Canadian Wildfires 2023

 There were a few things I wanted to blog about, but I guess I've got to talk about the wildfires.

Due to the dry weather this year, forests in Nova Scotia and Quebec have come up in flames. The fires have spread rapidly and gotten out of control. The resulting smoke has wafted into many nearby cities. In Kitchener, a haze formed over the sky and there's been a kind of campfire smell. 

Our family Whatsapp chat has been popping, with everyone exchanging notes on how bad the smoke has been in their respective areas. I have family in Toronto and New York where the air quality is said to be really bad. My New York connections have said that it is indeed as bad as the press makes out, whereas the people from Toronto say they've avoided the worst of it. I've got people in Guelph, Brampton, and Northern Ontario also saying that they've been effected.

Wildfires are not new to Canada, and indeed we had some pretty nasty ones in recent years, but this is the first time that I've experienced such a sensory impact to city living. I'm not being chased out of the city or choked out by smoke, but the effect is still unignorable.

It's interesting to see people re-adapt some of the COVID measures without being told to. A lot of people are wearing masks again to filter the air, and some people are staying home to avoid exposure. I don't think these things would have been instincts pre-pandemic. I guess this is how we respond to natural disasters now.

In 2020, Australia dealt with some really destructive fires, and in the following years the Southern US had the same issue. I guess it's our turn.

I used to think that climate change would turn Canada into a tropical paradise before it burned us up, since so many places are warmer than we are and they're able to sustain life. It would obviously be bad globally, and people would migrate away from the more impacted areas creating issues of population density. Canada would eventually suffer the same as everywhere else, but I thought it would take us a while to get there.

I suppose the difference is that those warmer places had a much longer time for their environments to adapt to that climate, whereas the ecosystem here is equipped for colder temperatures and it can't keep up with the speed at which we're warming.

Despite having a low population compared to our size, Canada hasn't done great in terms of environmentalism. I've heard that we're heating up twice as fast as the global average, and that we were the worst in terms of emissions among the G7. This is partly due to the fact that we're such a vast and sprawling country, so things need to be travelled over longer distances, and we're also a major oil producing nation.

I'm getting some mortal pangs, similar to the feelings of early COVID. In a way this is even worse, since the pandemic was a threat to humanity, whereas this is a threat to all life on Earth. 

We live on a planet that is home to the only carbon-based life in the Universe that we know of. Our proximity to the sun and our abundance of water is nothing short of miraculous. We consider ourselves the most sophisticated animals for our self-awareness, compassion, and innovation, but while almost every lifeform contributes to the ecosystem, humans are the only species that inhibit it. If we cause the end of the miracle that sustains all life as we know it, think what losers we'd be.