Tag Archives: British Columbia

A letter to an MLA

Posted on by

To Ms. Lana Popham, MLA, Sanich South, BC, Canada (by email)

4v082_LanaPopham

March 11, 2013

Dear Ms. Popham

I support your opposition to GM apple and would like to add my signature to the campaign.

Science’s understanding of genetics is in its infancy. How gene tampering might ultimately work out long term is not known. How the patenting process works for this Apple, and if it could cross pollinate with other apples and how those natural apples might or might not be affected, is not known.

If at all patent should be granted for life forms, where the gene was not “invented” but simply taken from one place and put into another, is a serious question – not to mention the ethical issue of owning life forms. Apple that browns has a natural function – it is an indication that it is beginning to rot at the edges. Rotting itself is a natural process which we as humans may not like, but is nonetheless a process that involves many other cohabiting organisms. So, what is the implication of an apple that will not brown? Is it because it will hide the fact that it is rotting ? That can have serious health problems.

Could it be that this GM apple simply will not rot so easily ? Why not? Since rotting is in itself a natural process where organisms consume and proces the apple, artificial gene tampering that repels microorganisms from this apple thus prevents it from rotting, can have even more serious implications. We need to know far more than simplistic explanations of a non-browning apple before it should be allowed on an unsuspecting person’s table.

I do not know if it is possible to raise all these issues with the local Government, but it is suggested that a moratorium be placed on marketing of all Genetically modified non-processed foods such as fruits, and a restriction be imposed on any further genetic modification of processed food such as cereals till sufficient information is gathered on their long term effect on humans, on soil, on biodiversity and on sustainability.


Thanking you
Tony Mitra
10891 Cherry Lane, Delta, BC, V4E 3L7, Canada
604-649 7535
Tony.mitra@gmail.com

—————————

13th March 2013

Hi Tony,

 Thank you for this – and for the retweets and your blog post. I really appreciate your support. You ask very thoughtful questions and make a very sensible proposal at the end of your message. Great input!

 Lana

——————————————————————-

April 7th: Lana Popham, NDP Agriculture Critic, speaks in North Vancouver. Lana  introduced our petition against the GMO apple with 5500 names on it into the BC legislature in late March 2013.

Venue : Buddha-Full 106 1st St W #101, Time: 4.30-6.30 PM

For more information contact: gefreebc07@yahoo.ca
Pls try and attend if possible. Bring friends.
———————————————————————-
Small typo and grammar corrections done on the orignal letter – to clean up the language.

Quantum mechanics or mass hysteria?

Posted on by

Good things come in small doses, or don’t they ?
I was sitting at the waters edge, and thinking about it all. I do sit by the water at times. In Boundary bay, they have a few benches suitably located, facing the ocean. If the tide is low, you can see shore birds pecking at the mud and among the shells and pebbles. If the tide was in, you could see flocks of Brants or Canada Geese.
I have at times looked at the green winged teal and wondered about their lifestyle.

But that is not supposed to be the subject of this, this, this … I wonder what this is. It is a chapter in a story? Is it an essay? More likely it is one more rambling of mine, in an increasing series.
So, while good things might come in small doses, I wondered what kind of stuff I was dosing out in my blogs. It was like a mysterious double helix.
I, Tonu, was thinking about balancing out my ramblings between the novel and the diary. Could a diary-novel combination qualify as a double helix?
One one side, I had an expanding number of episodes on a blog that could loosely thread together as a basic theme of a novel or a mini series of soap opera that involves an opinionated immigrant from India in his thirties, and a young Canadian woman, Mabel Rechardsen, who is largely in awe of the man and contributes little if any individuality in the story line. Then there was the other series, a list of ramblings which were neither essays nor quite systematic in their arrangement, of my own ramblings, mostly about the state of the planet. In short, these were ramblings mostly about the state of my own mind – which was not in a state of equilibrium.
And while writing all that, I at times send out a number of mini-episodes of the basic story of Neil impressing Mabel. And then I get tired of it. Actually, I get more frustrated that tired, to be truthful. And the frustration comes from a lack of strong conviction on how that story should end, or if indeed it should ever end. From one point of view, considering the history of this universe, or the solar system, or this planet, or even the story of life on it, from what little we know, it is almost a never ending story that advances in small increments.
But, I am only writing a story. A written story cannot be compared with to the  story of the existence of the universe., or can it? In the greater scheme of things, is the universe, and the story that Tonu writes, are in essence comparable. If the universe as we know it had a beginning, or a birth, and if it is going to have an ending, or a death, then should the story too have a birth and a death. Come to think of it, one can hesitate to use terms like birth of a universe. Even today, scientists are arguing about the big bang and if that was a one time affair, or cyclical. They cannot likely agree on if the universe is going to expand forever and end into nothingness, or if it will run out of steam of expansion, and eventually begin to contract and end up into a an infinitesimally small vanishing point of nothingness. Either way, whether it vanishes into an expanded oblivion or a contracted one, is the whole story only a one-time one, or is it cyclically to be repeated ad infinitum?
If we are to believe the hindu philosophy, then we can bring in the art form of dancing into it, and get the God of dances, Nataraja, perform his dance or creation, and then, when the universe is bubbling over with creative energy, he may tire of it and change it to a dance of destruction, only to reverse back again. It involves a lot of dancing, but, the side effect is, we get a lot of creation and destruction.
We have seen through nature as be understand it on the planet earth, there is cyclical creation and destruction. Once season often wipes out changes brought forward in the previous season, but only to lay the groundwork for more changes to come as a result. We have seen rivers destroy the land on one bank and create more land on the other.

So, creation and destructions at one level are flip sides of a same coin. One cannot have creation, unless there is also some destruction. This is self evident when it comes to many things that are finite. Land may not be created indefinitely, and can only be balanced by land disappearing elsewhere. Oceans cannot rise or fall indefinitely, without a corresponding amount of water being locked, or released from land bound icecaps and glaciers.
But, how about a story?
Tonu was not Nataraj. In fact, I have no training or knowledge of the kind of dance Nataraja might have engaged in. Anycase, he had multiple hands, if I remember right. That could well be untrue and an expression of an over-exuberant devotee of the past that decided to add limbs to the god while creating an image of his dance of creation-destruction.
The last time I had any kind of training in dancing, was at the age of sixteen. I was in college in Bombay and we had a college social coming up. I was a newbie from Bengal, but wanted to come up equal to the local boys. To do that, I had to accomplish two things. The first was to have a girl come to the party in the college. The second was to take her up to the dance floor and dance with her, as well as be allowed to dance with others in exchange.
The college seniors thought, correctly, that many of the students from out of town would not be able to get a girl to come, and that this would overly skew the male-female ratio and cause a mad scramble of too many males trying to dance with too few females. Therefore, those male students that had a girl partner, were to sit segregated from those without a partner. The unattached males were not allowed to come to the dance floor, and could only watch the proceedings, or move on for the dinner or coffee or chit chat.


And so, I had decided, newbie or not, from the other end of India or not, I was not going to be sitting out and looking in. I had solved the first problem by asking my uncle, who lived in Bombay and was a journalist, to help me find a suitable girl. As it happened, it was the aunt that helped out.
But then there was the second issue. The girl in question, the daughter of my aunts friend, new how to dance, for sure. But I did not. And I had only two weeks to learn. There were some dance schools, but there wasn’t enough time, and I did not have enough money in my pocket, for a crash course.
And so, I solved in another way. When I asked the girl to come to the social, I told her I did not know how to dance and needed some training. I was hoping that she might teach me. But she thought her mother is a much better teacher. And thus, for two weeks, I went to her house every evening, and my aunts friend, the mother of the girl, taught me how to do fox-trot, waltz and cha cha cha – only to the extent an opinionated Bengali boy of sixteen could pick up in two weeks.
I don’t even know why I wrote all this – except to impress upon any chance reader, that there is no way in hell my dancing should be considered even remotely comparable to what the god of dance, Nataraja might be doing up in the cosmos somewhere. And to make things more complex, I do not really believe in creationism or of existence of a god as described in various institutionalized religions. Come to think of it, I am not even sure if Hinduism qualifies as an institutionalized religion. Instead of being an organized religion with a hierarchy and a line of control, Hinduism often appears like a loosely defined description of human behavior that is halfway between mass hysteria and quantum mechanics. And I can live with quantum mechanics, though I can do without mass hysteria.
See, this is one of the basic issues of my writings. I end up occupying four or five pages of text without actually saying anything – not a damned thing.
There is absolutely no good reason to compare me with Nataraja. He does not exist, and I do, at least according to Tonu. Besides, he has many hands and I type with just two. He knows how to dance, while I barely managed to get a girl in the college social in my first year, in Bombay.
And my story of Neil has not moved much, even if the characters in the story have covered a lot of ground, both in time and space. As far as time goes, I think they went back more than five hundred million years. As to space, they had driven close to a thousand kilometers east from Vancouver, and had spent some time in the Yoho and the Kootenay national parts on the Rocky mountains.
But, when it comes to proceeding according to plan, the characters were doing better than the writer. I was moving them around without any definite plan, and was just enjoying the ever evolving chapters.
Was Nataraj doing whatever he did, for the same reason – joy of bringing change in an otherwise unchanging and boring existence ? Hmm, whether he was real or not, he might have had something there. Or rather, the fertile minds that created Nataraja, had really something there. I wish I could .. Well, here I go rambling again.
I had thought of writing a lot of stuff, inside or outside of the story. There was this disenchantment with the middle class mindset. More I thought of it, more I got convinced that the ills of the world were either because the middle class brought in on, or because the middle class did not stop it. Either way, in my eyes, the buck stops at the feet of the middle class. It is not the politicians who are to be blamed. It is not the corporate raiders, or the mafia, or the dictatorial goons or the war mongering governments. It is the middle class, the only entity that is powerful enough to bring change, that is responsible for all the shit that is happening everywhere.
And what makes it worse, is that I am part of that middle class. This is where things could begin to get bad, and I try to grasp at the spring grass at the ledge, to prevent sliding into the slippery slope of self loathing. Is there a way to mix all that with the mass hysteria on one side, and quantum mechanics of the other ?
That got me to thinking. Recently, I met an interesting young man that was doing post-doctoral work at the University of British Columbia and his subject was, simply, condensation. No, it is not quite the kind of condensation that results in dew drops forming on blades of grass on a cool morning, pleasing as the sight may be. And it is not the kind of droplets that you sometimes will find on the windscreen of your vehicle, to be swept away quickly by the wiper.
It has something to do with the state of matter at near absolute zero level of energy, or temperature. Bose and Einstein wrote about it way back in the early parts of last century. Some folks even coined a new term – God particle, as something vaguely related to it. Incidentally, no machine has so far been invented by man that could capture god and prove to us of his existence. There is some sort of a machine built recently in Europe which is supposed to do many things, including prove the presence of the god particle. But so far, God is proving to be elusive, either whole or in particle.
And so, six pages into this episode, I am still contemplating if I should be writing a piece of my rambling on anything at all, or just about mass hysteria or quantum mechanics. Meanwhile, what about that young man I met, who is researching condensation ? Well, at this point of time, I shall hazard a guess that, the young man most certainly displays signs of being alive and talking, Schrodinger’s cat Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle notwithstanding. There may be a time and place, along with a set of conditions, where the young man might be perceived as both dead and alive at the same time, and the uncertainty may never be properly resolved, but I am not in that time and place and have not agreed to those conditions as yet.
So then, what happens to my story, and about my rambling? Can the story and the ramble merge and overlap and be present and not present the same time? Can the story be of Neil the young immigrant and of Tonu the opinionated writer at the same time? Can I avoid the mass hysteria and alternate between multiple realities of a quantum writer? Could I, for example dance both Foxtrot and Waltz the same time, but only as perceived by two different persons. To one I was dancing, badly, a waltz, and to the other, who might have actually been ogling my six year old date, I was dancing foxtrot, also badly?
I had thought of writing about the story of organising a Vancouver chapter for Association for India’s Development, or AID. It has been a subject of some conviction for me for some years now. But instead, I ended up writing of a hypothetical cat that might have been both dead and alive the same time, as presented as a thought experiment by Erwin Schrodinger a few years after getting the Nobel prize in Physics in the 1930s.
If this was not yet the time for writing about an AID chapter for Vancouver, perhaps I could talk about Ms Loretta Napoleoni’s book on Rogue economics, and discuss how alarming the situation was regarding nasty people with the help of bad money getting into good institutions and thus turning the lives of normal people on their head. I was going to analyze what one even means by normal people.
I do not know if Napoleoni had Italian ancestry, or if the name had other roots. For that matter, I had also read a book named “Bad money”, by Kevin Philips. For all you know, any idiom or expression I use here, might turn out to be the name of a legitimate book by someone, somewhere, unless I was thinking of writing a book with name such as “I sat on the head of Nebuchadnezzar”. But then I did not sit on his head, or anybody else’s and do not have a good idea about the Biblical man. I don’t even know if he wore a turban or not, and if it was at all practical to conceive about sitting on his head. And finally, who knows, perhaps some nut case had already written a book about sitting even on that man’s head. You can never tell.
Leaving Nebuchadnezzar on his Biblical throne, I could move sideways to the world of genetic evolution and the writings of Dawkins – such as The Selfish Gene. But, as soon as you mention the world Selfish, the first image that seems to come to me is that of the middle class. Could there be such a thing as the Middle class gene ?
There should be, don’t you think ?
ON that thought, I decided to get up from the bench by the water, and head home.
Tide was in.

A vanishing world

Posted on by

They were the only travelers on the mountain road, as far as he could see ahead or behind. The road climbed, turned, and snaked in between towering hills, and then sloped down and would at times upon up to valleys and lakes. The sky remained partially clear and bright. Temperature continued to drop. Snow piled up on the side of roads as well as on the hills. The mountain peaks were white.

He thought about writing, about his travels, about the mountains, the lakes, the birds. He could write about Mabel. He didn’t know if his writing was any good. He thought about what and how, he might write.
Someone had made an interesting comment, on a social network that he visited at times, about writers. It stated that the writer needs to feel disappointed. He needs to experience a deeply unsatisfactory situation where he found no recourse at hand.
Only then, may he create good literature.
He had read similar comments elsewhere too. It was a somewhat known idea – that human suffering is the main source of creative zeal.
He did not feel that certain. Perhaps frustration can create a mental state that helps write certain kind of literature. He had also heard the same thing about painters. IT was perhaps a convenient way to explain why and how so many painters and writers were poor and hungry in their own lifetime, but end us getting famous posthumously.
He doubted, however, that this kind of depression was mandatory for all creative artists of all kinds.
He did not know enough about his brain. He doubted anybody else knew either. But the human brain was behind most things a human does, including creating something silly, or beautiful. In fact, even the definition of what should be silly and what beautiful can be argued. In fact, they are often argued. There are many that consider the cubism of Picasso, as silly rather than outstanding. Out of politeness, they would not say so to others.
Sometimes, a handful of folks would try to create a heightened appreciation of certain kind of creative art, not necessarily driven by altruistic motives, but to create a ‘fad’ or a fashion. The motive is to see high demand for that kind of products, so that the promoter can make money by selling those stuff at a high cost.
He did not consider himself to be a famous art critic, or one that claimed to know too much. But he would not pay his own good money, to acquire a Picasso – even a reprint, to be hanged on his walls.
On the other hand, he was biased towards liking the kind of painting his father did in his formative years, often using subdued earth tones, recording simple rural scenes of the arid country of Birbhum district of Bengal. Those scenes spoke to him not just of art – but of a vanishing world that might not return again. Physically, those scenes were fading away, as progress and modernization turned the landscape. That landscape was etched in his mind, as a dirt road lead them towards distant quiet small agricultural plots lined by date and palm trees, and mud-walled thatched roof village dwelling surrounded by heavier leafy trees like Mango, Bombax ceiba, Breadfruit, Rose apple and the like.

He remembered walking through the low land on the dirt road packed with hard soil and lined with the gravels stones, where he could see the distant villages, while on both sides there were first the landscape of soil eroded by running water, exposing semi arid fallow lands that the locals called “Khoai”, with its signature red earth and small irregular shaped red gravel stones covering a hard undulating soil surface. There would be palm trees here and there, and an occasional man made pond with high earth embankments on all four sides, the embankments themselves augmented by a line of palm trees.
Palm trees lining the high banks of a pond was a common feature of the land.
But today, the road was of asphalt, and the sides had a continuous stream of brick and mortar shops and houses. The area had turned into a small crowded suburb full of noise, filth and trash. The air stank of fumes from the exhaust of countless two wheelers and small trucks and cars that continuously moved about, each trying to out-honk the other in an effort to terrorize foot walkers off the road.
He did not wish to go that rout any more. He did not care about that kind of development.
However, he still doubted that one needs to see such degradation of pristine beauty before one can be coaxed to create good art or writing. His father saw the original beauty in his early years and did create what he considered one of the best arts that he liked. He was fortunate enough to have many of them hang off his walls.
A generation down the line, he himself had witnessed the degrading transformation of that landscape. But he was not creating any art out of it. That was not wholly because he could not create art. He refused to believe conventional wisdom, that art is to be evaluated by third party experts before it can influence him. He was not part of the positive feedback generation and did not intend to tread on the positive feedback loop. He had already mentioned in earlier in his musings.
Looking around, he found a similarity, however much different they might seem to a casual observer, between the khoai that his father had painted in his youth, and the high slops of the Cascade mountains around him in the middle of British Columbia. Both were, to him pristine. He knew this was relative. Man had altered the land of his fathers youth a long time ago, but particularly after the place began to grow with an eradication of dacoits and a rise of settlements.
He knew that the landscape around him once had the last generation of virgin forests, with conifers so large that their trunk were as thick as two tall men lying head to toe could not cover. Trees that could have been a thousand year old, even two thousand. All that, and the kind of biodiversity that kind of a forest supported, was gone forever. In its place, were trees that were tiny, and barely fifty to eighty year old. Slow growing, these new trees where called the second, and third generation forests, continuously felled to feed human need for lumber.
He was aware of it and conscious of it. And yet, it was still better than the landscape converted into a manicured golf course fenced off to prevent wild animals, or not so wild humans, from encroaching.
He did not like man made clearings where townships are planned to come up. Even if they are planned and designed better than the way they came up back in Birbhum district in Bengal, they would still be an eyesore to him. A manicured and pedicured one, sure, but none the less an eyesore. Nothing man could conceivably create, could equal what nature did, naturally. That is how he saw it.
He came to realize that he himself belonged to the tribe that was the principal agent of destruction of nature.
That could be a source of major depression.
He thought about it, but did not feel depressed per se. Sad, yes, but perhaps resigned to the fact that evolution could work that way, enhancing a winning trait in a species to an extreme when the trait represented too much of a good thing, and began to have a snowballing effect of a destructive positive feedback loop. Things go out of control and out of hand in a big way, resulting in a crash.
In the past, such events might have caused mega – extinctions. The reason might or might not have been the works of a single species of animal, or even multiple groups of living creatures. It could have been triggered by external unanticipated events.
But one way or another, change in circumstances have happened that the highly specialized creatures were no longer able to deal with. Thus, whole swaths of creatures die out in sudden mass extinctions, leaving the field open for the survivors to occupy and expand, carrying a different set of traits.

He thought he might write about these feelings, along with the views he was enjoying, of the drive through the Cascade mountains and its third generation conifer forests.
“where are we ?” Mabel opened her eyes and asked, as he swerved the car to avoid a dark patch on the asphalt.

“Thats the Coldwater river on our right. We are going down to the Nicola Valley and the town of Merritt.” He said and reached out to caress her cheek.

A cryptic message

Posted on by

On his way to office, Neil’s phone peeped, indicating that he had a message. Since he was driving, he did not look at it, but wondered if it might be from Mabel. He was planning to go on a four day trip into the southern Rockies, and had invited Mabel to join him. But she was not sure if she could get away on Friday.
Neil would not read messages while driving. He decided to wait till he was stopped at a traffic light.
He looked out at the white speckles in the sky to his left that he had noticed through his peripheral vision. They were snow geese – lots of them. As he looked, they flew in to land on the agricultural field at the side of the highway. Snow geese had been a part of Neil’s life ever since he came to the pacific coast of British Columbia. At certain times, their numbers grew as more of the migratory birds arrive from Siberia. Some would then stay back, while the bulk would move on south across the border and fan out into the United States. IN the summer, they would fly back to Siberia. But some of them came in the winter to settle around the Fraser valley and go no further.
Neil guessed it would soon be time for them to return home to their summer grounds to raise chicks. Soon, he would not be seeing any more of them.

Snow geese landing on a field in Delta, BC

He took an exit at Knight’s street and eventually came to a traffic light inside the city of Vancouver.
He remembered to check the message on his phone. It was from Mabel. The message was : HI 6TH OK CALL ME
The text vaguely reminded Neil of the old days when telegrams had to be abbreviated into cryptic sentences to pass important news to far off relatives. He had seen a lot of old telegrams that his parents received, all kept in a box. Most where typed on a thin strip of paper, which then were glued on a telegram form that was printed on pinkish paper. It contained such cryptic messages – announcing births, deaths, marriages, safe arrivals and other events of relatives and friends.
Neil had no trouble deciphering this message though. Since he had Mabel on his telephone’s list of contacts, the message already identified itself to have originated from her. His phone clubbed such messages going back and forth between him and Mabel on a single thread, which made reading through both practical, and interesting.
They were heading into a long Easter Weekend. IT comprised for for continuous holidays from Friday, the 6th of April through to Monday, the 9th.
Neil had been planning to use that period to visit the lower Rockies of British Columbia and Alberta. He was keen to see if Mabel too might join him.
This was a major change in his lifestyle of late.
A sort of a bachelor till this point, he was apt to either plan this trip all by himself, or perhaps with another like minded male friend.
Neil’s interests were not very commonplace among the Indian diaspora. And while he knew some of the local Canadians, he did not know too many that shared his interest exactly, either.
The thing is like this – a lot of Canadians liked to visit the mountains for recreation. Some where for skiing and going along powdery slopes on snow mobile. Neil was not keen on that. In fact he did now know how to ski and had not made a serious effort to learn.
Its not that he disliked the idea of skiing. But he found out, early on – that the industry was geared to generate a lot of money through these activities. So, going to ski was not easy, even in Canada, without spending a lot of money that eventually end up in the hands of corporations. Somehow, the notion of pristine spots on mountains being the property of businesses, and all the gear that one needs to own also costing far higher that they should, put him off this hobby.
He liked nature but liked the right to walk around in marshes and swamps and dry country and mountain slopes that were unspoiled and unmodified by man, as far as possible. Also, he could understand a nominal fee to visit some parks, where the money was used to maintain the area and prevent its degradation. But the spot of skiing, in Neil’s eyes – was a whole different thing that he did not wish to enter.
Hereabouts, near his own home, he liked to put on his hiking shoes and go walk along the Fraser riverbed or the dykes along the shoreline of the Pacific ocean, watching the lowland vegetation. He loved to look at the tireless rounds taken by the northern Harriers as it glided in slow circles above the reed bed in search of food.

A female Northern Harrier in search of food

It cost him virtually nothing to do that, and he felt closer to nature than in man made institutions to allow him to enjoy a sport that appeared to him to be also a fashion statement that required access to a measure of wealth in order to engage in it. Civilization was geared so one would constantly strive to earn more money, so one could spend it all away in order to make someone else rich.
Neil perhaps still had too much of his upbringing from rural landscapes of Bengal still in him. He had not yet fully merged with Canada. And so, skiing was out.
Snow shoeing was a different issue. It allowed one to walk on stretches of soft snow and usually in back country to see beautiful nature. Going in winter had an added protection in the sense that bears are likely to be hibernating or less active. This, to Neil was an academic and hypothetical issue. He knew Canada had bears and had seen enough black bears up close and Grizzly not so close, to appreciate that. However, he still could not mentally grasp the issue that he might encounter a bear suddenly at some remote spot, where the bear would be startled by him and might make a threatening charge.
Anyhow, snow shoe was something he might have gotten used to, especially since he liked nature.
But somehow, in his few years in Canada, he had not picked up this hobby, while still spending most of his time outdoors, just soaking in the new country. Perhaps he would try that out, along with snow hiking and outdoor living in tents this coming winter, perhaps with Mabel.
Meanwhile, there were still lots of things to see and places to visit, for him. One of them was the Yoho National park and the surroundings. And he was planning a trip there during the Easter holidays.

He had a specific attraction for the Yoho national park. It contained the Burgess mount and the famous fossil beds of Burgess Shale.
Some half a billion years ago – that is over five hundred million years in the past, North America was far from its current location. Neither were all the pieces of the present North America in one pice. But most of the parts lay on its side, at right angle to its current orientation. Further, the central portions of Canada was a shallow sea instead of the current high Rocky mountains. And the time frame was the Cambrian.
This was a period when life had evolved in the ocean, but had not yet invaded land. There was an explosion of diversity among the sea creatures, some of which left no descendant. Most were soft shell creatures. Backbone, or spinal column, had not yet evolved properly. The only hard bodied creature of high population were the trilobites.
And, the soil of the shallow sea bed was a very fine silt. Underwater land slides to deeper depths would occasionally bury some of these soft shelled creatures and the fine silt would preserve their shape. The depth would prevent their bodies rotting fast or being consumed by bacteria. Time and geologic forces would then convert the soft clay into shale and the remnants of the soft shell creatures into very rare fossils. So rare that the Burgess Shale deposit is recognized as one of the best sites for the Cambrian era fossils in the entire planet.


And Neil was interested to go there and check the area, out of curiosity. He knew the fossil beds were not open to public. Also, at this time, snow still covered the slopes. But he still wanted to look around the area.
Mabel had thought she might need to be in town on Friday for something relating to her work in her uncle’s construction business. Therefore, she could not confirm if she was able to go with him.
And now, the cryptic text message on his phone confirmed she was good to go with him on the 6th.

The light turned green. Neil concentrated on the road, and let the iPod read out a book while he navigated the roads from Knight Street on to the downtown area of Vancouver.
He was onto the eighth chapter of Bernard Wood’s book on evolution and came to the issue of multi-regional against our of Africa theories about the evolution of modern humans. The issue of how to define a modern human was being talked about, along with the issue of possible Euro-centrism in the view that not only modern civilization evolved in Europe, but also modern man.
The fact that ancient cave paintings, a sign of advancement in human evolution, was there in Europe and not in Africa, was being used as evidence that Africa did not evolve modern humans.
But, as the book was careful to mention – there were other scientists, some of them from Europe itself, that pointed out two major faults in this theory. The first was – there were cave paintings in Africa. It is just that people were not searching for them in context of human evolution, and these cave paintings were not exactly where human evolution was thought to have originated, in Africa. The second problem was – in order to have cave paintings, a region should have caves in the first place. The region were the species evolved into a more modern form, did not have much caves.
Neil was absorbed in the book and thought back on the issue of the first humans in North America. People were still debating on this. Originally, the notion was that the folks came across the Bering strait at a time when the ice age locked up so much of the water on land glaciers that the corresponding low sea levels exposed vast tracts of land thus providing a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. Humans might have inadvertently crossed over to North America while following the Wooly Mammoth.
Alternately, they could have island hopped over the Aleutian island range. Or, if Asia was not the best candidate, the could have come from Europe.
Some believe that the ancient stone tools in Spain resemble the early stone tools of humans in North America. Therefore, they say the origin of the first humans in North America could have been Iberian rather than Siberian.
Clovis point stone tools, supposed to be of Asian origin and carried by the early humans – is also under scrutiny. One recent view is that the Clovis point technology might be wholly home grown in North America. This means, humans might have come even earlier, to the continent, and then lived long enough to evolve a new kind of stone technology.
Some recent archaeological finds seem to point signs of the first arrivals to around 50,000 years in the past. This can essentially turn conventional wisdom about the origin and propagation of modern humans on its head.
Neil pulled his car into the underground parking lot.
Modern humans of thirty, forty or fifty thousand years in the past will have to wait. For now, he was heading into the Rockies to have a look at the places that gave rise to the grand parents of modern humans, the first of the multi-cellular ocean creatures of the Cambrian period – over five hundred million years old.
And, Mabel was likely to be with him.

At the waters edge

Posted on by

Saturday and Sunday were bright and sunny, and glorious in the color spectrum of the landscape around my home in Delta, British Columbia, about ten miles north of the US border.
Coming from India, I do not recollect being overly concerned about the presence of absence of clouds in the sky. Nature had been spectacular throughout the year and in all seasons. But that was then. I remember asking permission from my mother, as a young kid, to take a shower in the shower – meaning, go out bare bodied and bare feet out into the field behind our home, wearing only a pair of shorts, in the middle of a rain shower, and get thoroughly drenched. This allowed me to roll in the grass and generally have a great time while rain splattered on my face. I am not sure if it washed all the dirt off, since I was maintaining a sort of balance – letting the rain wash old dirt off, while accumulating new dirt by rolling on the grass.
I even remember stray dogs coming up and joining the fun with me – howling into the rain and rolling around, all in good fun.
But that was then. Today, the area were I grew up has no open field behind – it is chock full of cramped houses with serpentine narrow lanes, plastic and garbage collected at every corner. The area has a bleak apeparance, and has gotten dangerous because of petty crime, which I have no doubt, will mature into more serious crime down the line.
The grass, the sky, and the roll in the rain – is a distant memory.
But here, in British Columbia, the temperature is usually a lot lower than in India of my childhood. If I went out to bathe in the rain when the water is at 4 degree Celsius, I am likely to shiver and catch pneumonia. Besides, I am no more an 8 year old kid, not yet spoiled by the act of growing up and getting civilized.
Here in British Columbia, weather is a big thing. It rains a lot and the sky is often overcast. A cloudy day is warmer, in winter, but the gloomy appearance and the rain in the urban areas appear depressing, mainly because it is no fun going out in the rain when it is also cold and damp.
Clear sunny days are spectacularly bright, and also a lot colder. Temperature often drops many degrees when the sky clears up. This is a proof that moisture or water vapor is a greenhouse gas too. While the total amount of water remains the same with climate change, less ice and more liquid water on the oceans, and higher temperatures usually means more evaporation, more clouds and more green-house effect.
But, meanwhile, I spent the weekend roaming the country side around my home, carrying a heavy camera/lens/tripod over my shoulders, wearing a sort of hiking boot that was also thermally insulated, and wearing a parka and a pair of woolen gloves.
I walked and I walked. I stood still at some places, with the tripod on the ground, for long stretches, watching and counting birds at times, and looking for some bird that is rare in these areas. I have stamped my foot and watched as the tide runs out of the shallow ocean front at Boundary Bay, overlooking the coast of Washington state in USA.
And then I have walked through marshes, reed beds, sandy or pebbled land, through bushes and over dust patches and mud banks, just soaking in the atmosphere and marveling at the fantastic variations of nature.

Here I stopped for a moment, watching the near sights of trees. They sported different shades of color as spring came upon us. The northern snow tolerant trees that have needle shaped leaves, that do not shed all their leaves at the same time in the winter, and can be called evergreen, stand up as green outlines.
The tall leafy trees that went bare in winter, are showing signs of small buds sprouting all over their high branches. Some of these would be new leaves, and some would be flowers.
And then there are the low bushes, still bare of leaves. They show up as reddish brown. They are still waiting for a trigger. It would be a while before they too become leafy and green.
But beyond the tree line, there were the mountains. Vancouver and surround area are on a river estuary, which is land created by silt deposits of a large river. It is therefore flat and almost at the sea level. But the river itself broke out of a long and wide range of mountains. As a result, all around us, there are mountains and more mountains. Some would shed their snow completely in the summer, while some would retain a snow cap throughout summer.

I might have walked twenty or thirty miles in these two days, carrying heavy camera and most of the time by myself. Sometimes a guy or a small group would join up and we would cover a track together. But mostly, it was my own interaction, with the planet as I see it.
Yes, my aging body aches after two days of walking about morning to evening. Yes I would feel hungry at the end of the day since I had not stopped to find lunch at noon. Yes, my legs would feel tired. And yes, I would have deep sleeps at night when I hit the bed.
But, this was my way of interacting with the rest of the world.
I did not really feel lonely at all.
Given a choice, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Glaciers of our ancestors

Posted on by

It was the beginning of January, 2012. I had gone north from Glacier National park in the US, crossed the border and entered Canada in the province of British Columbia just west of the Alberta state border, and south of Banff. My intension was to take the southern route going west back towards Vancouver, and stop on the way wherever it looked good. I had travelled some of these roads before, but not in the dead of winter. A lot of high mountain roads were involved, with sudden change of altitude and weather. Heavy snow and limited visibility in sharply curving mountain roads were to be expected. One had to be vigilant.

I was also going through what many call the southern edge of British Columbia’s wine country. A few of the vineyards were within site, among the lower foothills of the mountains.

I was watching the scenery. It took me a while to identify what was intriguing me so much. It was the slopes of the distant hills to my left. There was something odd about it. It was not just a farmland, a few farmers vehicles in the foreground, and a low hill in the background.

I slowed down and watched the side of the hill for a while – till I could not continue any longer. I had to stop, and seek out a dirt road going through the farmland towards the low hills, so I could take a closer look. Beyond the flat farmland, as the land began to slope upwards, there is a vineyard. Someone had planted grape trees what were currently barren, shorn of leaves in the winter. Its not so visible from here, but can be seen closer to the hills.

But what drew my attention was the hill itself.

The side facing me was rocky, without much soil cover, and therefore mostly barren with no trees. At the upper regions, there was soil and also trees.

The rocky slope facing me had a light powdering of snow. Water coming down over thousands of years had carved the rock and made a few channels and ravines. Gravel and dirt coming down from top had collected into these ravines, enough to support a few trees.

But, right across that bare rock face staring at me, were horizontal gigantic scratch marks, over which the water-cut ravines ran zigzag down the slope. These scratch marks, were the ten thousand year old footprints of a gigantic glacier that ploughed and ground its way through this land, carrying huge boulders, rocks and other material that caused those horizontal markings on the rock face. Those tell tale footprints of the passing glacier has survived the ten thousand or so years, and remains visible primarily because soil and trees have not hidden them from view.
Water has done its work over it, cutting all those vertical channels over the horizontal scratches. And trees have grown where soil collected at the depths of those channels.

I am not a geologist, and never studied the subject except for reading a book that Gautam Sen had given me, written by a French Geologist, some fifteen years ago while I lived in Florida.

And yet, here I was – mesmerized by a geologic text book facing me through a simple rock face of a hill by a quiet stretch of highway heading west towards Vancouver.