Complimentary Blueberry Juice

At Riding Mountain in Manitoba, there is a bridge and low-tech dam built by conscientious objectors in the early 1940s at Whirlpool Lake (more archival photos here).

What is striking to me about these sorts of things is everything absent from modern life. This bridge was built by hand. There was no trip to the department store for wood: they cut trees and designed their own planks. There was no fleet of giant F150 super crews hauling people and tools to the work site. And so on.

These things happened less than 100 years ago.

These things are stark reminders of the accelerational pace of consumption of our planet’s resources. We have gone from something that took a lot of time and effort, human-scale projects, to massive infrastructure projects and machines and technology – whether civil or agricultural – in the span of a century or less. In the coming decades we will need to reflect on if the speed and convenience was worth the consequence.

The span of one lifetime was enough to see the widespread use of human-invented chemicals for everything imaginable, the adoption of fossil fuels, the proliferation of plastic, the felling of nearly every ancient tree on the planet, and a giant patch of garbage swirling in our biggest ocean. These problems were not known to the world prior to the last 100 years.

Yet in a few special places – like a hand-built bridge at Whirlpool Lake – you can catch a scent and a view that serves as a reminder of what the world was closer to, less than a century ago…and how little of it remains.

Graham