From the Editor
Suzanne Boyd
Due to the peculiarities of traditional publishing schedules, this edition of Zoomer magazine – the final one of calendar year – will arrive in your homes and on newsstands around Thanksgiving, which is not unusual. But 2020 has been an unusual year and, because of that, the timing feels auspicious. It’s been a year thus far of threats, real and existential, every day and apocalyptic. We mourn the lives lost to the pandemic, particularly those of vulnerable elders living in long-term care facilities, and empathize with those who have suffffffered in countless ways because of the virus. We fear the uncertainty of what future flareups will mean to our health and prosperity. There has been shock, but I am in awe of what we’ve been able to hold on to, including a sense of safety and stability – fragile though it may be as so much hangs in the balance – that Canadian leaders and citizens have achieved together.
But it’s a very difffffferent story due south where, at press time, huge swaths of the Pacific Northwest states are ablaze in an unprecedented environmental disaster, racial tensions have turned deadly and COVID-19 has killed more people than in any other developed nation, as Carolyn Abraham’s reports in “Election on the Brain” (pg. 52). Against this backdrop, the Nov. 3 battle between Donald Trump and Joe Biden for the Oval Office seems as if it is only pouring gasoline on the fire of deep divisions in an ailing America.
In an online essay for rollingstone. com, which you may have read because it went viral, our cover subject, Wade Davis, explorer, anthropologist and ethnobotanist wrote in “The Unravelling of America”:
“Over the last months, a quip has circulated on the internet suggesting that to live in Canada today is like owning an apartment above a meth lab. Canada is no perfect place, but it has handled the COVID crisis well …” As Alanna Mitchell reports in our cover profile of Davis, “River of Redemption” (pg. 34), he is driven by passion and purpose in a way that is deeply inspiring. He has spent an eventful life of ideas and action, immersed in the world at large – in its nature, its culture and its people. He knows a good thing when he experiences it.
“Canada performed well during the COVID crisis because of our social contract, the bonds of community, the trust for each other and our institutions, our health-care system in particular, with hospitals that cater to the medical needs of the collective, not the individual, and certainly not the private investor who views every hospital bed as if a rental property,” Davis writes. “The measure of wealth in a civilized nation is not the currency accumulated by the lucky few, but rather the strength and resonance of social relations and the bonds of reciprocityiprocity that connect alla people in common purpose.”
And for that I am graateful.