Camping this year distilled some of my thoughts about the made-in-China syndrome, about which I've cartooned a lot of late. Here we were, in one of Ontario's most glorious parks, and people are doing their utmost to buffer themselves from their environment.

The beach was riddled with fold-up chairs, digital cameras, iPods, all manner of blowup toys; campsites were jammed with astro-turf, bright lights, every comfort from home -- all now considered necessary to mediate our experience of nature. We are further domesticating ourselves. We crave the wild because it is an essential part of our psyches, but we are incapable of experiencing it first-hand anymore. We look at nature through a lens. We remove ourselves from warm, flat rocks with chairs.

This is possible, in part, because stuff from China is too cheap, not reflecting the true costs to health, environment and workers, allowing most of us to afford it all. And all this stuff needs to be transported, so larger and larger cars are necessary. These wreck havoc on the very environment we journey there to "experience."

That's the subtext for this cartoon, which presents another Catch-22: A drug that allows us freedom from worry about the environment actually makes global warming worse, creating more reasons to worry.

Gaiagra is fictional (barely). Some readers may not have caught the wordplay on Gaia, the Greek Earth goddess. It also refers to the Gaia hypothesis by James Lovelock that the Earth's biological processes can be considered that of a single, highly complex organism.

I was surprised to discover that Gaiagra hadn't been coined yet. So I purchased gaiagra.com. You never know.

Toronto readers, don't miss the Toronto Comic Arts Festival on August 18-19. I am sharing a booth with my friend, Guelph-based comic book artist and illustrator Nick Craine. I'll be signing copies of my comic book, Attack of the Same-Sex Sleeper Cells, which will be available at a special low price. So if you're in town, be sure to drop by. I'd love to meet you.