Climate change and burning truths

The closest I’ve ever come to losing my home to fire happened when I was about five years old.

The careless use of matches tossed into an old, dry stump on the edge of the forest was believed to have been the starting point for the blaze. The wind did the rest.

On a hot, dry, waning summer’s day, with the long meadow grasses yellow and brittle, a strong breeze puffed new life into the tentative flames like someone trying to blow out stubborn candles on a birthday cake.

The fire, now inflated in size and purpose, made a beeline down the slope of the garden towards the split rail fence encompassing our wooden house.

In my memory, my mother is standing in distress in the sideyard, shielding her eyes from the smoke with the dish towel in her hand, looking frantically around to make sure all of us who were at home that day were safe.

Fortunately for my family, the anxiety was short-lived and the flames were extinguished before any of us had to make a harrowing dash for pets, possessions and other precious things.

So, I can only imagine how people in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick have been feeling in the past few days as some have been forced to leave their homes with fire hot at their heels, with others living in dread of having to do the same at any moment.

Fleeing in the face of natural disaster must feel like the countryside you knew intimately has inexplicably turned on you; the place where you’ve lived and dreamed and enjoyed the love of family and friends, perhaps for a lifetime.

It’s not just bricks and wood and mortar — as difficult as it is to think of them being obliterated by fire — but also the things you can never get back that you couldn’t take with you; a child’s first drawing or a height chart pencilled on the back of a door. A grandmother’s doilies, lovingly crocheted, or your father’s well-worn carpentry tools.

Even if you are covered by insurance and are eventually compensated for your loss, no amount of money can bring those things back into your life; things that were part of you, and you part of them.

And in addition to the stress and fear of having to leave your home behind, there is also the possible loss of community.

Some people will choose not to rebuild on land that has been razed by fire or threatened by floods, which means the circle of friends and neighbours you once had can be cast to the wind and nothing will ever be the same.

How strange it is to be in my corner of Newfoundland and Labrador — where spring temperatures have been running cool to frigid and the city has been steeped in rain, drizzle and fog — to think of hot fires burning fast, threatening lives and livelihoods.

And yet it was less than a year ago that fires were raging in this province, killing wildlife and leading to a state of emergency, with hospital patients having to be evacuated from fire zones to other regions.

How quickly we forget what has happened in our own backyards once the danger has moved on to someone else’s.

But we should never forget, because climate change has taught us how intertwined ecosystems are, and how an imbalance in one area — hotter, dryer weather than usual in the forest — can trigger a crisis in a populated area next door.

Or how punishing wind gusts and pummelling waves can rip houses off coasts they had clung to for generations.

Last year, the UN’S Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that, more and more, we can expect severe weather to take a terrible toll on the planet, from storms causing coastal erosion in P.E.I., to high winds felling trees that fuel the next forest fire in Nova Scotia.

We are being forced to combat that reality every season now, it seems.

Thinking of the people of the Maritimes, I look to the sky and hope for rain.