The previous day had been very dry, and in the town, some garden maintenance had begun. At four-thirty in the morning, I was awakened. By what? In the dark, lifting the shades, there it was, a blizzard driving the snow sideways, the dry yellow grass of spring covered and the trees thrashing wildly. Behind me, a printer began beeping, signaling the power faltering. Then everything but the wind went silent. Old thoughts of the implications became confused in my half-sleeping mind. I knew some things might need to be done before I could sleep again, but what?

Thoughts of lying in bed as a child where the winter winds turning the windows into whistles, peering out, and seeing the snow dance under the lights emerged. In the dark I listened to the radio read out the weather one small town after another. Then looking around, I wondered what might freeze in the car and break. Then it occurred to me it is not below zero even though it is snowing.

Lying back in bed unable to fall asleep again, I got up to get breakfast, but no coffee today just cold cereal. I turned the tap to rinse the dishes, no pressure; I filled a drinking cup, then the tap was dry. No water, no electricity, no heat, no internet, I checked my cell, which still had a charge, and found all the highways closed for at least two hours in any direction. Then realized I likely did not have enough gas left in the tank and the pumps would not be working either. What a strange reaction. I knew clearly everything will pass soon, best to stay put. I and those around me in the snow-locked houses were all interdependent until the blizzard subsided. This brought to mind Stegner’s characters in Wolf Willow on a cattle drive caught on the bench in such a storm, struggled down into this valley to find shelter.

A mile more, Ray said. But the river led them a long time around an exposed loop. He had all he could do to force himself into the blast of snow and wind that faded and luffed only to howl in their faces again more bitterly than ever. When Spurlock, stumbling like a sleepwalker, hung back or sagged, trying to sit down, Rusty felt Panguingue’s strength and heard Panguingue’s stout cursing. His own face was so stiff that he felt he could not have spoken, even to curse, if he tried; he lost all feeling in his lips and chin. His inhuman hook dragged at Spurlocks’s waist rope, he threw his shoulders forward, and he put foot after foot, not merely imbecilic now with cold and exhaustion but nearly mindless, watching not the feet ahead, for there were none now, with three of them abreast and Buck trailing behind… Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow

The cold of the house brought me out of this remembrance; I put on boots and a coat to retrieve the sleeping bags from the car. Later in the afternoon, awakening on the couch in the sleeping bag, nothing had changed. Later we found warmth with generous neighbours, who had hot coffee, a generator, and warm food. The conversation ranged from family histories to past and present struggles in these freak spring blizzards; the danger to the calves born on the bench; whether the ground was thawed enough for the much-needed moisture to soak into the soil and not run over the frozen ground and into the valley; the wait for the snowplows to get through; why the new water plant pump had failed; and recollections of the hillside cistern’s ability to ride out the power failures. We are far too dependent on these increasingly centralized systems, having decommissioned the old ways that worked.

I am in a modernized house surrounded by the safety of other homes. Cars are running on the streets, and just now the snowplow rockets through the main road. The electricity clicks on, and then noises about the house as the electronics and clocks come back to life. It is time to sleep again, and I collapse into bed.

In the morning, I go to refill my tank. I bundle up and go out into the driving snow. It is very wet just below the snow, the temperature well above freezing even though the falling snow is dry. Turning onto the main street the end of the third block disappears into the swirls. I pull into the pumps, step out and smell fresh chicken frying; I lift the lever and grab the handle of the pump. The clicking of the liters and the smell of the kitchen mix with the swirling snow. Things are awakening again. Inside she says as I tap to pay, “I thought I would take a risk and start up the oven to do some cooking, given the blackout yesterday I was not sure.” Aside from the chicken, there were fresh donuts, and other baked goods. I thought to ask about the highway. “Well, there’s a semi jackknifed on the highway going East, and they haven’t yet plowed it to the West, best to stay put” she says.

We write, to make sense of it all. Wallace Stegner

This morning I walked out on the highway up to the point where 100km turns to 40km. The point at which you slowly wind down peacefully into Eastend. The farm off to my left, as I turn to walk back into town, has since 1914 weathered the harsh transitions of weather, war and now climate change. The wind is steady and almost calm in the way it feels on my skin and it is the only sound on the empty road.  

Reaching the final turn into town the riverside water purification building lies behind an earthen high-water dyke next to the satellite dishes pulling down the town’s 25 megabits per minute internet. Removing the need for rooftop catchments into basement cisterns, and bringing the chaos of our times into the lives of the town. Although I am sure many of the residents do not indulge too busy running rigs to the farm with the radio on or pursuing their passions into their twilight years. The streets are mostly empty as nothing green has emerged since the snow has receded.    

Turning onto Rail Street or highway 614 I depart from the Red Coat Trail that brought the Metis, farmers and new governance into the West. The street is a collection of small businesses and homes and runs parallel to the rail line for five blocks till it reaches the grain elevator, the recreation centre and the inland grain terminal, at which point it turns to link back up to the Red Coat Trail and the way out of town.

Halfway down the road, a side door slams shut and a man takes the two steps off his porch onto his driveway filled with historical objects he has saved from the scrappers. He is selling them to preserve them. These lie beside his current project a handmade car body made a long time ago on a farm set on a Ford Model T frame. It will be a two-seater one day he tells me, and it gives me something to do. The phone rings and it is the hospital arranging another visit for treatments. All those years designing fossil fuel plants, working on jet engines, and later teaching these skills at university did this lead to this call, it did not seem right to ask? Preserving farm mechanical objects from a time before cars draw me back to a more peaceful, simpler time with some harsher realities. Lying beside the trailer is an old hand-operated water pump, a small wood-burning stove, and a steel pump perhaps to bring water up and out from the river. 

Saying goodbye I continue my walk along the quiet streets the sun has warmed the valley and I unbutton my coat as I pass the church advertising-free bread and coffee on Monday mornings. One man stands by the door as a woman with a walker descends the steps and passes me with a good morning. Back on the main street or rather Red Coat Drive, I turn toward home thinking of toast and coffee to fill the distance between mid-morning and lunch.

Across the street are the usual collection of refurbished, modernized houses that are a contrast to the older buildings awaiting sale and a new owner who will spend his or her time “fixing it up.” The sky still looks like snow to me but it has looked this way for many days, the dryness persists. The only water is in the Frenchman I see from the window at the back of the house where I am writing. On the shelf are literature journals, novels, gallery magazines, and in the drawers of the table watercolour trays, bookmark stickers, notepaper, and other items from other artists and writers. In the hall, the library is filled with literature and publications left by others who have worked here. There is a creak near the window as the internet line strung from the Tamarac to the house bounces in the wind. I pause to take the last sip of my morning coffee.

On the window sill beside the desk is the following quotation in a frame titled a prayer:

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed, if we permit the last virgin forest to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.

Wallace Stegner

The sun is strong today and warm but still some chill in the air with a brilliant uninterrupted blue sky. At the grain elevators, I run into a gentleman walking his dog a newcomer in the last six years. Bought a house on the main street Red Coat Drive. A Reiki master he tells me among many other skills. Retire at seventy with new eyes behind ophthalmologist sunglasses is out walking his dog. After years on the West Coast, this Icelander from Manitoba has settled in with his Mexican rescue dog and wife in this small town, to learn its ways. 

As we talk my mind wanders to the abandoned house the night before up on the highway, full of years of equipment and vehicles. I wonder at the reasons, perhaps they just built a new house across the way and left this one to wind, or had they moved? Perhaps the town was more comfortable in the Valley, or as someone told me the land could have been drawn into a larger operation.

He tells me the town was once 1500 people with three car dealerships, and many more businesses selling farm equipment. Now the now 503 are living in this valley 85 kilometers from the border. He tells me it’s the third year of drought, throwing ranchers into survival mode. Selling cattle before they calved, he says, is not sustainable and very hard to recover from. Also, he says the water in town is also expensive, I think to myself so is mine. His house had cisterns in the basement used to gather water from the roof. Now he says it is not unusual to see others pump water into a reservoir on their pickups from the Frenchman River. 

My mind wanders again wondering how much of the abandoned farm equipment I have seen in the fields around me, was from this town? We keep reinventing things then we cast the old aside, and rearrange and adapt to the inevitable change it brings. It is a constant forward movement, with a few individuals preserving where we have been, the history that should keep us from reliving mistakes. The conversation comes to an end and we part company.

At the corner, someone is raking the winter from the lawn, a wilderness guide who after hearing about this special town, uprooted and move to settle into this quiet and peaceful town, and in the evenings take in the sunset at Jone’s Peak; or the river at Ravenscrag which meanders poetically with the boundaries of the valley.

My mind wanders again thinking of the porcelain peeking out of the hillsides, and the potters gathering clay to mix in their potteries. How in the schoolhouse basement there used to be pottery classes. How a ceramic artist wearing his Order of Canada pin walked these slopes in his blue jean tuxedo stooping to feel the different clays in his hand and reveling in the richness of his country.

…there is little to interrupt the eye. Roads run straight between parallel lines of fence until they intersect the circle of the horizon. It is a landscape of circles, radi, perspective exercises — a country of geometry.
Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow

i

Just settling into Eastend a small town two and a half hours SE of Medicine Hat.  To the Southeast of the Cypress Hills nestled in a river valley invisible from the rolling prairie plateau.

During the drive, the high cumulus clouds off in the distance with purplish curtains stretching out toward the ground reaching downward and becoming thinner as it descended. Thirty minutes later I reached the curtain, snow so thin in the crosswind raced across the highway to be lost in the dry yellow grass. Then as quickly as it began it was gone. 

Turning off the main highway to a two-lane car-less road heading South, then dropping down from the Cypress Hills ridge, a coulee appears as the road begins to drop. The Frenchman River valley appears around the last bend. The valley floor was absolutely flat, a drained shallow lake created by a canal tucked against the valley walls, and cattle dotted across its expanse. Then the engine begins to labour up the other side and we came out of the valley onto the high prairie to be buffeted by the wind. Then after some time, I disengage the cruise as the “T” intersection rushes toward me. I turn left next to an abandoned farm and the car is pointing due East, I look down at the dash it says thirty more minutes of the seventeen-hour drive. 

Nearing Eastend we descended back into the Frenchman river valley again, this time from the South, passed exposed coloured clay beds looking out from under dry grass. Then there we were in Eastend on the old Red Coat trail. 

In the morning walking along the river and down the streets I could see both the Coop and the Rexall had closed. Yet there is a convince store and a small private grocery store that has everything you need. The convenience store has two gas pumps out front one for diesel and one for regular, anything else is just too expensive. I slid the flap over the opening removed the nozzle and filled the tank before going inside to pay. No electronics no advertisements or pitches for a car wash with extras. 

There is an operating grain elevator owned by Jim who got it from his father and had it passed down from his father. In the morning they gather in the office for long conversations over coffee. It stands next to a more modern-looking superstructure or inland grain terminal.

Many of the shops in town are closed but there is a stunning museum, churches, and a day surgery medical clinic, with extended care beds. Each house seems to have a service from pottery to hairstyling and car repair.  A neatly woven community safe and comfortable, with a love for the arts, history and phalotology.

Near the river’s edge, there is an outdoor pool with a water slide and a small golf course across a small suspended bridge. Across the street, the library, school, tea room, and bingo hall. There was evidence of oil in the fields as we drove in but the town seems to have no evidence of that industry in its streets.

Near the Stegner house, the river takes a wide arc and embraces the campground, picnic area, baseball diamonds all empty this time of year and the ground are as bare as the trees that follow the path of the river. The house built in 1917 by Stegners father just two years from the founding year of the town was built during the war years when wheat was needed to feed the troops and country. But his father abandoned the home they built after four years of failed crops. It is a dry windy area prone to lengthy droughts, but a serene and calm oasis in our modern world.

Fifty-two days with no measurable rain, and suddenly the blazing blue sky is filled with rain clouds. But by 10 am at Turkey Point, the clouds were wringing the last drops onto the sidewalk as I walked through the steam rushing across the parking lot. Out on the shore, a cluster of people are walking on the wet sands of a low tide… no, it’s paddleboards just off the kelp beds a passing boat reveals.

Above the clouds were still dark and rolling, wringing out the last rain in the distance. I reach the stairs at the harbour breakwater and descend to the small beach with large granite boulders towering above me. A boat full throttle is on the water heading into the narrow opening between the breakwater and the Mary Tod Islet.

The rocks above me are overflowing with plants dripping with rain.

Return to the breakwater path, the sun suddenly breaks through, lighting up a kayaker pushing out into the strait.

The pleasure of this morning is temporarily broken as thoughts of the next heat dome, no longer a fifty-year event, now punctuating this summer several times in a diminishing crescendo. The planet is reacting violently to our actions. It is at war with our species.

Later, when the sky’s clear and the wind picks up, bending the trees. The hawk with fully extended feathers is wiped sideways in a gust and then regains its drift in the sky. I look at the ground, wondering if the rain is enough or is there dust just below the surface. Then the news floods back, “Code red for mankind” read the headline. On the next page, British Columbia and Canada are, doubling our fossil fuel output through a new pipeline. To pay for our energy transition, says our Rhode scholar climate change Minister! It is too late for this kind of thinking.

A few days later, walking on the dry grass under the blazing blue sky again, it is impossible to avoid remembering what is on the news as every step is a reminder. Evacuation warnings have gone out to small towns and cities as fires burn out of control. We are still at the largest tipping point we have seen yet. The language on the news is expressing alarm, but we are still not acting.

Walking down the road into a small bay, alone paddleboarder is moving toward the moored boats and kelp beds. The sun has brought the temperature up. I can feel in the early morning the heat that should not be there. The night before had cooled with the wind off the sea, but not as cool as it should be in August.

The next day I awake to the headline Nowhere to Run. The reporter has read the latest UN report on global limits. We are rocketing past any safe limit, and environmental damage is unavoidable. In the North, we are warming three times faster than the South. The ice melts are accelerating beyond any of our estimates. There is a 40-year delay before we will discover the outcome of what we have done today, then centuries before we can turn anything around.

Now that mother nature is working hard to reduce our numbers, why are we not dramatically changing course. What is it about the possibility of extinction that does not trigger our survival instincts? I am not sure in the future I can revel in the summer heat as I did in my youth, knowing what I now know it means.

On the point, Plein air painters are scattered across the rocks deep in concentration. They are clear in the foreground, everything else is obscured by the smoke in a sickly dullness, and the Olympic snow-capped peaks across the strait have completely disappeared. We are now breathing the most polluted air on the planet.

Old poems are swirling in my head:

Our dried voices, when
    We whisper together
    Are quiet and meaningless
    As wind in dry grass
    Or rats’ feet over broken glass
    In our dry cellar

It has been over 40 days with no rain, and I am walking under an old tree canopy towards the cove—the last remnants of the native forest that escaped the surrounding developments. The trees follow the road, which follows the swale in the land beneath Minnie Mountain, an ancient pathway lined with 60-foot Arbutus trees, their limbs reaching back for centuries.

Descending, I emerge onto the smooth pebbles of the beach, in a horseshoe-shaped cove, guarded by rock outcrops on either side. The water is calm and still like the clear sky, reminding me of extreme heat. Over my morning coffee, I read of a fisherman who was no longer fishing, he has turned to rescue thousands of salmon fry trapped in dried-out mud pools. He is standing with his bucket in Swift Creek, where only a trickle of water runs from one pond to another. Beside this story was a photograph of a farmer tilling his soil, he wears a particulate respirator as he moves through the cloud of dust.

Walking along the gravel, my thoughts are interrupted by the circular formation in front of me. The staves of a gunpowder barrel emerged after a hundred years, the remnant of the 1895 explosive factory. The locals say it has some relationship to the pig wars and the US attack on the San Juan Islands, leading to their loss.

I look up at the surrounding homes, such a different world from the factory and the small farm of 1895. On the rock outcrops, mansions sprawl commanding views of the strait beyond the mouth of the cove. But why has the barrel emerged?

Circling the remains, I walk till I reach the rocks at the far side. I am alone except for a couple who stopped to rest on a log. Under a canopy of Arbutus and Garry Oak trees that weave around the rocks, I, too, move erratically on the rocks. Their dance becomes my dance.

My thoughts returning to the mega-fire pyrocumulus clouds in the interior. Something people believed could only occur during a severe volcanic eruption, now the fires are sending smoke and particulates into the stratosphere. It’s a tipping point that scientists warned would rapidly deepen our environmental crisis.

Turning back toward the beach, I run across the emerging pylons of the old dock and mention it to another on the beach. He stops, looks at me and then tells me of his 40 years of watching over this cove. He points to the large smooth rock that emerges from the beach and the bay. “Those rocks were under the beach.” Up until 2015, people came with pickup trucks to get free gravel, so over the years, the receding beach’s ecosystem has waned, and the sea has moved inland, eroding the heart of the bay. He points to the signs at the entranceway and says that point of land used to be where the rocks have emerged. The keystone species for the salmon that once thrived here are almost gone.

I am lost in my thoughts as he talks about our disconnection from nature. The dynamite factory and its explosion did not destroy this ecosystem, but over the last few decades, an ecological desert in what looks like a pristine environment. He talks about visitors who wonder why the seaweed is not cleaned from the beach, a critical component of nutrients swept back in the cove to nurture new life. This is the disconnect that eroded the ecological harmony of the cove.

Now smooth stones are trucked in every year, temporarily preventing the sea from seeking its old angle of repose. As I turn to walk back down the beach, mulling over my new understanding of the cove, readings percolate again: ecologists that study live ecological system are now coroner’s recording its death; the wildfires that at midsummer have burned more than twice the forest they burned all of last year, and the story that hit me hard. Top scientists of the world warning that multiple tipping points are “imminent.” Imminent, I am already see tipping points all around me, the destruction of the very ecological systems that give us clean water, air to breathe and food to eat. They are here, and we have entered the unknown; what else could it mean when the ice melted on Greenland in one day this summer was enough water to cover Florida with 5 cm of water, or the whole continent and Southern Europe is covered with smoke altering the sunlight to a sickly yellow.

I look out onto the water. Noticing the distant green buoy that marks the drop-off point to the deep water where the shipping lanes send coal and our forests overseas. Lanes that will carry the tripling of the tar sands and LNG. Through this lane and out into the world, we are contributing to the collapsing ecological systems of the world. Only a few understand what has happened to this cove, and so we seem to carry on. The tides that rush from the deepwater still swirl into the bay, bringing nutrients to feed the ecosystem. The natural systems are at work and are turning against us.

It is evening and I am walking over the smoothed pebbled foreshore at high tide toward a weathered log to sit and watch the colours set in before dark. The bay is calm except for the quiet conversations of others watching the scene. As I look out I see some movement on the boat moored in the bay near the kelp beds, and in the distance, the Fraser valley mountains are outlined above the gulfs islands. It is very calm quiet and restful and the thoughts of earlier in the day are now distant.

In the early morning, I had been reading about the mega-fires in the interior that were approaching the main hydro and gas lines from the North. These thin lines run from the northern gas fields, whose leaking wellheads are fueling these fires, to almost every house in the South. A fragile line that allows us to ride out future more sustained and intense heat domes.

Later I found myself walking on the tinder-dry grass by the ocean, nothing was green. I walked out onto a small peninsula and stopped to look at the clouds that spread out towards me from the snow-capped Olympic mountains. It is dry, hot and I can not remember when it last rained, was it a month ago? Even then the last rain barely wet the ground. Yes, what would happen as these events escalate and those electrical and gas lines are severed more and more frequently?

Winding my way through the yellow grass following a path around the rounded edges of the stones that emerge from the grass, couples are sitting distanced on the benches scattered around the rise I am climbing. With the exception of one lone runner passing, it is still. I am thinking how the internet is not a single thin line but a series of webs and nodes. Not prone to fail catastrophically like that fragile lines that power it.

The path narrows and approaching the stairs to the beach I walk beside the stairs, and carefully find my way down beside the stairs to given the people ascending the necessary 6 feet. There on the beach is an elderly man in a toque and jacket passing those cooling themselves in the water and sunbathing. It reminds me of how fragile he is and how we too are fragile in these extremes of heat and cold, of how dependent we are on this tenuous centralized energy system. Why have we not move past this archaic method of creating and delivering energy, likely they will not survive the tipping points bringing on new extremes?

I turn from the beach into a cool tree canopy and onto another staircase, again I move over onto the grass to give those descending a safe space. This time there is a thank you as I make my way up across the grass and turn into a nearby street. At the corner, there is a cluster of trees interwoven and thriving. Their interconnection reminds me of what Dr. Suzanne Simard is exploring in her mother tree project. The complex network or web trees create to ensure survival, the strong sending life-giving nutrients to the weak. Why would we not design our energy systems in the same ways as these trees? How is it that trees see this necessity and we do not?

We are stuck in a century-old paradigm trying to overcome inertia. We know that net-zero plus houses can push energy back into the grid and this energy can be stored in household battery systems and cars. We have windows and roofs that can now act as solar panels. We have invented small geothermal neighbourhood closed-loop systems that can produce electricity 24 hours a day. Implementing these ideas would seem the thing to do, yet we are still going in the wrong direction.

Returning along the cliff the trail winds through the dry grass along the rocky shore, I stop and watch the sailboat healing sightly in the wind. Then press on in the heat.

This morning’s wind is clear and cool in the aftermath of the heat dome. As I walk across the scorched grass and over the smoothed rock, a small stunted grove of trees struggles up out of the yellowed grass above the weathered driftwood. This patch of gnarled branches and deep green leaves anchors my senses, washing away for a moment, thoughts about what I had been reading before setting out, what various scientists had discovered and published in disconnected pockets of news. The relief the wind brings settled my mind, but deep down, I am waiting. I remember the yellow skies of previous summers and fine particulates permeating everything, including my lungs, where they are still embedded. There was no escape and no relief. 

Moving away from the grove, I pass parked cars pointed toward the strait. Through one window, a person upright in their seat. Head tilted back at an uncomfortable angle, eyes hidden behind sunglasses and mouth ajar in a deep sleep. Others are looking out, sipping on coffee, looking toward Puget Sound and the cloud bank forming over Haro strait, while others read the morning news on their iPhones.

Again my thoughts turn to what I had read, a “positive feedback loop,” ironically a very negative thing. In other words, a climate change event that continues to accelerate, using its negative energy to increase in severity.

Walking up onto the rock outcrop, a lone individual sits frozen, only his thin blonde hair moving in the wind. I wonder what is passing through his mind? Is he contemplating the tipping point that can be cobble together from the disparate pieces of scientific news? Is this what was being studied on the iPhones in the parked cars? Or was it a desperate event in his life that left him to sit alone on this hard bench in the morning winds?  

I look out onto the strait myself watching the waves, and in that direction, the town of Lytton’s temperature rose to 50C for three days straight, within five degrees of the world record set in Furnace Creek Death Valley last year. A fire erupted so quickly that it became difficult to find a way to put it out. I see nothing but the blue sky and summer haze on the water in the distance, no sign of the smoke from this fire. The article I read said at 30C, if water had been dropped from a helicopter to put those flames out, it would have created a downdraft that would have accelerated the fire, instead of putting it out, like pouring gasoline on a fire. It went on, fire retardant the next line of defence only works when the fire is smaller than a football field. Once it is more extensive, there is no way to extinguish it. A climate change mega-fire is beyond our control.

Walking into the narrow path under the low green canopy arching over me, I recalled in 2017, a mega-fire burned 75 percent of Waterton Park in eight hours, leaving behind hills so bare they closed the national park fearing landslides from the exposed slopes. 

I look out over the strait again as I emerge from the path, studying the clouds looking for signs of approaching smoke. Reminded that the Lytton fire also induced thunderstorms that causing 12,000 lightning strikes over 24 hours and starting 70 new forest fires. Smoke from the mega-fire accelerated with such force that it shot right past the lower atmosphere into the stratosphere, where it should not be. It was the trigger for more lightning firestorms—an altitude reserved for massive volcanic eruptions.

I turn again to walk along the shoreline across the tinder-dry yellow grass to see if the leaves on these trees have curled and died like the Arbutus grove we saw last night in its death throngs. 

If these fires become large enough, the clouds blot out the sun, nuclear winter sets in arresting photosynthesis, with widespread impacts on plant and animal life. At some point, there is the real possibility of global agricultural losses. 

Isn’t this one of the tipping points predicted for the next decade? It is upon us now, making the scientific models wrong about how fast mother nature will extinguish us as we have failed to act. Mike Flannagan and Charlie Van Wagner predict a 50 percent increase in fire severity and a doubling of CO2 emissions as a result. In other words, we need to panic!

Then there is our “sudden death rate” in BC during the heat dome, which overran our hospital’s capacity, the massive bird die-off in Washington state, and the billion seashore animals that cooked to death on our shores. 

Like those in the cars, I turn to my iPhone, a friend is writing, “why are our leaders not listening, not acting, not declaring an emergency, as we did for the pandemic? I begin to respond perhaps this is something our elders might help us with but pause, reminded that we are both now elders…