By the time you read this column, I will have already spent ten days tent camping at Algonquin Park in Central Ontario with my son and 13-year-old grandson. This is one of the most pristine and jaw-droppingly beautiful parts of this planet. I know because I camped with my family there every summer for over ten years.

In those days, before online reservations became the norm, you would drive to one of 13 or 14 individual campgrounds accessible from the single highway that runs through one corner of the park travelling some 56 kilometres gate to gate. Once at the chosen campground, we would drive around looking for empty campsites. When one was found, one of us three kids or my mum would hop out of the car and prepare to ‘repel all borders’ by sitting on the supplied picnic table. This would happen throughout the campground until we ran out of family members, which also included our springer spaniel. Once the best site was determined my Dad would drive around and fetch us if he could remember where each of us was. I don’t think we ever lost anyone for more than half-an-hour. Sometimes we had to knock on outhouse doors because it had been a long drive from Toronto.

Before we could set up the big cottage tent, Dad had us make rakes out of twigs and branches and amidst some grumbling we swept the site to collect any trash that may have been left behind. After camp was struck two or three weeks later, we all three of us kids took up our arsenal of gear and again swept the plot clean. In his words, we could always find the means to take out of the bush every single thing that we took in. That is one of those ‘fondest memories’ I have of him and how he constantly instilled in us an absolute and unequivocal love and respect for family and friends and for the natural world and the life it gives us.

One of the amazing aspects of Algonquin Park is the nature trails. One would lead you to a huge beaver dam, one to a long-since abandoned logging camp, and another would take you up a steep escarpment to look out over an incredible natural landscape or the mirror surface of a quiet lake. The smell of countless campfires from the valley below was intoxicating. On the nature hikes in those days, dogs could be let off the leash once you were a certain distance from the highway. We let our spaniel off her tether and she ran like the wind through the undergrowth. At one point as we made our way up a steep part of the path we heard a lot of commotion and crashing through the bush over the rise and several people were yelling, “Bear, bear, it’s a bear!” We immediately thought it would get the dog or us and we too ran into the bush. As it turned out there was no bear – just our black-and-white mutt nosing through the ground clutter. She was as surprised as we with the carry-on.

Once nestled safely in our sleeping bags at day’s end, we often heard the timber wolves howling in the blackness of the night. By the way their sound carried and from the chill running down our spines we swore the pack was gathering just on the other side of the tent flap.

I’m sure we all know someone, if not ourselves, who have succeeded in maximizing living as close to nature as possible. I have friends who winterized their 24 foot by 36 foot cottage located about 190 kilometres north of Toronto right on the shores of a beautiful quiet river to make a permanent home. When the couple decided to increase their living space, they lifted the entire structure ten feet in the air on house-jacks, poured an eight-inch-thick floating concrete slab below it and constructed a natural log structure under the full dimension. They dovetailed each 12 inch by 12 inch pine timber and chinked every void by hand, learning as they went along. The entire new first floor was kept cosy in even the severest winter weather by a closed wood-fired heat stove. A wood-burning fireplace did the same for what became the second level. They invested in a government-controlled wood lot not far from home, which meant their heat bill every winter was a pittance and no fossil fuels per se were burned. Solar panels provided much of the joy to the house. The other beauty is that they could cut and/or remove only naturally felled trees and ones designated as sustainable by the Ministry of Natural Resources. Most things in their home were hand-made – cupboards with stained-glass fronts, backs and sides; chairs with huge soft inviting pillows; book cases; bed frames – you get the picture. As a hobby, employing ancient methods, my friends made a birch-bark canoe. To my surprise, the damned thing actually floated and we spent many lazy hours on the river in it.

They were both Scandinavian, right down to their Siberian Husky, and I’ll not soon forget visiting in the early winter and being greeted by the scent emanating from a cauldron full of soup-fixins’ gently bubbling away on the heat stove. At some point during each day we would sweat it out in their sauna. Then, red hot skin and all we would walk out five metres to the river’s edge and plunge naked into the frigid water. What luxury!

My son has close friends who design and build houses from bales of straw, which is the waste product from wheat/grain. It is a totally renewable agricultural by-product that has a positive impact on the environment as well as farming communities. These houses require half as much timber and can be heated and cooled for 25 percent to 50 percent less than other conventional methods meaning the atmosphere doesn’t have to absorb so much fossil fuel exhaust. Unlike manufactured insulation, straw bales are natural and do not emit toxic gases that can lead to health problems. The walls actually breathe for real therefore condensation becomes negligible reducing the chance of mould forming. On top of that, straw actually has a better fire rating than foam insulation – foam will quickly burst into flames while straw simply smolders thereby allowing more time for escape and far less toxic smoke filling the space.

My son-in-law is a registered trapper with the government of Canada. He is often called in to clean up messes created by non-thinking people that overhunt or destroy the habitat of a particular animal species. This makes room for alien species to move in and totally disrupt the natural balance. He was recently sent to British Columbia for the unpleasant task of culling hundreds of exotic ducks from an area that were preventing the native ducks from re-emerging once they were declared endangered. I must say that he would rather not have to perform such tasks.

What I’m driving at is why so many people want to enjoy the very world that gives them pleasure yet continue to put nature’s head on the chopping block by contributing to, or who are loath to accept, global warming and climate change. I don’t know for sure where it comes from. All I know is that it’s here and the clock is ticking. I often think of the words of the character Andy Dufresne from the movie Shawshank Redemption – ‘are we really that obtuse?’

We seem to think there’s plenty of time to deal with problems and I’m going to finish with the words of Tom Rand, fellow Torontonian and author, climate advocate, senior advisor at the MaRS Discovery District as well as managing partner of the privately-backed $30-million MaRS CleanTech Fund. He is also the developer of Planet Traveler, a low-carbon hotel project in our fair city:

The battle to save the planet started out well enough. When U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher addressed the United Nations General Assembly in November 1989, there could not have been a much more credible advocate for strong action on climate disruption. The world seemed poised to act, and leading the charge was none other than the Iron Lady herself – champion of the free market, military hawk, and good friend of U.S. president Ronald Reagan. Fast-forward twenty years. Today, an outpouring of climate scepticism is required to establish bona fide conservative credentials. From former U.S. Governor Mitt Romney (Massachusetts) to former governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin (Alaska) and from Fox News to the American Enterprise Institute, neoconservatives have somehow positioned a scientifically illiterate denial of climate disruption into the national debate. Even when the problem is acknowledged, it’s played down as more of a nuisance than a threat. What on earth happened?¹

¹ Rand, Tom. Waking the Frog: Solutions for our Climate Change Paralysis. Toronto: ECW Press, 2014