Eco-Anxiety and Eco-Assurance

 

                                                                Barred Owl -- David McNight 

                                         (apologies to David for my lousy photo of his excellent photo!)

On the weekend family members who live in Southwestern Ontario were in this part of the province when they received word from a watchful neighbour that their basement had been flooded after a torrential downpour. Their street had been turned into a river, a rain event unlike any other during more than 30 years at that location.

On Tuesday a series of storms advanced on Toronto rendering the Don Valley Parkway, a major traffic artery, into a lake and knocking out power across the city. Here in Belleville we got a Severe Thunderstorm Warning followed by a Tornado Warning. Thankfully, neither arrived, although we had lots of rain. 

There is now a term that we would never have considered or comprehended 25 years ago -- eco-anxiety. This is the ongoing uneasiness and even distress about weather, particularly castastrophic events related to climate change. We are witnessing the predictions about destructive weather coming to pass, years before what had been projected.

We watched the weather apps diligently on Tuesday, our vehicle packed with camping gear and the canoe on the roof. We were scheduled to paddle in to an island at the Depot Lakes Conservation Area that afternoon but had no intention of going in the rain. Happily, the weather system passed and we got to our site, although a few hours later than anticipated. 

We set up before going for a restorative swim and then we sat by our campfire. As we moved to retire for the night we were delighted to see fireflies throughout the trees and over the water. We have fireflies in our backyard but this was unprecedented in terms of numbers and the magical sense of their movement through the trees.

During the night we awakened to hear a barred owl, first of all in the near distance, then right above us, the closest we've ever experienced. When we quiety spoke to one another the calling stopped, no doubt because we scared it away. A short while later we heard a loon on the lake and the breeze in the pine trees. 

All this was a tonic, an antidote to my own eco-anxiety. Could this be eco-assurance, the comfort of the Creator? We can't ignore the climate emergency, the sort of whistling in the dark approach of so many governments, including that of the province of Ontario. We can be uplifted, inspired, and energizerd by the beauty around us in the natural world, or what we term Creation in our Judeo/Christian tradition. 

 For the umpteenth time I share The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry.