The bottom line came in the first part
of the 21st century

FTLComm - Tisdale - Friday, March 16, 2007

We all know things have to change, but what we didn't know was that we would have so little choice in the way changes would come. Due to a project I was unable to post Wednesday and Thursday of this week but that gave me time to reflect on the remarkable speed and direction of changes that is about to affect us all.

When we are asked to consider what to we expect to happen next, the wise man will often reply that he "hasn't the foggiest ideal of what is to come." In reality, most of what will happen is already far down the road and

we are just unaware of what has already taken place and is now the driving force behind the changes we are experiencing.

The release this past week of the results of the 2006 census is pretty shocking and just as shocking is the realisation by politicians that global environmental concerns are perhaps past the point of no return. We need very much to concern ourselves with these two factors because what we think we are as a people and as a society, is pretty much a myth.

Though the environment and the census are significant elements and will affect our day to day lives, we who live in rural areas are going to experience the results of these changes far more than our urban countrymen.

You can see for yourself the dramatic change in demographics here in Canada as we rapidly become mostly urban people. New Canadians will more and more be involved in shaping the sort of Canada we live in and together, we all must come to terms with the shift in our way of life, as we cope with the environment.

At a dollar a litre we are paying about fifteen cents more in Canada for Canadian produced petroleum than our American neighbours who depend for 60% of their fuel on Canada and are paying less than 85¢ a litre for that same Canadian fuel.

Agriculturally produced fuel is a certainty and that will involve us here in Tisdale, but the price of energy will continue to balloon so that private cars and trucks are in their last decade. Public transportation is just as certain as the death of the private vehicle and since that infrastructure no longer is available in our rural part of the world and is unlikely to evolve, the rural portion of Canada will continue to devolve and vanish. We rural people are as doomed as the dinosaurs from which came the petroleum products disappearing at an amazing rate today.

By the time present day urban Canadians realise the unpleasant nature of living in mega-cities and aim to repopulate the rural towns and villages, they, with their present infrastructure, will be ghost towns and things of the distant past. However, not all is gloom and doom.

Humans are incredibly adaptable. When faced with extinction about 15,000 years ago the people who today call themselves "First Nations" people picked up their belongings and walked across the ice to begin a new civilisation in North America. Starting about five hundred years ago another migration took place as our European ancestors boarded leaky boats to come the "new world" and today about 30,000 people every year come to Canada to start fresh in a new country.

The environmental crunch will be faced and so will urbanisation, but along the way we will have to park our SUVs, abandon the concept of single family houses and join the masses.