We’re changing the world

Perhaps it would be easier if I were more devotional — if I had a more clearly defined religion or belief. Perhaps if I did, the world wouldn’t seem so much like it was always balanced on some knife-edge of chance.

Coming down through the clouds over Winnipeg in a driving rainstorm, and there’s that sudden moment where you cross over from the darkening clouds above and into the sheets of rain below — so much rain that it runs sideways across your windows as the plane still rushes forwards, rivulets as wide as your fingertip, clear water distorting the ground below.

And this year, the ground is even more distorted than one rainstorm could provide: the plane curves down over the squares and rectangles of fields, some planted, some bare soil, and everywhere there is standing water — in some fields, one whole corner is flooded, as if the ground had been tilted to try and let the water run away. In others, there are spots where the standing water has rejuvenated hidden swales, as if discovering ponds that had been hidden there in plain sight.

The rivers are silt-brown and full, and even though they still wind in their oxbows and step-over bends, you can see that they are overfull and up into the trees on both sides, faster than usual and only hiding behind the ordinary flow of their pretend leisurely courses.

It’s clear that there’s a lot of ground that is not going to be harvested this year — there’s plenty that carries the suspicion that it was never once dry enough this year to plant.

Things like that always make me wonder about the “what-ifs” of the world we live in — what if the rains didn’t move on and drying sun didn’t follow? What if water fell in bands on the Earth and fell there constantly? What if the oceans became too salty or too acidic for barnacles and mussels? What if ice sank instead of floating? What if the change in the Earth’s surface temperature, as slight as it is, had a significant tipping point that we were far closer to reaching than we realize?

Sure, it would be nicer if there was a grand plan, if this entire place was the result of some natural design rather than the haphazard workings of chance and adaptation.

But believing in that grand plan has some inherent dangers, not the least of them being the complacency of the powerless. In some larger plan, we just become cogs — and cogs have no real purpose beyond turning their appointed turn. Click forward one small gear-tooth with every day, because that’s the role you’re expected to fill, and your motion, in whatever direction, is merely what it’s meant to be.

Maybe I’m engaged in some form of organic proselytizing, chanting “the end is nigh” like a variety of fatalists have since the Middle Ages.

But the truth is, I’m not really saying it’s nigh. If we’re all cogs, each turn and result has its desired effect, its planned purpose — if, instead, we’re part of the great happenstance, every single thing we do has the ability, perhaps the distant possibility, of fundamentally changing the way things work.

If that’s the case, we’d better be careful where we put our feet, especially if they’re big feet. And the human race has probably the biggest feet that any earthly species has ever had.

I suppose it would be far simpler to believe that we are meant to be here, and that this place was meant for us. But I don’t think so. We might not have a duty of care — but we do have a duty to be careful.

Because we probably don’t know anywhere as much as we believe we do. There are interesting things afoot in the world: structural changes in our oceans and increases in acidity that really do threaten the scores of species that build

carbonate shells (you can’t count the number of organisms that includes), distinct changes in the patterns of existence of the wet skin breathers, the amphibians, and the growth of blue-green freshwater algaes, just to name a few.

If you choose not to see any of them, it might well be like burying your head in the sand for a little imaginary security.

Rain stopping wheat outside Winnipeg this year, high temperatures and drought having the opposite effect in Russia.

Pause for thought.

No, really: I mean it. Pause, and give it some serious thought.

Russell Wangersky is The Telegram’s editorial page editor. He can be reached by e-mail at rwanger@thetelegram.com.