Living through a summer of crisis - Keith Roulston editorial
As this is written, early in the week, weather forecasters are predicting that by the time this paper is published, Ontario will be sizzling under a heat alert with high temperatures made worse by high humidity. This certainly has been one of the most extreme summers I can remember in seven decades.
This heat has seeped northward from the southern U.S. where it has been setting records for weeks. Similarly, China and Japan have been suffering under extreme heat and, in the tourist hotspots of southern Europe, such as Italy and Greece, tourists can only see sites from ancient history in the early morning, because they are closed in the heat of the day.
But, as this heat dominates world headlines, Canada’s news is dominated this weekend by stories of terrifying floods, as some places in Nova Scotia received three months’ worth of rain in 24 hours and people are missing in cars lost in the floodwaters. This is the same province that began our long string of forest fire stories earlier this spring with frightening blazes across the south of Nova Scotia.
Quebec has had similar extremities. A while back, flooding in southeastern Quebec was driving people from their homes at the same time as people in the north of the province were wishing for rain to protect their communities and the forest on fire around them.
I can never remember a year when tinder-dry forests in the north of most provinces have burned at the same time. Forestry analysts say Canada has lost more acreage of forest to fire this year than at any time in recorded history. People in these northern areas have to wonder, as they watch the news, why can’t they get a little of the rain falling on Nova Scotia or southern Quebec or British Columbia, but instead they get dry thunderstorms with the lightning starting even more fires. So far, nearly 900 wildfires are burning across Canada - and we’re just coming into what is traditionally the worst season for wildfires.
And that doesn’t even account for the smoke from those fires. Areas of southern Canada have been suffocated by smoke, with a nine-year-old boy from the community of 100 Mile House, British Columbia dying because his asthma couldn’t withstand breathing in wildfire smoke.
The smoke has sunk well below the border, bringing one of the few times when Canada makes the U.S. headlines as we get blamed for their pollution. Smoke has prompted about 2,500 air quality bulletins since April 1, according to Environment Canada.
Globe and Mail columnist Marsha Lederman writes that human-caused climate change is heating up the planet. Paired with the return of El Niño this year, the results have been disastrous. This is very bad for the economy, as well. According to Forbes magazine, extreme heat could cost the U.S. economy $100-billion U.S. annually - with impacts on not just health care, but also infrastructure and transportation.
Climate change has been spoken and written about for years, yet we’ve done comparatively little to combat it. Government legislators have done too little, yet, what little they have done has been opposed. The federal government brought in a climate tax on gas to discourage us from driving too much, but the Ontario government reduced its gas tax to counteract the move. Conservative provincial governments across the country have opposed feeble federal moves to reduce the human effect on the planet from climate change. Federal Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre promise to reverse climate change policies imposed by the Liberals.
People my age have contributed a distressingly high amount to the problem. When I was young, I remember only two families that took southern vacations in my village. Now, I have many relatives who take one, two, three or more vacations a year - especially those who have retired on well-paid retirement plans from jobs that helped promote our modern economy.
I remember when nearly all the foods we had on our menu were grown at home, except for oranges, grapefruit and a few other tropical fruits to keep us healthy in winter. Today, we have television shows by the dozen teaching us the pleasure of eating exotic imported foods.
Watching TV the other day, at the end of a newscast about the damage done by floods in Nova Scotia and fire and smoke in British Columbia, I was struck by a feature on fear of the future among Canadian teenagers. One girl, who said she dreams of becoming a mother, worried that she shouldn’t bring children into this world of suffering.
Looking at human history, it seems that we have escaped from so much human suffering in our history or in other parts of today’s world, yet, strangely, we haven’t been wise enough to know when enough is enough. We must begin to live environmentally responsibly if humans can continue to populate the Earth.