The past week's flooding in Calgary and elsewhere in southern Alberta has been described as "historic" and "unprecedented." In fact, it was Premier Alison Redford herself who uttered the latter superlative to describe her province's most recent natural disaster. While it would be unfair to make a direct connection, we can only hope Premier Redford can at least draw a crooked line connecting the province's most lucrative industry, her own government's policies toward it, and the event itself.
We don't, for a moment, think most Albertans are climate change deniers - you know, those who think accelerating average global temperatures aren't at least partly human-caused and are, instead, merely a conspiracy of unscrupulous scientists fudging the facts as a way to land fat government research grants so they can keep researching er, y'know, fudging the facts.
Still, it's interesting that such a flood should strike the very city that has the biggest stake in the fossil fuel industry -in Canada, if not North America. We don't mean to minimize the struggles of the hundreds of thousands affected by the disaster -some of them are our friends, after all. We sincerely hope the organizers of the "Hell or High Water" Calgary Stampede can make good on their clever, defiant marketing slogan and help citizens coalesce, clean up and carry on with even greater resolve than before the flood.
While climatologists tell us it's impossible to draw a direct correlation, it seems obvious to this writer that events such as this one - or Superstorm Sandy before it -are on the verge of becoming the new normal. And while the Alberta and Canadian governments aren't the only ones to blame for that, they're among the world's most egregious examples of leaders far more interested in promoting short-term profit for the few over the long-term interest of the planet.
Locally, the Alberta floods should be seen as yet another wake-up call to our own community. Is that supposed "one-in-200-year" flood we experienced in 2003 about to become much more commonplace? Or is the next "big one" bound to be even bigger? Preparedness -where it comes to both our families and to our local flood-protection infrastructure -can't be stressed enough.
- David Burke
