Is Mother Nature Telling Us Something?

A Brief Commentary by Niagara At Large reporter and publisher Doug Draper

Posted April 21^st, 2021 on Niagara At Large

If you live almost anywhere in Southern Ontario or West New York, you likely woke up this April 21^st to something like this.

This is my backyard patio area in Niagara. Want to come over for a barbecue?

Photo by Doug Draper. Taken April 21st, 2021.

It’s almost the last week of April, for God’s sake. The daffodils and tulips are out. Garden Centres in our area have been getting ready to bring in geraniums and other plants for spring planting.

And yet here we are, a little more than a week away from the first day of May, and in a matter of a few hours we have winter wonderland out there.

Is Mother Nature trying, once again, to tell us something?

A few of the tulips I could still find in the garden. The daffodils are now much harder to track down. Photo by Doug Draper

This Thursday, April 22^nd will mark the 51^st anniversary of the first Earth Day and I still have a book I purchased for the inauguration of that day, put together by an environmental group called Friends of the Earth that contains numerous articles written by scientists from all over the world.

At least a few of the articles already warm about what has become one of the existential crisis of our time, climate change, and they predicted at the time – and this was a whole 51 years ago – that if we continue burning huge amounts of fossil fuels and belching carbon gases into the atmosphere, we can look forward to an increasing frequency of weird, strange and severe weather conditions.

So we are getting a greater frequency of highly dangerous and damaging floods, wind storms, wildfires, and we are getting more strange weather, like snow in late April.

Inspite of the obvious evidence that we have a serious escalating emergency here with our weather, there are still individuals and groups that think this is all a hoax or at least not threatening enough to the health of our planet and to our economies to act on in any decisive ways.

At least two of these deniers have got to be Doug Ford and federal Conservative leader Erin O’Toole.

Two of those climate denying groups in Canada are the current Conservative Government of Ontario and the federal Conservative Party – both of which have no further relevance in a post-pandemic 21^st century where we have no choice but to take climate change seriously

In the meantime, since I woke up this April 21^st, I have been having trouble getting songs like ‘Winter Wonderland’ and ‘Frosty the Snowman’ out of my hand.

I would much rather listen to an old Beach Boys album.

• Doug Draper, Niagara At Large

  

  The winter wonderland that is the front of my family home, this April 21st, 2021. Photo by Doug Draper

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