Wildfires my environmental tipping point

I climbed from bed feeling virtuous last Sunday.

Since we are all in on the value of growing our own food — that it reduces carbon emissions, that it tastes better and is cheaper than the massproduced stuff in the vegetable aisles at the Superstore — we had spent the good part of a month humping seaweed and compost onto vegetable beds, tenderly planting seeds by hand, and carefully watering them just like the Internet said.

Yet despite the daily soaking our beds looked as lifeless, dry, and dusty as a construction site.

When I lifted the well cover, I could see the bottom, which has never been known to happen a month before summer officially starts around here.

Then again, the temperature is seldom in the low 30s in late May as it was that day.

When I got the first text from one of the kids asking if we were in danger from the wildfire that seemed to have spontaneously ignited the area around Barrington Lake, my response was, what wildfire?

Driving back from Halifax scanning the news on Saltwire, we soon found out.

Even then, learning the details of what was happening on the South Shore and in the communities outside Halifax, it was all a little unreal, like we were old-time radio listeners hearing Orson Welles’ famous War of the Worlds broadcast.

Until the plume of smoke at Tantallon became a cloud, and we passed the lineup of cars filled with people forced to abandon their homes to the flames.

I cannot say whether that afternoon was when our province reached its collective tipping point, the moment after which we never again would doubt that the messedup environment presents an imminent danger to our lives.

I just know that it was mine.

“It takes having to really experience it first-hand,” Halifax ecologist Nicholas Carter said, sympathetically of my ecological aha-moment, “and discovering that you are not immune to these things.”

Still, it is not like I failed to understand the science.

Seventeen years ago, my family and I dutifully lined up at the Oxford Theatre — God rest its soul — to hear Al Gore gives us the frightening news in his movie An Inconvenient Truth. We emerged chastened, on the walk home vowing from there on in to change our behavior for the good of the planet.

What is more, doing this work, you cannot escape the woeful state of the global environment.

I am, as well, aware of the realities of cause and effect: that the worsening storms we have been experiencing in winter and summer could, in a roundabout way, be traced to the car I left idling for too long in the supermarket parking lot.

But you know how it is: life intervenes.

I talked the talk — contributing to the Ecology Action Centre, screwing in energyefficient light bulbs, taking shorter showers — but slowly many of the bad old habits returned, or I did just enough to assuage my guilt as the situation worsened.

EVERYTHING CHANGED THIS WEEK

My only excuse is that it is easy to intellectualize dangers when it suits you, when they are far away in Alberta, or Australia and seem somehow removed from the realities of your comfortable day-to-day life in this temperate province.

This week, for me, that all changed. I imagine that I am not alone.

On Thursday, while about 100 American firefighters prepared to make their way to Nova Scotia to help battle our out-of-control wildfires, another 200 were leaving South Africa, bound for Alberta, as of Thursday the site of 61 out-of-control wildfires.

So far this year, wildfires across Canada — in Saskatchewan and British Columbia as well as the aforementioned hot spots — have roared through about 2,700,000 hectares of Canada, Bill Blair the federal minister of emergency preparedness told reporters this week. To put that in context, the Canadian 10-year average is about 50,000 hectares annually.

That doesn’t even include the rest of the planet.

An April wildfire that scorched a hillside in the Scottish Highlands — like Nova Scotia, another place with the kind of traditionally damp weather that used to make wildfires a rarity — was the second-largest fire in the United Kingdom in more than a decade.

Wildfires are devastating Chile and coursing through Russia’s Ural Mountains. The outlook is frightening enough in California that State Farm Insurance has just announced that it will no longer insure new homes because of wildfire risks — a trend which could migrate north the way things are looking.

CLEAR LINK

This, the experts tell us, is no surprise.

“Increased CO2 emissions are keeping the heat in and warming the earth like a blanket,” Brenna Walsh, the Ecology Action Centre’s energy co-ordinator told me.

In fact, the link between global warming and all matter of natural calamity seems to grow clearer by the day.

In December, the provincial government released a report predicting that sea levels in Nova Scotia will rise by up to a metre by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions aren’t reduced “significantly.”

Just last week, the Environment and Climate Change Canada’s Canadian Hurricane Centre in Dartmouth released a report indicating that climate change is making our hurricanes wetter, windier and more powerful, something we all anecdotally know.

Walsh showed me a paper published May 16 in a journal called Environmental Research Letters which outlines how vapor pressure deficit — the amount of humidity in the air which is “a measure of the atmosphere's drying power that is significantly influenced by human-caused climate change” — has been partially responsible for increases in “burned forest acreage” across the western United States and southwestern Canada over the last several decades.

“Global warming is not just making forest fires more likely but is making them move more quickly and with more destructiveness,” Walsh said.

That’s because it is all interwoven, explained Carter, who advises a number of organizations including Plant Based Treaty, a global organization advocating for food systems change.

Global warming adds to an increased risk of drought, and a dearth of rainfall, as Nova Scotia has recently experienced. Last year’s posttropical storm Fiona downed trees that are helping to fuel the wildfires.

“Taken together,” he said, “they all tend to add up and can take on a life of their own.”

When I said that it can be easy to be overwhelmed by it all, I thought I could hear Carter nod across the cellphone line.

He said not to lose hope. There are plenty of things people can do, in their daily lives and in the bigger picture by advocating for change, that can make a difference.

“Just being aware of the impacts of biological destruction is a beginning,” he said.

That, at long last, is where I will start.