I loved this article. I spend weeks paddling in eastern Ontario every year, mostly on the Rideau Waterway. I started noticing the occasional trumpeter swan a few years ago, and dutifully reported them to the agency that was tracking them. A couple of years ago they notified me that there was no need to report anymore, the species was doing just fine. This made me very happy. My favourite swan story involves a flotilla of three who objected to my paddling too close to their spot. Being attacked in a kayak by three thirty-pound birds is a high point in my paddling career. Through sheer good luck I didn't capsize. They followed me relentlessly down the lake, squawking and strafing me as I sprinted away. These birds have attitude. You asked for another good news story: Loons are everywhere now. Ten years ago I photographed every one I saw. Now there are so many of them that I don't really bother, unless its an adult with young very close to the boat.
The trumpeter swan’s comeback is such a wonderful story . Anyone looking to dive deeper, check into the story of Ralph Edwards, the 'Caruso of Lonesome Lake.' He played a pivotal role in the 1950s by protecting a small group of swans near Bella Coola, BC, helping to ensure their survival in the region and likely the reason we are now seeing them regularly near us on Vancouver Island.
I'm not a student of history, only of my own observations. I particularly like the progression of my food and beverage choices. Many more things that are local, taste better, fresher are the only things that I buy as opposed to the frozen, prepared, canned, distant sustenance that I was raised on on the 60s. Cheaper - no, better, yes. Craft beer, heirloom tomatoes, red fife bread. I am conflicted about buying fresh raspberries in December, but why would you be opposed to a distant farmer making a living with a perishable crop? Anyway, Thanks for the great article.
I will second the wild turkey observation. When I was first posted to Petawawa in the mid-90’s there were none. Coming back in the mid-aughts they were everywhere.
Black bears too. Everywhere on base, but we take a far more “live and let live” approach to them now. No trapping and relocation, we just put up with their dumpster diving, and theft of soldiers rucksacks (and once attempted abduction of one of our pilots asleep in a range hut - to be fair to the bear he did look like a giant burrito in the dark…). They can be a nuisance, but we get on all right. I enjoy their company and we have our own “fat bear weeks” here in the fall.
Here’s one from where I grew up in northern Saskatchewan. For decades, the smelter at the mine works in the town of Flin Flon belched sulphurous smoke. It stunted the surrounding greenery. Ravens managed to tolerate it, but other bird species, particularly bald eagles, were driven away. You had to go far into the bush to spot one. When the smelter was shut down more than a decade ago, the eagles came back. Not right into town, but nearby on surrounding lakes they became as common as their rivals, the ravens. The mine provided work for families, including mine, and its effect on the landscape seemed transitory. The earth was healing itself as best it could. Then came the devastating fires of last summer, creeping right up to the town’s edge. The fires were in part the result of the heating and drying climate which the mine had contributed to. Will the eagles return again?
There is a reason to hope. I have been inspired by the example of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Rabbi of the Warsaw Ghetto.
His wartime sermons and private musings were forged in the furnace of suffering; they address not an abstract optimism but a resilient, active hope — a hope that must be seized, practiced, and embodied. To read Shapira on hope is to encounter a theology of effort: the insistence that human beings must throw a “rope” toward heaven and climb it, not to haul God down to human terms, but to lift themselves into a living relationship with the Divine.
Hope, in Shapira’s teaching, is not a passive waiting for circumstances to improve. It is a disciplined act of courage that transforms interior posture and outer conduct. Where despair anesthetizes the will and fragments moral imagination, Shapira urges an arresting alternative: to perform the small, stubborn acts that keep the soul linked to God. Prayer, study, charity, repentance, and acts of kindness are not merely rituals but the knots in the rope we throw upward. Each knot is a practiced discipline that both reveals and creates pathways for ascent.
This ethic of active hope emerges from three interlocking convictions in Shapira’s work. First, human beings are co-workers with God. Shapira refuses a fatalism that makes people passive recipients of fate; instead, he portrays the human heart as a field in which divine light can grow if it is tilled. The rope metaphor captures this coop-erative dynamic: we do not summon God like a servant, nor do we expect God to remap the world without our participation. We anchor ourselves in practices that enable an encounter with the transcendent.
Second, hope requires moral clarity. For Shapira, spiritual ascent is not divorced from ethical living. The rope is woven from moral strands — honesty, responsibility, humility, courage — and climbing it demands integrity. In the stark moral testing of his era, Shapira repeatedly insisted that inner survival depended on outer conduct: loving one’s neighbor, caring for the weak, sustaining communal institutions of prayer and learning. These were not sentimental appendages but indispensable supports for the soul’s upward movement.
Third, hope is communal. Though Shapira often addresses the individual’s wrestle with doubt and fear, he consistently frames salvation as a social reality. Throwing a rope can mean providing a lifeline to another: teaching, consoling, sharing scarce resources, or simply refusing to abandon the vulnerable. Communal ropes resist the atomizing effects of trauma, enabling people to climb together when none could ascend alone.
Shapira’s teaching also acknowledges a tragic humility. He does not promise tidy solutions or guaranteed deliverance. The rope does not render one immune to suffering; rather, it dignifies suffering by giving it orientation and meaning. In Aish Kodesh, the presence of suffering deepens the urgency of prayer and the need for moral action precisely because the rope must be thrown in darkness and uncertainty. Hope, thus, is not naive brightness but a luminous practice born of fidelity.
Practically, Shapira’s hope looks like persistent rituals and small evidences of faith: short, concentrated prayers that admit the heart’s real fear; daily acts of kindness that repair a frayed world; the renewal of study that keeps the mind and soul engaged; and the deliberate cultivation of inner speech that names God’s presence even when God feels distant. These habits, sewn into everyday life, lengthen and strengthen the rope. Over time they change how one perceives possibility: not as a distant contingency but as a reachable horizon.
The contemporary resonance of Shapira’s voice is powerful. In an age of political upheaval, ecological dread, and epidemic loneliness, the temptation to either bitter passivity or brittle optimism is constant.
Shapira’s middle way — an active, disciplined hope — offers a corrective. It invites public leaders and ordinary citizens alike to see hope as a practice grounded in durable habits and moral responsibility. Throwing a rope up to heaven becomes a metaphor for civic acts that bind people together: volunteering, witnessing truth, defending dignity, and sustaining institutions of learning and care. These are the communal knots that hold when storms come.
There is also a psychological truth in Shapira’s thought: hope built on action resists collapse. When people act — when they pray, repent, give, teach — they generate feedback loops of meaning and efficacy. Even small acts reinforce agency; agency, in turn, mitigates despair. Shapira understands that meaning accrues through practice, and that hope that is felt viscerally grows from muscle memory as much as from conviction.
Yet Shapira’s ethic is not an injunction to heroic self-sufficiency. The rope we throw is itself a plea, a supplication. Its aim is relational: to reach God, to be changed by relationship, and to allow that change to shape how we treat one another. The climb is thus a spiritual ladder and a moral education. As we pull ourselves upward, we learn humility and interdependence; we discover that ascent is less about individual status and more about becoming fit channels for compassion and justice.
Finally, Shapira’s image counsels patience. Climbing takes time. The rope will fray; knots must be tied anew. Hope will falter and must be recommitted. But the daily re-throwing of the rope — the repeated recommitment to prayer, study, and loving action — is itself the mark of faithfulness.
Even when outcomes remain uncertain, the uprightness of the effort matters. Doing what is right to do, with hope, is both ethics and resistance.
In sum, Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira offers a hope that is neither passive nor magical, neither sentimental nor merely strategic.
It is a hope rooted in practice: a rope of small disciplines, moral habits, and communal care thrown toward the Divine. To climb that rope is to accept responsibility for one’s own interior formation and for the welfare of others, to sustain faith through action, and to hold fast to meaning even when the world unravels. That is a hope fit for the most perilous times — a hope that, like the rope itself, invites us to reach, to climb, and to pull one another up.
In PEI and Nova Scotia there was a time when the sighting of a Bald Eagle was very rare - a lot of people saying they had never seen one. That has changed dramatically over the last 20-30 years as Bald Eagles, while still not commonplace, can be seen on a regular basis. Recovery efforts and conservation protections help as they did for the Trumpeters. Success stories like this, as Dan indicated, get lost in the daily grind of crime, wars, egomaniacs, etc that have become too commonplace,
Three reasons for hope: the rapid progress in fighting cancer via vaccines that can be targeted to the person and their tumour; the progress in achieving efficient and scalable desalination for use in agriculture; the similar rate of progress in achieving low-cost, geographically-dispersed, base load geothermal energy
I think this is a key reason why I value reading your pieces on Substack - current events are much more complex and nuanced then we generally have time to look into with historical origins that are far from the binary takes we are provided by those stumping for their team.
Linked to your point about a negativity bias, we often get locked into specific perspectives early in life and if negative can colour how we continue to see things no matter what changes. Every time I turned around as a kid, the only sense I had of Africa was of an ill-defined darkness punctuated by starving children being ravaged by disease. From that moment on, even into adulthood, this was the predominant way I could think of Africa.
Of course, its not that there was not great need and trying to get people to help was wrong. It just meant that it is hard to consider the richness of the 50+ countries multiple cultures, languages, etc., when your view is clouded. And you tend not to see real people but problems. Yet, the improvements in poverty rates, disease eradication and reproductive health have been enormous across the developing world, even as it is important to recognize that more can be done.
Interestingly, there can be a converse tendency to view progress as being irreversible. This was something that struck me when Mr. Trump was first elected. It brought home to me there was a real risk that what I was trying to ensure I could now see as genuine forward momentum could in fact be turned around.
Environmentalist Bill McKibbon reports in his latest book and also in an interview on CBC radio’s The Current that solar energy will be the major supplier of electrical energy in the world by 2040. His example: Pakistan’s huge turn to cheap Chinese made solar panels to power wells, businesses etc prompted the government to cancel a large LNG contract and pay the penalty because they just don’t need it. Renewable energy like this should happen sooner - but it will happen. This was the first time I heard an environmentalist give me hope. Real hope.
The Migratory Birds Convention Treaty between Canada and the United States is probably one of the most successful conservation measure undertaken. Migratory birds have recovered to such a degree that now we are seeing significant overpopulations of geese, particularly snow geese, who are now causing significant damage to their tundra nesting grounds in the Arctic.
I know environmental doomerism has been popular for the last 20 years, but the air and water, for the most part is much cleaner now than it was in the 1960’s, when significant pollution controls were implemented. But people still focus on the declines rather than the incremental improvements.
I had the great pleasure of being in Marsh Lake, Yukon Territory, in April of last year and saw the Trumpeter swans 'resting' there, part of their annual migration north. It was so beautiful - a truly memorable moment! Thank you for the full story!
All that you write is true, but there's also the issue of relative scale. As in, imagine just hypothetically Trump declares himself King Donald The First, imposes martial law, and starts shipping people off to be tortured in concentration camps in El Salvador. Someone could say "Don't despair. Trump won't live forever. Remember, this too shall pass. The Third Reich didn't last a thousand years. Someday this will all be history, then ancient history.". And that's all true. But I'm not the kind of person who would find it much comfort in the MAGA camps.
All true. I'm certainly not one to say, "smiles, everyone!" But ultimately what matters is the we never quit. And to the extent that reminders of good things happening in the world help make us resilient, and keep kicking, I think that's all to the good.
I follow the advances in green energy. Solar and wind, with battery storage, are now the cheapest forms of energy. The US Republican Party is in total denial, but the free market will win eventually.
Hans Rosling's (founder of Our World in Data and Gapminder) book "Factfulness" was very inspirational and impactful for me https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness-book/. This video of his, granted, it was made 15 years ago, shows great progress. Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats - BBC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo
I loved this article. I spend weeks paddling in eastern Ontario every year, mostly on the Rideau Waterway. I started noticing the occasional trumpeter swan a few years ago, and dutifully reported them to the agency that was tracking them. A couple of years ago they notified me that there was no need to report anymore, the species was doing just fine. This made me very happy. My favourite swan story involves a flotilla of three who objected to my paddling too close to their spot. Being attacked in a kayak by three thirty-pound birds is a high point in my paddling career. Through sheer good luck I didn't capsize. They followed me relentlessly down the lake, squawking and strafing me as I sprinted away. These birds have attitude. You asked for another good news story: Loons are everywhere now. Ten years ago I photographed every one I saw. Now there are so many of them that I don't really bother, unless its an adult with young very close to the boat.
The trumpeter swan’s comeback is such a wonderful story . Anyone looking to dive deeper, check into the story of Ralph Edwards, the 'Caruso of Lonesome Lake.' He played a pivotal role in the 1950s by protecting a small group of swans near Bella Coola, BC, helping to ensure their survival in the region and likely the reason we are now seeing them regularly near us on Vancouver Island.
I'm not a student of history, only of my own observations. I particularly like the progression of my food and beverage choices. Many more things that are local, taste better, fresher are the only things that I buy as opposed to the frozen, prepared, canned, distant sustenance that I was raised on on the 60s. Cheaper - no, better, yes. Craft beer, heirloom tomatoes, red fife bread. I am conflicted about buying fresh raspberries in December, but why would you be opposed to a distant farmer making a living with a perishable crop? Anyway, Thanks for the great article.
It's so true—given the endless choices we have now, the 1970s feel as limited as a Soviet gastronom. Ok, slight exaggeration 😁
I will second the wild turkey observation. When I was first posted to Petawawa in the mid-90’s there were none. Coming back in the mid-aughts they were everywhere.
Black bears too. Everywhere on base, but we take a far more “live and let live” approach to them now. No trapping and relocation, we just put up with their dumpster diving, and theft of soldiers rucksacks (and once attempted abduction of one of our pilots asleep in a range hut - to be fair to the bear he did look like a giant burrito in the dark…). They can be a nuisance, but we get on all right. I enjoy their company and we have our own “fat bear weeks” here in the fall.
Here’s one from where I grew up in northern Saskatchewan. For decades, the smelter at the mine works in the town of Flin Flon belched sulphurous smoke. It stunted the surrounding greenery. Ravens managed to tolerate it, but other bird species, particularly bald eagles, were driven away. You had to go far into the bush to spot one. When the smelter was shut down more than a decade ago, the eagles came back. Not right into town, but nearby on surrounding lakes they became as common as their rivals, the ravens. The mine provided work for families, including mine, and its effect on the landscape seemed transitory. The earth was healing itself as best it could. Then came the devastating fires of last summer, creeping right up to the town’s edge. The fires were in part the result of the heating and drying climate which the mine had contributed to. Will the eagles return again?
There is a reason to hope. I have been inspired by the example of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Rabbi of the Warsaw Ghetto.
His wartime sermons and private musings were forged in the furnace of suffering; they address not an abstract optimism but a resilient, active hope — a hope that must be seized, practiced, and embodied. To read Shapira on hope is to encounter a theology of effort: the insistence that human beings must throw a “rope” toward heaven and climb it, not to haul God down to human terms, but to lift themselves into a living relationship with the Divine.
Hope, in Shapira’s teaching, is not a passive waiting for circumstances to improve. It is a disciplined act of courage that transforms interior posture and outer conduct. Where despair anesthetizes the will and fragments moral imagination, Shapira urges an arresting alternative: to perform the small, stubborn acts that keep the soul linked to God. Prayer, study, charity, repentance, and acts of kindness are not merely rituals but the knots in the rope we throw upward. Each knot is a practiced discipline that both reveals and creates pathways for ascent.
This ethic of active hope emerges from three interlocking convictions in Shapira’s work. First, human beings are co-workers with God. Shapira refuses a fatalism that makes people passive recipients of fate; instead, he portrays the human heart as a field in which divine light can grow if it is tilled. The rope metaphor captures this coop-erative dynamic: we do not summon God like a servant, nor do we expect God to remap the world without our participation. We anchor ourselves in practices that enable an encounter with the transcendent.
Second, hope requires moral clarity. For Shapira, spiritual ascent is not divorced from ethical living. The rope is woven from moral strands — honesty, responsibility, humility, courage — and climbing it demands integrity. In the stark moral testing of his era, Shapira repeatedly insisted that inner survival depended on outer conduct: loving one’s neighbor, caring for the weak, sustaining communal institutions of prayer and learning. These were not sentimental appendages but indispensable supports for the soul’s upward movement.
Third, hope is communal. Though Shapira often addresses the individual’s wrestle with doubt and fear, he consistently frames salvation as a social reality. Throwing a rope can mean providing a lifeline to another: teaching, consoling, sharing scarce resources, or simply refusing to abandon the vulnerable. Communal ropes resist the atomizing effects of trauma, enabling people to climb together when none could ascend alone.
Shapira’s teaching also acknowledges a tragic humility. He does not promise tidy solutions or guaranteed deliverance. The rope does not render one immune to suffering; rather, it dignifies suffering by giving it orientation and meaning. In Aish Kodesh, the presence of suffering deepens the urgency of prayer and the need for moral action precisely because the rope must be thrown in darkness and uncertainty. Hope, thus, is not naive brightness but a luminous practice born of fidelity.
Practically, Shapira’s hope looks like persistent rituals and small evidences of faith: short, concentrated prayers that admit the heart’s real fear; daily acts of kindness that repair a frayed world; the renewal of study that keeps the mind and soul engaged; and the deliberate cultivation of inner speech that names God’s presence even when God feels distant. These habits, sewn into everyday life, lengthen and strengthen the rope. Over time they change how one perceives possibility: not as a distant contingency but as a reachable horizon.
The contemporary resonance of Shapira’s voice is powerful. In an age of political upheaval, ecological dread, and epidemic loneliness, the temptation to either bitter passivity or brittle optimism is constant.
Shapira’s middle way — an active, disciplined hope — offers a corrective. It invites public leaders and ordinary citizens alike to see hope as a practice grounded in durable habits and moral responsibility. Throwing a rope up to heaven becomes a metaphor for civic acts that bind people together: volunteering, witnessing truth, defending dignity, and sustaining institutions of learning and care. These are the communal knots that hold when storms come.
There is also a psychological truth in Shapira’s thought: hope built on action resists collapse. When people act — when they pray, repent, give, teach — they generate feedback loops of meaning and efficacy. Even small acts reinforce agency; agency, in turn, mitigates despair. Shapira understands that meaning accrues through practice, and that hope that is felt viscerally grows from muscle memory as much as from conviction.
Yet Shapira’s ethic is not an injunction to heroic self-sufficiency. The rope we throw is itself a plea, a supplication. Its aim is relational: to reach God, to be changed by relationship, and to allow that change to shape how we treat one another. The climb is thus a spiritual ladder and a moral education. As we pull ourselves upward, we learn humility and interdependence; we discover that ascent is less about individual status and more about becoming fit channels for compassion and justice.
Finally, Shapira’s image counsels patience. Climbing takes time. The rope will fray; knots must be tied anew. Hope will falter and must be recommitted. But the daily re-throwing of the rope — the repeated recommitment to prayer, study, and loving action — is itself the mark of faithfulness.
Even when outcomes remain uncertain, the uprightness of the effort matters. Doing what is right to do, with hope, is both ethics and resistance.
In sum, Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira offers a hope that is neither passive nor magical, neither sentimental nor merely strategic.
It is a hope rooted in practice: a rope of small disciplines, moral habits, and communal care thrown toward the Divine. To climb that rope is to accept responsibility for one’s own interior formation and for the welfare of others, to sustain faith through action, and to hold fast to meaning even when the world unravels. That is a hope fit for the most perilous times — a hope that, like the rope itself, invites us to reach, to climb, and to pull one another up.
In PEI and Nova Scotia there was a time when the sighting of a Bald Eagle was very rare - a lot of people saying they had never seen one. That has changed dramatically over the last 20-30 years as Bald Eagles, while still not commonplace, can be seen on a regular basis. Recovery efforts and conservation protections help as they did for the Trumpeters. Success stories like this, as Dan indicated, get lost in the daily grind of crime, wars, egomaniacs, etc that have become too commonplace,
Three reasons for hope: the rapid progress in fighting cancer via vaccines that can be targeted to the person and their tumour; the progress in achieving efficient and scalable desalination for use in agriculture; the similar rate of progress in achieving low-cost, geographically-dispersed, base load geothermal energy
What a hopeful comment, Dan. Thank you for it. I was totally unaware of the history of the trumpeter.
And, yes, the picture of the mute swan is superb.
Merci!
I think this is a key reason why I value reading your pieces on Substack - current events are much more complex and nuanced then we generally have time to look into with historical origins that are far from the binary takes we are provided by those stumping for their team.
Linked to your point about a negativity bias, we often get locked into specific perspectives early in life and if negative can colour how we continue to see things no matter what changes. Every time I turned around as a kid, the only sense I had of Africa was of an ill-defined darkness punctuated by starving children being ravaged by disease. From that moment on, even into adulthood, this was the predominant way I could think of Africa.
Of course, its not that there was not great need and trying to get people to help was wrong. It just meant that it is hard to consider the richness of the 50+ countries multiple cultures, languages, etc., when your view is clouded. And you tend not to see real people but problems. Yet, the improvements in poverty rates, disease eradication and reproductive health have been enormous across the developing world, even as it is important to recognize that more can be done.
Interestingly, there can be a converse tendency to view progress as being irreversible. This was something that struck me when Mr. Trump was first elected. It brought home to me there was a real risk that what I was trying to ensure I could now see as genuine forward momentum could in fact be turned around.
Environmentalist Bill McKibbon reports in his latest book and also in an interview on CBC radio’s The Current that solar energy will be the major supplier of electrical energy in the world by 2040. His example: Pakistan’s huge turn to cheap Chinese made solar panels to power wells, businesses etc prompted the government to cancel a large LNG contract and pay the penalty because they just don’t need it. Renewable energy like this should happen sooner - but it will happen. This was the first time I heard an environmentalist give me hope. Real hope.
The Migratory Birds Convention Treaty between Canada and the United States is probably one of the most successful conservation measure undertaken. Migratory birds have recovered to such a degree that now we are seeing significant overpopulations of geese, particularly snow geese, who are now causing significant damage to their tundra nesting grounds in the Arctic.
I know environmental doomerism has been popular for the last 20 years, but the air and water, for the most part is much cleaner now than it was in the 1960’s, when significant pollution controls were implemented. But people still focus on the declines rather than the incremental improvements.
I had the great pleasure of being in Marsh Lake, Yukon Territory, in April of last year and saw the Trumpeter swans 'resting' there, part of their annual migration north. It was so beautiful - a truly memorable moment! Thank you for the full story!
All that you write is true, but there's also the issue of relative scale. As in, imagine just hypothetically Trump declares himself King Donald The First, imposes martial law, and starts shipping people off to be tortured in concentration camps in El Salvador. Someone could say "Don't despair. Trump won't live forever. Remember, this too shall pass. The Third Reich didn't last a thousand years. Someday this will all be history, then ancient history.". And that's all true. But I'm not the kind of person who would find it much comfort in the MAGA camps.
All true. I'm certainly not one to say, "smiles, everyone!" But ultimately what matters is the we never quit. And to the extent that reminders of good things happening in the world help make us resilient, and keep kicking, I think that's all to the good.
I follow the advances in green energy. Solar and wind, with battery storage, are now the cheapest forms of energy. The US Republican Party is in total denial, but the free market will win eventually.
Hans Rosling's (founder of Our World in Data and Gapminder) book "Factfulness" was very inspirational and impactful for me https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness-book/. This video of his, granted, it was made 15 years ago, shows great progress. Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats - BBC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo