Climate Bytes: look in the mirror, think seven generations

We’ve had hazy skies recently as a result of the forest fires to the north, east and west.

But this was different.

I went into the house planning to come out and put in some new (native) plants and came out about a half hour later. What? The sky had turned a greyish yellow, and the air tasted...and smelled...sharp, a combination of smoke, oil, and sting. My eyes watered, I coughed, turned around and returned to the house. 

It was unlike anything I’ve ever known. Even sitting next to a campfire when the wind suddenly swirls the smoke in your face, doesn’t compare. It was the sharpness of the smell, the acrid smoke, and the haze that changed the sky colour. The streets downtown had emptied, as people headed indoors. For just a minute, it almost felt like a science fiction story - a creepy one.

In Stratford, we were glued to air quality index (AQI) reports and wondered if we should go for a jog or ride our bikes.

Was soccer a go at the Packham Road pitches tonight? Baseball still happening on the Festival City ball diamonds? 

You may have woken up with a slight cough or stuffy nose. 

One of our Ontario cities, North Bay, had the second worst air quality in the world at one point, according to an AQI website. 

So where do we look? Aliens attacking the planet? Cities toppling in anarchy? Well no, maybe a mirror.  

There are a few home truths here. Because we are heating up the planet with greenhouse gases (GHGs), the weather patterns overall are changing. What you might be noticing is the long hot spells, and the long dry spells. While weather patterns will vary, overall those long hot and dry spells are a result of climate change.  

On the ground, we are shifting more towards “managed” forests, with one type of tree, and minimal undergrowth. Our shifts in agriculture and forestry are reducing rich stands of habitat in forests, woodlots, roadsides and hedges. When it gets blistering hot and dry, the stands of forest that remain are tinder dry and go up like tinder in a fire.  

Forests that have hundreds of tree varieties and lush underbrush withstand climate change and fires more efficiently. We also know that trees and plants promote moisture, held in the ground, and in the air, which adds to rain cycles, feeding our lakes, rivers and wetlands. Those growth areas are rich in wildlife as well, which is rapidly disappearing. There is a direct connection between maintaining biodiversity in plants and wildlife and our ability to withstand climate change.

Back to that mirror, we know that some of our approaches to green growth and habitat may not be helping, but we need to look in a couple of other directions.  Biodiversity and green growth may help, but what about the causes?  That mirror might tell us that it’s critical to wipe fossil fuel emissions out of our lives as fast as possible. Those are the greenhouse gases (especially carbon dioxide, CO2 and methane) that make a layer in the atmosphere that traps the heat on the surface of the Earth. We’re already in a spot where those gases will make our planet continue to warm for decades to come. 

Mostly they come from transportation, cars and trucks. We might try to use bikes, public transportation, electric vehicles, and walk more (when the smoke clears).  We can also look at how much “stuff” we think we need to have. Each item of “stuff” means factory machines, often plastics, transportation of goods, and mountains of throwaway waste. We might try to use something I’m sure you’ve heard, think need versus want.

Some Indigenous cultures have an approach that I love: anytime we do something that will affect nature, we ask ourselves, how will this affect seven generations? The earth is our mother, the sky is our father, and everything in between is our brothers and sisters. Everybody deserves respect and the right to be listened to.

-Dale Carson

Today this is applied to sustainability, to renewable energy, and to reducing extraction of non-renewable resources. It encourages us to protect the Earth, to make it possible for seven generations into the future to be able to share in the beauty and the richness of nature and clear skies on our planet.

Let’s work on that.