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Beaver Ponds, Bogs and Fashion

Life is motion; a flow of energy, blood, oxygen, nutrients, neuronal signals, ideas, etc. Water is life; that is what people have been saying for millennia. Understanding the ingenuity of a beaver’s actions of stopping the water outflow from the Canadian Shield environments can take a while.
Beaver Pond in eastern region of Muskoka, Ontario
Beaver was hunted to the edge of extinction while serving as headgear, a fashion and a status statement for generations of Europeans. Beyond its pelt, the life of a beaver back then didn’t represent any other perceived value. Remarkably, the beaver population recovered within shield environments when fashion changed.
Throughout the rest of the continent, the beaver population was decimated by farmers who couldn’t understand the benefits of the steady water table. Or that soil is a complex living organism that stops living when the draught comes. By now, we should learn something and admire beaver’s visionary sense of purpose. Not so, I’m afraid. The future doesn’t prove us to be right or wrong. It will come, and we will see.
I like to take a lonely trip in late fall to savour the conclusion of life’s end-of-season spectacle. It’s reassuring that it is still in place, playing out as it always did. It doesn’t matter what has been stored for millions of years under the surface. The “future” is not mine, even if it’s bubbling up to the surface from warming waters or through the melting permafrost.
Morning at a bog in Orillia area of Ontario.
Like ghosts scattered around, out of public eyes and minds, these nature projects were put into motion hundreds of millions of years ago. This beauty above is only one hundred kilometres from Toronto City Hall as crow fly. Is there anyone in there to care about it?
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