My Grandfathers were farmers...but wind farms??
My beloved Val and I took the customary 90-minute drive today to the Rez (Delaware First Nation) in Maroviantown to stock up on cigs for Val. It seems like only a few weeks since I made the last run.
I took Joe’s son, Simon, with me last trip. I told him we were going to tour the tepees when we got to the Rez. Needless to say I was spinning a yarn to rev up his imagination for the ride, He was bummed when we got there and he saw the driveways filled with Hummers and Harleys instead of the stereotypical images I had yarned for him. I soothed his youthful imagination with a gift of a couple scratch tickets from the store(here he sits as we plan and map the best trail home).
HEY…the Ontario Indigenous Nations do pretty good, trapping and hunting smokers and gamblers with $10 to $20 bags of smokes (200 in a bag). Considering a tariff carton is some $80 under the feds, the market is better than historically traditional sustainability for the Rez, and for smokers, its not a bad deal either. Back home, in Manitoba, the First Nations do pickerel and moose and don’t do nearly as well stocking the driveway, even with the accompanying DIA funding (“Anish” money, as its referred to on the Rez, vilifying the Cree First Nation’s self proclaimed Anishanabee). Only recently has the Casino licensing been allowed and realized and that windfall will make the fishing/hunting/ firewater/gang stigma disappear quicker than Custard’s golden locks on a cool Dakota morning. Anyhow, I digress; I have long since left the orbit of political correctness. My apologies if I offend.
I did notice on the drive down Highway #3, past Wheatley, that weaves along the shores of Lake Erie, that the farmers and market gardeners and vintners were hurriedly sowing the fields, orchards and vines with the years seedlings in anticipation of this falls harvest. My grandfathers were farmers and my father was a hobby farmer so I have a inherent curiosity when it comes to agri-activity. The one n
ew farm that I have seen in other regions of the country, but first noticed here was the wind farm being sowed in Essex along the north shore. Three turbines were already standing and some 10 or twelve were in various stages of assembly.
Wind farms are long overdue in this power hungry, energy starved, green gorging, Southern Ontario. The biggest contrast from my home-grown prairie lifestyle, when re-locating to Southern Ontario, was the climate friendly, seasonally mild, unheralded seamless polarity of S/O and the absence of energy conscience, compared to the inherent conscience for residents of harsh, extreme, hostile bi-polar seasons from whence I came. If the adage that ``necessity is the mother of invention” and ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder” can be applied to the climate differences, than, absenting the extremes of climate (particularly winter) would explain the sociological difference between the energy consciousness of the two demographics. Simply put, I would never want to pay to heat the unusually larger Windsor houses in Winnipeg. By the same token, on an earlier visit home I happened by some 70 to 80 wind turbines in Manitoba’s St. Leone jet-stream alley, and, driving to CAW's education center in Port Elgin, over 100 turbines in Central Ontario’s rural Kincardine catching the easterlies off Lake Huron. What’s the alternative? Nuclear generated power!!!
Anyhow…. the wind farms are long overdue in Southern Ontario. There is some semblance of opposition in the county I reside, for starting a wind farm here, but the STOP THE WIND FARM posters that adorn the boulevards usually accessorized the driveways of conspicuously opulent residence that demonstrate a complete absence of any necessity (or conscience) to mother conservation.
I took Joe’s son, Simon, with me last trip. I told him we were going to tour the tepees when we got to the Rez. Needless to say I was spinning a yarn to rev up his imagination for the ride, He was bummed when we got there and he saw the driveways filled with Hummers and Harleys instead of the stereotypical images I had yarned for him. I soothed his youthful imagination with a gift of a couple scratch tickets from the store(here he sits as we plan and map the best trail home).
HEY…the Ontario Indigenous Nations do pretty good, trapping and hunting smokers and gamblers with $10 to $20 bags of smokes (200 in a bag). Considering a tariff carton is some $80 under the feds, the market is better than historically traditional sustainability for the Rez, and for smokers, its not a bad deal either. Back home, in Manitoba, the First Nations do pickerel and moose and don’t do nearly as well stocking the driveway, even with the accompanying DIA funding (“Anish” money, as its referred to on the Rez, vilifying the Cree First Nation’s self proclaimed Anishanabee). Only recently has the Casino licensing been allowed and realized and that windfall will make the fishing/hunting/ firewater/gang stigma disappear quicker than Custard’s golden locks on a cool Dakota morning. Anyhow, I digress; I have long since left the orbit of political correctness. My apologies if I offend.
I did notice on the drive down Highway #3, past Wheatley, that weaves along the shores of Lake Erie, that the farmers and market gardeners and vintners were hurriedly sowing the fields, orchards and vines with the years seedlings in anticipation of this falls harvest. My grandfathers were farmers and my father was a hobby farmer so I have a inherent curiosity when it comes to agri-activity. The one n
ew farm that I have seen in other regions of the country, but first noticed here was the wind farm being sowed in Essex along the north shore. Three turbines were already standing and some 10 or twelve were in various stages of assembly.Wind farms are long overdue in this power hungry, energy starved, green gorging, Southern Ontario. The biggest contrast from my home-grown prairie lifestyle, when re-locating to Southern Ontario, was the climate friendly, seasonally mild, unheralded seamless polarity of S/O and the absence of energy conscience, compared to the inherent conscience for residents of harsh, extreme, hostile bi-polar seasons from whence I came. If the adage that ``necessity is the mother of invention” and ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder” can be applied to the climate differences, than, absenting the extremes of climate (particularly winter) would explain the sociological difference between the energy consciousness of the two demographics. Simply put, I would never want to pay to heat the unusually larger Windsor houses in Winnipeg. By the same token, on an earlier visit home I happened by some 70 to 80 wind turbines in Manitoba’s St. Leone jet-stream alley, and, driving to CAW's education center in Port Elgin, over 100 turbines in Central Ontario’s rural Kincardine catching the easterlies off Lake Huron. What’s the alternative? Nuclear generated power!!!
Anyhow…. the wind farms are long overdue in Southern Ontario. There is some semblance of opposition in the county I reside, for starting a wind farm here, but the STOP THE WIND FARM posters that adorn the boulevards usually accessorized the driveways of conspicuously opulent residence that demonstrate a complete absence of any necessity (or conscience) to mother conservation.
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