Just recently, firefighters put down six wildfires in the Squamish area, there is one new one burning in the Squamish Valley and the Lower Mainland is forecasting more smoke to blow in from the provincial interior, which is mostly on fire, and cover the Vancouver area in smog.
Squamish is also hazy from wildfires.
The climate crisis is real.
And while it has often been thought that it would predominantly be poorer nations close to the equator bearing the brunt of the problem — and many are, as some are literally sinking from sea-level rise — the recent record-breaking heatwave has killed enough people in B.C. that it’s now obvious that a nation as rich as ours is not insulated from the worst effects of climate change.
B.C.’s chief coroner, Lisa Lapointe, said that during the heatwave, 570 of the 815 sudden deaths recorded over that time period — about 70% — were the result of heat.
It strikes me as rather strange, then, that it’s still an open debate over whether climate change is a thing.
Before, the idea of global warming was relegated to theory, and it was, for many of us, an abstraction.
It was something that Al Gore talked about in a video.
it was a scientific paper that you got the Coles Notes version of.
It was numbers, charts and figures.
For many people, it was a “theory.”
But now things have changed.
It is no longer an abstraction that people can say they haven’t experienced, because all of us in Squamish have already felt the effects.
The temperature during the first heatwave this year was choking.
Shannon Falls looks anemic. Tons of rock have fallen off the Stawamus Chief. Six wildfires have already occurred in the last two weeks.
And this is the logical next step of a trend that’s been going on for years now.
Smoke from wildfires across the province has routinely blanketed our town, driving up air quality alerts and causing breathing problems.
At this point, the evidence is right in front of us.
We no longer need statistics, research papers, or experts to tell us what’s going on right now.
It’s clear.
The planet is burning.
And if we keep turning this into a political issue, we will be arguing as the world burns down around us.
