Climate change and nature connection

How will we deal with climate change and the extreme elements?

I had hoped, like everyone else, that this summer would be different. With the Covid-19 vaccine readily available, a great weight had been lifted. I was looking forward to a summer spent hiking with friends and enjoying the natural beauty of British Columbia. Then came the heat dome of late June, breaking records, causing hundreds of human deaths, and the deaths of a billion marine animals.

In early August the heat returned to The Lower Mainland where I, along with 60% of the province’s population, live. This time it has come cloaked in smoke from the interior, the ghosts of entire landscapes of pines, larch, and fir. For a few days, Vancouver can claim the worst air quality of any major city. But with so many other fires burning, in Greece, Italy, Turkey, California, even in Siberia, we won’t hold this ominous title for long.

“It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred”, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its recently released report, the most comprehensive and conclusive to date. 

There is a sense of accelerated unravelling. Certainly, we are entering into a new period, at least for our species. The past 50 years saw the fastest temperature increases in more than 2,000 years. The earth has not experienced this level of atmospheric CO2 concentrations, the presence of which determines global temperature, in at least 2 million years. There were forests in Antarctica then. Sea levels were 20 metres higher than they are today. 

Given all this, it might seem trivial to worry about how climate change will impact outdoor recreation in British Columbia. Perhaps it is. Whistler may not be skiable within the decade. That’s unfortunate for people who love to ski and for the many people who work in tourism, but hardly a tragedy on the scale of drought, fire, or hurricane. In Vancouver, water restrictions could lead to dead grass in city parks and putting greens, but cities of millions are already facing the prospect of their taps running dry.  

What is clear, even to a non-expert like me, is that the natural world is destabilizing. How will this impact our image of “Super, Natural BC”? How will we engage with the natural world when it becomes ever less predictable and ever more hostile?

It is easy, for those of us who live in cities, to think of nature as something separate: a weekend getaway. In Vancouver, the North Shore mountains and second-growth hemlock form the boundary between the human-built world and the natural world, beyond those ridges is wilderness and the promise of escape. Or so we imagine. 

Like many Vancouverites, my default mode for engaging with the natural world is recreation: hiking, mountain biking, kayaking, the occasional bout of rock climbing. Nature means packing gear, organizing schedules, cardio, dri-fit, energy bars, and sweat. I often treat nature like a gym, one lined with trees instead of mirrors.

But Vancouver is not just conveniently close to the natural world: it is, like every town and city, engulfed by and utterly dependent on natural systems, clean and plentiful freshwater, healthy soil, and breathable air. Nature is not a weekend destination. It is not a playground for our enjoyment or an endless source of resources to plunder. It is a fabric of relationships, nutrients, and energy exchange. Resilient, complex, and endlessly fascinating, the ecosystems we depend on are also limited and coming unravelled under our relentless assault.

Earth

The Ancient Greeks used the four-element system to explain cycles of stability and change: the paradox of how the world could be both eternal and in endless flux. For lack of a better system, I have borrowed their terms—Earth and Air, Fire and Water—to write about the multifaceted, interconnected thing that is climate change—a calamity with as many heads as any hydra. 

There is something mythically dreadful about where we find ourselves. What else but a myth could threaten the entire earth? The diluvian deluge coming down on Noah and his brood, Jörmungandr, the world serpent, rising from the deep to spew venom at Ragnarök, Atlantis sinking into the waves, as Manhattan might.

The scale is staggering—flooding in Pakistan, historic drought in California, longer, more intense forest fires in British Columbia, melting sea ice in the high Arctic—there is no place on earth that will not be affected, and, in many cases, made harsher and less hospitable. 

Climate change is also fast, much faster than many had predicted. “The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale,” writes David Wallace-Wells in The Uninhabitable Earth. The great disruption is already underway. “There is already, right now, fully a third more carbon in the atmosphere than the last 800,000 years…there were no humans then. The oceans were more than a hundred feet higher.”

It is also a tragedy unfolding in a single lifetime; “…more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades… The majority of the burning has come since the premiere of Seinfeld,” writes Wallace-Wells. Climate change might have been forged in 18th-century coal-burning workshops, but this catastrophe is a decidedly modern creation. Instead of a Sci-Fi scenario impacting unborn generations—climate change is already here, a beast provoked and only beginning to lash out. 

During 2020, the warmest year on record, 30 million people were displaced as a result of floods, storms, and wildfires according to the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). The same year, more people were displaced globally by climate disasters than war. In 2017, “forest fires in British Columbia caused 65,000 people to be displaced from their homes, and millions were exposed to smoke-filled air harmful to human health. The 1.2 million hectares burned in 2017 set a record—only to be surpassed in 2018” (Environment and Climate Change, Canada). 

The earth has already warmed by about 1 degree Celsius since the 19th century. In 2015, Canada and 194 other countries signed on to the Paris Agreement, which aimed to limit warming to below 2 degrees, targeting a 1.5-degree Celsius increase. 

Every degree matters. At the target 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, extreme heat waves will become widespread. At 2 degrees, the ice sheets begin to collapse causing catastrophic flooding in coastal cities. At 3 degrees, the rate we are currently projected to reach by the end of the century, southern Europe would be in permanent drought. At four degrees, the list of projected impacts reads like the Book of Revelation: famine, fire, and war, as systems break down and conflicts spark over what arable land and freshwater remain.

Whichever direction you look, climate change smoulders on the horizon, a flame lit below our best-laid plans. The fact that human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases are driving global shifts in climate is, as the IPCC says, “unequivocal”, but what exactly lies ahead remains hazy. Scientific models vary in their predictions, in part because of the complexity of feedback loops. Melting sea ice means that less of the sun’s radiation is reflected and more is absorbed by the ocean, which causes the ice to melt all the faster. Hot, dry summers make fires more frequent and severe, and burning forests release massive quantities of carbon which leads to more warming, more droughts, and more fires.

The biggest unknown variable in climate models is how we will choose to respond in the next few years. If we act fast, we can escape the worst scenarios, although a significant amount of warming is already baked into our future. “There’s no going back on some of the changes in the climate system,” said John Fyfe, a senior research scientist with the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis, and lead author on the chapter of the IPCC report.

If we do nothing, if emissions continue unabated, the unthinkable becomes increasingly unavoidable. We will move towards a world where entire regions, including large swathes of the Global South, “become unlivable by any standard we have today as soon as the end of this century”, observes Wallace-Wells. 

Already, the ground is giving way, sometimes literally as in the case of deadly mudslides in Japan and Turkey. In Squamish, BC, even the Chief, an imposing granite monolith renowned by climbers, cracked during the heatwave, with thermal expansion likely causing the largest rockfall in living memory.

We worry about the damage we have wrought on the natural world, but we are only beginning to realize how much we have enraged it.

Air

The heatwave that struck BC in June shattered records twice. Lytton, BC broke the record for the country’s highest-ever temperate of 46.6 C on June 27th. The next day it was 49.6 C. The previous high of 45 C had gone unbroken from 1937. Youth climate activist Greta Thunberg tweeted “heat records are usually broken by decimals, like a tenth of a degree. And not in June…”

An article in the Vancouver Sun, published on June 28th, described how Lytton locals often drive up to the cooler air of nearby Pasulko and Botanie lakes, located at an elevation of about 1,200 metres, for relief from the heat. Two days later, the entire town burned to the ground. Outdoor recreation might offer a temporary respite, but what escape is possible when the crisis raging down main street? 

Under the “heat dome”, outdoor recreation offered little solace. Some people sought out mountain streams or headed for higher elevations, but most of us simply hunkered down. After a couple of days of sweating it out in our apartment, my partner and I found a few hours of blissful respite in an air-conditioned movie theatre. As our summers grow ever hotter and extreme heatwaves grow in frequency and savagery, most of us will invest in air conditioning and stay home. 

One of the many cruel ironies of climate change is that our growing reliance on air conditioning to make life bearable is leading to increased carbon emissions.  The IEA projects that as air conditioning becomes more prevalent, it will “will use about 13% of all electricity worldwide, and produce 2bn tonnes of CO2 a year – about the same amount as India, the world’s third-largest emitter, produces today” (Guardian, 2019).

Extreme heat events are the leading weather-related cause of death in Canada. According to a government report, Preliminary Strategic Climate Risk Assessment for B.C. (2019), “heat waves are projected to become more common, and occur every three to ten years by 2050.” 

Heatwaves confront us directly with the fact of our emissions. Our cars become ovens. Our cities broil. We have to make our own small weather systems with AC and fans to survive. The natural world becomes not a source of solace, but a hostile landscape.

And yet, even as we retreat from the natural world, we continue to be at its mercy. The very term “heat dome” invokes claustrophobia. Maybe that explains the fascination with terraforming Mars and the billionaires making fleeting forays into space. But their escapes are expensive illusions. They return having contributed nothing but more hot air. 

More than three in five British Columbians are concerned about climate change. Yet despite this concern, and our province’s reputation as an environmental leader, BC’s emissions have increased every year since 2014. As a province, and as a nation, we compare poorly to European countries. “Even in the U.S., emissions have decreased in recent years despite the Trump administration,” notes Sierra Club B.C. 

The NDP committed to enacting legislation requiring BC to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, during the 2020 provincial election. Yet, the NDP government continues to encourage and subsidize the clearcutting of old-growth forests and the buildout of megaprojects such as LNG Canada and Coastal Gas Link. A report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that “if LNG Canada comes online, emissions from just oil and gas production will exceed B.C.’s 2050 climate target by 160 per cent, even if emissions from the rest of the economy were reduced to zero.”

While natural gas is often touted as a “clean” source of energy, compared to other fossil fuels, or as a transitional fossil fuel, several studies, including a 2020 paper in Nature, found that emissions from natural gas are often comparable to coal.

It is not surprising to see politicians underdelivering on their campaign promises. But it is alarming how addicted our industries and politics are to fossil fuels. Even when politicians are given a strong mandate for action, they appear unwilling or unable to significantly curb emissions. Who then is in the driver’s seat? Who is responsible for our constant acceleration towards disaster? Weak politicians? Corrupt industry? Or do we all have our foot on the acceleration? Even knowing better, we seem unable to slow down. 

“No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there,” said Prime Minister Trudeau, at a 2017 energy conference in Texas. He received a standing ovation. 

Fire

In the wake of record-breaking temperatures in July 2021, British Columbia is once again experiencing hundreds of wildfires. A total of 4,780 square kilometres have burned as of early August. 

Forest fires are a natural and essential part of BC’s forests. Many species of plants have evolved to resist low-severity fires, such as the ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir. Others take advantage of the disruption: fireweed expands quickly into fire-disturbed areas and the lodgepole pine has a cone that only releases its seed in the aftermath of a blaze. Periodic fires can even contribute to overall regional biodiversity, as species with different avoidance or response strategies find their niche. For tens of thousands of years, Indigenous Peoples of the interior and coast practised burning to clear dead grass, reduce the risk of severe forests fires, and to encourage the growth “of medicinal and food plants, such as mushrooms, berries and wild onions, and maintain the landscape for all species.”  

But as the climate warms, sustainable cycles of burning and regrowth are being thrown out of balance. “We are seeing an increase in fire activity — more area burning, more fires burning, a much longer fire season,” Lynn Johnston, a forest fire research specialist at the Canadian Forest Service, told Global News. 

“Yes, it’s climate change,” Naomi Klein wrote in her reflection on the devastating 2017 fires. She then quotes Mike Flannigan, a University of Alberta wildfire expert: “The increase in area burned in Canada is a direct result of human-caused climate change. Individual events get a little more tricky to connect, but the area burned has doubled in Canada since the 1970s as a result of warming temperatures.” 

If heatwaves feel like a direct reflection of our emissions, fires arrive like the furies, winged spirits of vengeance and violence. The woods become weaponized. Entire towns are forced to evacuate. 

Most of us experience these fires as smoke. In early August, Kelowna was once again engulfed. Air quality levels were 42 times worse than the World Health Organization’s maximum recommendations.⁠⁠ Soon after, intense smoke blanketed Metro Vancouver. 

Our definition of summer is changing. Camping trips under starry skies are increasingly rare. We hunker under grey skies or review smoke forecasts and drive long distances to avoid the worst.

But we adapt or try to. At the very least we are reluctant to cede our summers to the smoke. Both the Vancouver Sun and CBC ran articles featuring families enjoying the beach despite the haze.

What message should we take from photos of kids playing, and families vacationing, through the smoke? That we are resilient? Or that we are oblivious? 

“Smoke, after all, is not fire. It’s not a flood,” Klein writes. “It doesn’t command your immediate attention or force you to flee. You can live with it, if less well… We paddleboard in the smoke and act like it’s mist. We bring beers and ciders to the beach and remark that, on the upside, you barely need sunscreen at all.” 

These days “the new normal” is often used to define (and perhaps attempt to diminish) what we are seeing, feeling, inhaling. But the term “new normal” is misleading. It implies that we are moving from one steady-state to another instead of accelerating into cascading catastrophes.

More heatwaves, longer and more severe fire seasons—that’s already baked into the next decade. As we keep adding emissions, the future becomes terra incognito. Will the great forests give way to scrubby grassland? Will wearing masks for smoke become the norm or will we simply retreat indoors? 

While our forests should be one of our strongest allies in the fight against climate change, they are now emitting more carbon than they can absorb, a report from Sierra Club BC found. Because of increased fires, destructive logging, and slash burning, our province’s damaged forests now contribute “more planet warming carbon dioxide than all other provincial sectors combined.” Despite this impact, emissions from forest fires are not counted as part of provincial totals. We are headed blindly ahead into a future we do not understand and cannot hope to control.

Water

In 1922, Coke debuted its polar bear mascot, a cuddly creature with a taste for sugar water. The polar bear has since become the unofficial mascot of climate change, a fearsome predator teetering on shrinking ice. 

Polar bears make for majestic victims. They are also happily remote, living a hard life in a cold, alien landscape. We are less comfortable with the impacts of climate change on human life, especially on the Global South, where victims might arrive on Canadian shores as climate refugees. Although few media sources made the connection, the hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees who crossed the Mediterranean were fleeing a conflict that had been exacerbated by climate change. Between 2006-2010, the country had been hit by its worst multiyear drought in nearly a millennium. 

Climate change is already impacting BC’s watersheds, glaciers, sea levels, and the water sources on which our cities and towns depend. The threads of climate derangement are interwoven. In an interview with Vancouver Sun, Francois-Nicolas Robinne, a wildfire research scientist, described how intense fires can result in the removal of large swaths of vegetation that serve to absorb, filter, and distribute precipitation. This can lead to flash floods. It might also result in the chaotic cycle of “drought, wildfires, heavy rains and drought again”. 

Despite the seeming abundance of lakes, rivers, and streams, BC’s largest towns and cities are also vulnerable to threats to their water supply. Metro Vancouver relies on mountain reserves fed by rainwater and snowmelt. With more precipitation falling as rain during winter, snowpacks will be eroded. Combined with longer dry spells over the summer and a growing population, this could lead to water shortages (Climate Projections For Metro Vancouver).

More winter rain will also impact the ski season. According to an assessment of climate change challenges for alpine ski resorts by UBC researchers, even based on projected best-case scenarios “the coastal ski resorts of Mt. Washington, Cypress, and Hemlock will have winter mean temperature at or above 0° C by the end of the 21st century… Under the worst-case scenario, all of the coastal resorts will become much too warm to support winter recreation.” In the near term, we are likely to see a shorter season on the coastal mountains, with more frequent recurrences of seasons like 2015, which was warm enough to cause Cypress to close for much of the year.

Sea levels will also rise, although how quickly or how high remains somewhat unknown. In a 2019 report, the IPCC estimated 1-3 feet of global sea level rise by 2100 and worst-case scenario of a 5-metre increase by 2300. This would put many major cities, including Vancouver, New York, and Shanghai mostly underwater. 

When we think of our oceans and the environment, we often think of plastic: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, that non-biodegradable monument to the Anthropocene. But plastic pollution is merely a nuisance when compared to the powder keg of climate change.

Plastic can make beaches less beautiful, entangle birds, and choke fish. Climate change is attacking its essential chemistry: “Surface waters are now 30 percent more acidic than they were at the start of the industrial era. Ocean acidification is now happening at a faster rate than at any point in the last 66 million years, and possibly in the last 300 million years,”(Union of Concerned Scientists, 2019). The BC government’s assessment of climate risks lists ocean acidification as “high risk” noting that it will lead to “population decline for a majority of marine shellfish, including oysters, clams, scallops, mussels, pteropods and snails.”

We fret about trash, because, like the Romantic poets, we still tend to view natural places as secular cathedrals, designed to inspire awe and contemplation in the enlightened pilgrim. But, whatever the healing powers of the woods, the natural world isn’t a cathedral built for our edification. The more modern view is to regard natural spaces as a place to demonstrate our fitness and resolve. But mountain peaks aren’t built for our summiting and coastal forests weren’t created to host our triathlons. The natural world doesn’t, in the end, exist for us. It is the systems that we depend on. It is the soil we grow our food in, the air we breathe, and the water we drink. 

We focus on trash because it feels within our control. We can take part in beach cleanups. We can leave no trace on hikes. We can use natural spaces correctly, unlike the rest of those ‘yahoos’. We can escape the crowds, leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but pics for Instagram.

But we can’t seem to avoid creating emissions, when we eat, when we drive, when we send emails or visit websites. According to some estimates, internet use accounts for about 3.7% of emissions, about the same as those produced by the airline industry. As with almost all contributing factors, this is expected to increase in the next decade.

Homecoming

How we think about the natural world and our place within it has changed and will continue to change.

The Coastal First Nations–Great Bear Initiative, an alliance of First Nations, speak about their connection to the natural world in terms of a legacy of stewardship going back at least 14,000 years. The arrival of European colonists brought extractive industries, logging, mining, commercial fishing. Now, city-dwellers like myself connect with nature through hikes and occasional weekends cocooned in a tent. The natural world feels like a gorgeous refuge, a way to recharge one’s battery before a return to traffic, email, and Zoom meetings. 

But how will we feel about the natural world as it grows ever less familiar, ever more prone to lashing out? How will we think about nature and our place in it as floods and landslides wreak havoc, fires spark, and smoke clogs the sky? Will we retreat from nature? What is the price tag of escape? Most of us can’t afford spaceships, let alone alpine retreats.

Outdoor apparel and gear companies will try to patch our fraying connection with nature with innovative products. The US team wore air-conditioned jackets designed by Ralph Lauren to the 2020 Olympics. How long before similar getups become de rigueur on the Grouse Grind? “While most of the appeal of camping is to be at one with nature, some climates are bare near impossible to comfortably camp in… Hooking an AC unit up to your tent is the best way to make the temperature and humidity inside as comfortable as possible,” claims one article listing the best tents with AC ports. 

Climate change is already forcing ski hills to rely increasingly on artificial snow. What else might we see—lakes and streams stocked with invasive but heat-tolerant fish? Indoor beaches?  As the natural world becomes ever more hostile, those who can afford to do so will transform small patches to suit their needs, establishing a facsimile of that once-instinctive connection. The rest of us will continue to hike and to camp when the heat and smoke are not too oppressive, walking through burnt forests—at least it makes for better views. Or maybe we will plant new forests of heat-resistant trees from other ecosystems. Would we notice if the woods are different, quieter, more homogenesis? Have we noticed so far? “It seems we can get used to almost anything, even the steady annihilation of our own habitat,” writes Naomi Klein.

We are facing a reckoning. Will we rise to the occasion and recognize that we are, despite all our cleverness, a part of the natural world and utterly dependent on its healthy functioning? Or will we retreat into delusion, ignoring or downplaying our role in the unravelling of vital systems? When more and more climate refugees arrive on our shores, will we recognize our role in causing their plight? Or will we turn them aside, seeing in their fear an unsettling reminder of our own possible fate?

As we turn our back on one another, we might also further alienate ourselves from the natural world, with the wealthy escaping into high-tech sanctuaries. The billionaires who dream of establishing fiefdoms on Mars might find a use for their terraforming tech right here on earth.

We do, in fact, have a choice in whether our future is merely difficult or abysmal. We decide what comes next, with every extra ton of carbon we pump into the atmosphere.

There is some reason for hope. The cost of renewables has come down so quickly that the dreaded trade-off between low-carbon energy and stalled economic growth no longer seems inevitable. Switching to renewables could even create a massive job boom.

Food production accounts for roughly a quarter of our greenhouse gas emissions. “Choosing to eat fewer animal products is probably the most important action an individual can take to reverse global warming” notes Jonathan Safran Foer, in We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, “It has a known and significant effect on the environment, and, done collectively, would push the culture and the marketplace with more force than any march.” 

Individual action is important, but collective action is our best option for changing policy. We can organize in our communities to protect natural places, elect climate-focused politicians, and pressure industries to make improvements. We can join and support organizations like The Outdoor Recreation Council of BC that build connections between people who love natural spaces and advocate for their protection. 

We once thought of nature as a source of endless wealth, a limitless frontier ready-made for our plunder; Thomas Jefferson argued that nature in its infinite wisdom would never allow buffalo to go extinct, even as the great herds of millions were cut down to mere hundreds. Our modern perception that nature exists solely for our emotional enrichment is just as fallacious. If we see nature as nothing but a recreation destination then we will turn our back on it once it becomes uncomfortable. With climate change, there is no longer such thing as pristine wilderness to be visited when time allows. The natural world is our house and home and right now, as Greta Thunberg said, “our house is on fire”. 

Today, as I write this, it is raining for the first time in weeks, a clemency.

Contributed by Connal McNamara, resident blogger.