• About
    • Which Energy Mix is this?
  • Climate News Network Archive
  • Contact
The climate news that makes a difference.
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
  FEATURED
BP Predicts Faster Oil and Gas Decline as Clean Energy Spending Hits $1.1T in 2022 January 31, 2023
Canada Needs Oil and Gas Emissions Cap to Hit 2030 Goal: NZAB January 31, 2023
Ecuador’s Amazon Drilling Plan Shows Need for Fossil Non-Proliferation Treaty January 31, 2023
Rainforest Carbon Credits from World’s Biggest Provider are ‘Largely Worthless’, Investigation Finds January 31, 2023
Danske Bank Quits New Fossil Fuel Financing January 23, 2023
Next
Prev

Wildfires, Floods Are ‘Exhibit A of This Extreme World’: Klein

September 28, 2017
Reading time: 3 minutes

skeeze / Pixabay

skeeze / Pixabay

 

Author and activist Naomi Klein went home for a visit this August to British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast, just west of Vancouver. In a deeply personal essay for The Tyee, she shares her shocked reflections on the heavy pall of smoke that blanketed the picturesque region for weeks, as the interior of the province burned.

The mainland Sunshine Coast, reachable only by ferry or seaplane and best known to other Canadians as the setting for the fictional adventures of the classic Canadian television series, The Beachcombers, is “where my parents live, where my son was born, and where my grandparents died,” Klein writes. She visited this summer with her husband, filmmaker Avi Lewis, and their five-year-old son, Toma.

  • The climate news you need. Subscribe now to our engaging new weekly digest.
  • You’ll receive exclusive, never-before-seen-content, distilled and delivered to your inbox every weekend.
  • The Weekender: Succinct, solutions-focused, and designed with the discerning reader in mind.
New!
Subscribe

Klein was unprepared for what she found: The sky was white, the air caustic to the throat. “For about four days, it’s as if we are on a different planet, one with two red suns and no moon at all,” she recalls. “At a playground in the haze, I meet a young mother who offers advice on how to reassure worried kids. She tells hers that forest fires are a positive part of the cycle of ecosystem renewal—the burning makes way for new growth, which feeds the bears and deer.”

But that’s not how it seems to Klein. “For years, climate scientists have warned us that a warming world is an extreme world, in which humanity is buffeted by both brutalizing excesses and stifling absences of the core elements that have kept fragile life in equilibrium for millennia. At the end of the summer of 2017—with major cities submerged in water and others licked by flames—we are living through Exhibit A of this extreme world.

“These fires, which rage for months, are of a different order entirely. There are direct impacts. The huge swath of land charred. The tens of thousands of lives overturned by evacuation orders. The lost homes and farms and cattle. The industries—from tourism operators to sawmills—forced to close down.

“Then there are the less direct impacts of all that wandering smoke. Over July and August, the smoke from this conflagration covered an area spanning roughly 700,000 square miles. That’s bigger than all of France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal combined.”

And Klein adds that “this is just one snapshot of a much larger season of fire. The area of Europe that has burned this fire season has been triple the average, and it’s not over yet. In June, more than 60 people died in a blaze near Pedrógão Grande [in Portugal]. Hundreds of homes have burned in Siberia. During Chile’s summer, the country battled the largest wildfire in its recorded history. Even Greenland saw wildfires this summer.”

The signature of climate change due to human activity is unmistakable in these events, as it is in the amplified power of hurricanes like the one that brought Houston to its knees earlier this month, Klein writes.

And in both fire and flood, “we learn the same lesson over and over again: In highly imbalanced societies, with deep inequalities reliably tracing racial fault lines, disasters don’t bring us all together in one fuzzy human family. They take pre-existing divides and deepen them further, so the people who were already getting most screwed over before the disaster get extra doses of pain during and after.”

As late as the Labour Day weekend, Klein notes, more than 160 fires were still burning in British Columbia.

“Our collective house is on fire, with every alarm going off simultaneously, clanging desperately for our attention,” she concludes. “Will we keep stumbling and wheezing through the low light, acting as if the emergency is not already upon us? Or will the warnings be enough to force many more of us to listen?

“Those are the questions still hanging in the air at the end of this summer of smoke.”



in Canada, Climate Action / "Blockadia", Climate Impacts & Adaptation, Drought, Famine & Wildfires, Health & Safety, International

The latest climate news and analysis, direct to your inbox

Subscribe

Related Posts

Mike Mozart/Flickr
Ending Emissions

BP Predicts Faster Oil and Gas Decline as Clean Energy Spending Hits $1.1T in 2022

February 4, 2023
329
Gina Dittmer/PublicDomainPictures
Canada

Canada Needs Oil and Gas Emissions Cap to Hit 2030 Goal: NZAB

January 31, 2023
196
CONFENIAE
Ending Emissions

Ecuador’s Amazon Drilling Plan Shows Need for Fossil Non-Proliferation Treaty

January 31, 2023
61

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.

Trending Stories

Sam Balto/YouTube

Elementary School’s Bike Bus Brings ‘Sheer Joy’ to Portland Neighbourhood

October 16, 2022
261
RL0919/wikimedia commons

Danske Bank Quits New Fossil Fuel Financing

January 23, 2023
2.4k
Mike Mozart/Flickr

BP Predicts Faster Oil and Gas Decline as Clean Energy Spending Hits $1.1T in 2022

February 4, 2023
329

Recent Posts

Gina Dittmer/PublicDomainPictures

Canada Needs Oil and Gas Emissions Cap to Hit 2030 Goal: NZAB

January 31, 2023
196
CONFENIAE

Ecuador’s Amazon Drilling Plan Shows Need for Fossil Non-Proliferation Treaty

January 31, 2023
61
Ken Teegardin www.SeniorLiving.Org/flickr

Virtual Power Plants Hit an ‘Inflection Point’

January 31, 2023
125
/snappy goat

Rainforest Carbon Credits from World’s Biggest Provider are ‘Largely Worthless’, Investigation Finds

January 31, 2023
94
Victorgrigas/wikimedia commons

World Bank Climate Reforms Too ‘Timid and Slow,’ Critics Warn

January 31, 2023
42
Doc Searls/Twitter

Guilbeault Could Intervene on Ontario Greenbelt Development

January 31, 2023
132
Next Post
skyseeker/Flickr

Bali Volcano Eruption Could Briefly Reduce Atmospheric Warming

The Energy Mix - The climate news you need

Copyright 2023 © Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy and Copyright
  • Cookie Policy

Proudly partnering with…

scf_withtagline
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities

Copyright 2022 © Smarter Shift Inc. and Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

Manage Cookie Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}