sums that up per­fect­ly: “…and the cheque’s in the mail”.

                                    AND AS IF THAT ISN’T ENOUGH

One would think that if we can’t do as much as we need or would like to roll back that kind of pol­lu­tion, we could at least not cre­ate oth­er forms. I recent­ly got stuck at a traf­fic light next to a vehi­cle with a sound sys­tem so loud the bass made my car vibrate.
As much as I don’t appre­ci­ate it, I under­stand that loud music is some people’s way of escap­ing the oth­er mad­ness in the world, but what’s in your head if you can tol­er­ate that lev­el? The answer, I fear, is “very little”.

As I escape my way, try­ing to achieve metronome-like pre­ci­sion and the per­fect stroke to max­imise effort and min­imise the sound of the pad­dle blades dip­ping in and out of the water, I am aware that this glo­ri­ous­ly tran­quil cor­ner of Nature was shaped by noise.
The sound made by retreat­ing glac­i­ers, grind­ing and goug­ing myr­i­ad lakes out of some of the old­est and hard­est rock on earth must have been vio­lent. Now, in the fifty meter-deep one that I pad­dle, lake trout weigh­ing up to five kilo­grams thrive in cold, dark silence.  (FYI the Ontario record is near­ly 29 kgs).
The only crea­tures on the lake that can go that deep are loons, and they hunt much small­er fish. A pair of them are rais­ing twins this year. It’s rare for both chicks to make it so far along.

Sur­viv­ing to full adult­hood will require the kind of work on the part of their par­ents that the “ill bird” in the world must emu­late in the nest we share. On avail­able evi­dence, that’s about as like­ly as me achiev­ing the per­fect for­ward pad­dle stroke.

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