September opened in fine form last weekend, with a great deal of sunshine, warm (but not sweltering) temperatures and another successful round at the annual Saanich Fair.
Thousands of people from communities across Greater Victoria attended the agricultural exposition and midway, and happily I was one of them. I hadn't attended the fair in many years, and for the first time in my life I ignored the rides in favour of the actual fair.
For many families, the Saanich Fair is an annual tradition, but it never was for us - my parents took us on the occasional visit, but we weren't annual attendees and we certainly never looked at the vegetables.
Later, when I was a teenager and I was old enough to go with friends, it was all about the rides. The Zipper was the thing - although the Spaceship was always my favourite. None of us thought of doing anything as dull as looking at flower displays. In fact, I don't think we knew that there was anything to the fair other than rides.
So it was a pleasant and genuine surprise to me to realize just how many people in Greater Victoria bothered to come to an agricultural fair with livestock judging and blue ribbons for pies and all the rest of it. I had a moment, standing in front of a table of prize-winning pickles, where I thought I'd fallen into that hoary Rodgers and Hammerstein musical State Fair from 1945.
I suspect that many of the teens and pre-teens in attendance didn't come to taste the jalapeno jelly or look at the overgrown gourds or watch the sheep-shearing, but based on the rows and rows (and rows and rows) of vehicles parked in that giant field, it was clear to me that many Victorians did.
The agricultural aspect of the fair is clearly important to a lot of people, and I find that fact both interesting and encouraging.
It's not a new observation to say that those of us who live in modern, urban societies are extremely alienated from food production, agriculture and "the land" in general, but it's an idea that bears revisiting in the context of global warming.
Advertisements for the fair described it as "old-fashioned," but of course agriculture isn't some quaint, old-timey hobby.
Farm work and food production are as necessary to modern society as they were in the pre-modern era, though far fewer of us are involved in it in any direct way. The Saanich Fair helps make this tangible, albeit in an idealized way.
It's important to reinforce our understanding of the relationship we have with the land that provides for us, especially now that climate change is making itself felt in a very real way in Canada's Arctic and tundra ecosystems.
David Suzuki pointed out in a recent op-ed piece that fewer and fewer people are denying the reality of climate change, which is great. But the next step for many of us is still a mystery, especially since it's becoming clear that the efforts that governments and citizens are willing to take to decrease our harmful carbon output will not be enough to stave off its effects.
Unfortunately, the best news we can hope for in this situation is still bad news. To use Suzuki's words, "It's too late to stop [Earth-warming] now, but we can lessen its severity and impacts."
This is a frightening thought for many people, myself included. Climate change is a topic too scary to want to talk about: Its solutions seem too big to understand and its effects seem too terrible to contemplate. But it's absolutely necessary that we, as citizens and consumers of the world, confront it.
And if we're looking for something to make this topic seem real to us, rather than a vague threat that someone else will have to deal with, we have only to look to our local traditions, such as the Saanich Fair.
Because the fair is, among other things, a celebration of the direct relationship that we have with the land that we inhabit. It reminds us that we are dependent upon it in the most basic and primal of ways. If, as last weekend's turnout suggested, Victorians do care about the land and the ways we use it to our benefit, then this reminds us exactly what's at stake when we talk about global warming.
