Photo by sakarin14 via Adobe Stock

Arctic Canada is filling with puddles.

Springtime in the Yukon looks astonishingly similar to June in Ontario. The days are long. Deer bite the heads off flowers deep in the forest. Icy mountains still loom in the distance, but here in the city of Whitehorse, wet mud squishes with every step. People wear shorts and t-shirts. Trucks are parked in nearly every driveway, dried clay caked onto their tires. Spring in Whitehorse is beautiful, if you forget that it comes at the cost of a forever-changed climate.

Annual mean temperatures in northern Canada have increased by 2.3 C from 1948 to 2016, with temperatures rising most rapidly in the Yukon and the Northwest Territories. By 2019, a new report from Environment and Climate Change Canada revealed that northern Canada, specifically the Yukon, is warming three times faster than anywhere else because of Arctic amplification.

Arctic amplification is like a magnifying glass reflecting off a mirror: heat from the sun bounces off the bright landscape, which then mixes with warm water vapour in the atmosphere. This heat isn’t being absorbed in the ground because of the ice, so it has nowhere to go: heat rises, but it becomes trapped in the atmosphere. As more ice melts, more vapour is created, which then causes the ice to melt even further. Essentially, Arctic amplification means that the region is caught in an intense greenhouse gas effect leading to biodiversity loss, habitat degradation, and mudslides.

For residents of northern Canada, the effects of the climate crisis are being felt faster and more aggressively than any policy can take effect. They’re threatening Indigenous ways of life that have been in place for thousands of years, making it increasingly difficult to pass down spiritual and cultural customs to young people. They’re also threatening the very ground the North is built on. But the climate crisis isn’t exclusive to the Yukon—if the oldest (and coldest) parts of the Earth are heating up, it signifies a dangerous warning to the rest of the world.

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Indigenous communities throughout the Yukon and Alaska regions have depended on Chinook salmon as a key food source for millennia, moving along the 3,190 kilometre-long Yukon River to fish. Brooke Woods, a Koyukon Dene woman, is a tribal citizen of Rampart Village and grew up on the Alaska side of the Yukon River. She spent six years as executive chair for the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission and currently works for the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Alaska, focusing on climate policy and fisheries management. She stresses that the salmon aren’t just food for her community; salmon fishing is also a livelihood with a deep spiritual connection. It’s important to people to use all parts of the fish, and it’s common to find salmon skeletons mounted above Dene doorways. “[Our] communities are along the Yukon River for a reason. We are salmon-dependant people,” she says.

But now, climate change is leading to the continued loss of the salmon: an essential part of the Yukon River’s ecosystem that was once abundant along its stretch. And Indigenous people in the area have largely resorted to buying salmon from other areas or trying to harvest other fish due to the decline. “So many parts of our life have changed because of the salmon declines…impacting us mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually and culturally,” Woods says.

Chinook salmon differ from Atlantic salmon on the other side of the country because of one key factor: they die less than a month after spawning. They also take up to eight years to reach maturity and reproduce. Though salmon live most of their life in saltwater, their eggs need freshwater to hatch. Because of this, the adult salmon usually return to their own birthplace to release the next generation of spawn, with females laying between 2,000 to 10,000 eggs. However, climate change is altering these freshwater rivers quickly, and the salmon eggs are soft and highly sensitive to temperature and environment. When the water is too warm, too polluted, too salty, or just too different from what it used to be, the hatchlings can’t survive. Right now, only about one percent of chinook salmon eggs survive to adulthood. In other words, climate change is a factor in degrading the salmon’s habitat beyond survivability.

Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the U.S. believe warmer waters make it harder for Chinook salmon in the river to keep a healthy diet and stabilize their metabolism. According to the NOAA, salmon grow faster in warmer water but struggle to find prey—like other small fish or invertebrates—meaning they will lay fewer eggs and have a lower chance of survival. Warmer rivers are also causing salmon to die from heat stress, according to a study from the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) also reports that as temperatures rise, it’s harder for water to retain its oxygen levels. Salmon—like all forms of aquatic life—need stable oxygen levels to survive. When the water gets too warm and the oxygen levels deplete too much, salmon suffocate and die.

In April 2024, the U.S. and Canadian federal governments teamed up to create a historic—yet controversial—agreement: ban all Chinook salmon fishing in the Yukon and Alaska for seven years in an effort to grow the population. According to the ban, both First Nation and Tribal subsistence fisheries—the method of harvesting fish specifically involving Indigenous knowledge and traditions—is prohibited “when there are fewer than 71,000 adult Chinook salmon.” Once this number is met, limited commercial, personal, and sport fishing could begin again. The salmon are counted by sonar at several sites in the region, and in 2023, only around 14,000 Chinook were counted at the Eagle sonar site near the Canadian border.

Detailed tracking of the Chinook salmon population began in the 1980s. According to the EPA, in 1984, around 1.2 million Chinook were tracked at the southernmost part of their migration—the Salish Sea region of the Pacific Ocean. With over 3,000 kilometres of migration from the Yukon River, through the Bering Sea, down to the Salish Sea before coming back up the Yukon River again, Chinook salmon have some of the largest migration patterns in the world. But fewer and fewer Chinook are surviving this migration for long enough to make it to their spawning grounds.

The 2024 Yukon River Chinook salmon run—the annual migration of salmon along the river to spawn—was the third-lowest in history, with fewer than 65,000 salmon making the voyage to the Pilot Station—the closest sonar site to the mouth of the river. Of those fish, an estimated 24,112 passed through the Eagle Sonar site near the Yukon border. The worst year on record was 2022, when an astonishing total of 12,025 Chinook salmon were counted for the season through the Eagle sonar site. This number is 80 percent lower than the historical average; some previous years have seen up to 500,000.

At the heart of the salmon run is Whitehorse. Whitehorse holds the world’s longest wooden fish ladder, a structure crucial for letting salmon pass through to their spawning grounds. It looks like a winding staircase filled with flowing water: salmon instinctively migrate and seek out changing currents. The water attracts the salmon, who swim upstream, jumping from step to step. Just like a staircase, these ladders have steps that allow the fish to “climb” upwards: this is especially helpful if parts of the river are blocked by dams or other predators waiting for their next meal. Conservation groups monitor the Whitehorse fish ladder yearly and use sonars to track how many fish pass through.

Jordan Blay has lived in the Yukon since 1985, and grew up fishing in Annie Lake 50 kilometres outside Whitehorse. He notes salmon, halibut and several types of trout among the fish he could catch around the Yukon and Alaska. “The record was 18 castes, 18 fish,” he says. However, in recent years, he says there are considerably fewer fish in large bodies of water, like the Yukon River.

Blay describes the spring of 2022 as “abysmal” for salmon. “If I remember right, it was something like six fish went through the ladder,” he says. Hardly any fish were seen on some days. Blay’s estimation isn’t far off: fish ladder supervisor Amy Jacobsen told the CBC that only 13 salmon passed through by August 10, 2023. More fish passed through after this, but August is the height of their travels.

When numbers are low, Fisheries and Oceans Canada prohibits sport fishing. Depending on the numbers and body of water, a prohibition can affect both personal fishing and Indigenous subsistence fishing. However, even if not explicitly stated by Canadian or Alaskan governments, First Nations leaders often voluntarily ask their citizens to refrain from fishing when the populations are in decline.

Historically, Indigenous-operated fisheries have had more robust fish populations than modern commercial fisheries due to longstanding practices of environmental reciprocity and continued traditions surrounding the Earth’s seasonal cycles. Woods explains that the salmon decline is a relatively new phenomenon. “We do have 10,000 years of relationship with salmon, and we have always maintained our cultural values when it comes to harvesting king [Chinook] salmon,” she says. “That has been successful, that has kept salmon runs alive and well.”

Woods says the low salmon population could have disastrous effects on future generations, noting that cultural traditions and education are passed down from older family members, and how she learned from her mother and grandmother when fishing. “Growing up, we had multi-generational family members coming together to harvest, process and share salmon,” she says. She’s concerned younger community members won’t be able to learn in the same way she did, which will pose serious challenges to their health and culture.

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Apart from warming the Yukon River, climate change means the physical landscape of the Yukon is shifting. Deep below the surface of the Earth in northern Canada is permafrost: permanently frozen soil and sediment held together by ice. The Yukon has some of the oldest pieces of permafrost in the world, with scientists estimating it’s been in place for three million years. In Whitehorse, permafrost accounts for up to 50 percent of the ground’s surface, according to Yukon University. Because of climate change, the permafrost is now melting.

“One of the biggest ways we see issues with permafrost in our human environment is probably through infrastructure and the highways,” says Alison Perrin, a senior research professional at Yukon University’s Research Centre. Perrin has been researching climate change and climate change policy in the North for the last 10 years. “It’s kind of like the supporting foundation of the North.”

In the same way a foundation provides stability for a house, permafrost creates stability on the ground in northern Canada. The crumbling permafrost threatens the livelihood of the communities—like the Kluane First Nation—that have existed in these remote areas for thousands of years before Canada was colonized.

Shirley Smith is an Indigenous Elder from the Kwanlin Dün First Nation. Their traditional land is located in what’s alsoknown as Whitehorse. One of her biggest worries is how the next generation will be able to learn about cultural traditions and living off the land sustainably. Warmer winters with increased precipitation meant that one winter, she had six feet of snow alongside her house, making it difficult to get to cultural and sacred sites.

Climate change presents a real threat to Indigenous communities’ abilities to pass their cultures and spiritual practices on to next generations. Smith says that the best place to teach younger generations about climate change is on the land, recalling that some of her traditional knowledge about hunting and fishing sustainably was passed down by her father on trips. But these lessons aren’t being taught as much anymore, she says. Still, any time at all learning from older people is deeply valuable for younger ones. “Even if they just go for two days, three days, teach them or show them how to live off the land,” she says.

Alongside threatening Indigenous ways of life and knowing, warming ice can also mean physical danger. Communities in northern Canada are remote and far between, leaving people with few options when it comes to emergency evacuations. Perrin uses Nunavut as an example of one place in the North where people’s ability to survive in the winter depends on stability below them in the forms of ice and permafrost. Communities in the North are mobile, moving to different locations to fish, trap, hunt. It’s about survival, tradition, spirituality, culture and lineage all at once. But this mobility isn’t possible when the ice cracks: suddenly, a longstanding tradition of walking across a frozen river doesn’t guarantee safety. And yet, “their lives depend on going out on the ice,” she says.

Only 30 kilometres outside of Whitehorse, reports have been made about tears in the Earth from the permafrost melting, causing trees to collapse as the dirt breaks open. These physical changes can mean less stability on the Alaska Highway, a 2,400-kilometre road that runs through B.C., the Yukon and Alaska. The highway is an essential method of transportation connecting remote First Nations communities and importing goods to northern areas. If parts of it become unusable, it could seriously threaten these communities’ health and wellbeing.

Further, melting permafrost can cause other issues: methane, carbon dioxide or potentially toxic microbes are often found within the sediment, furthering the overall problem of climate change, Perrin explains. “As permafrost thaws, it contributes to greenhouse gas effect,” she says.

Part of Perrin’s research investigates how climate change affects the Yukon over long periods. One report she coauthored, titled “Yukon climate change indicators and key findings,” published in 2022 by Yukon University’s Research Centre, looks at how the volume of Arctic sea ice has decreased since 1979. With a melting rate of about 300 cubic kilometres per year, the report estimates that most ice that was there in total has melted within the past decade.

Permafrost thaw, warmer temperatures and wildfires can cause extreme events like the landslides in Whitehorse, something that would have been unheard of until just a few years ago. For residents, the North is quickly becoming unrecognizable. Willow Brewster, a paramedic who’s lived in Whitehorse since she was a toddler in the 1990s, says she remembers long, frigid days too cold to hold a snowball. Now, she says, there’s sometimes slush in December and landslides by spring. In July 2024, a landslide caused by massive amounts of rain—another symptom of climate change—caused an 82-kilometre highway closure. While no one was hurt, it left people unable to travel between Carcross, Yukon and Fraser, B.C. Landslides are one result of climate-change related permafrost melting, according to a 2023 Simon Fraser University and Yukon Geological Survey report.

“I was driving through puddles in December because all of the snow was melting because it was plus five [degrees],” Brewster says. “It’s [an] eerie kind of feeling where it just feels kind of wrong.”

Brewster also sees injuries becoming more frequent. Her grandmother, who has lived in the Yukon for several decades, fell in the ice in 2016. In 2022, two people fell into icy water when crossing a seemingly frozen river near Pilot Station, Alaska, resulting in one death. Brewster describes freezing temperatures as “sporadic,” and says you can’t always expect the ice to be consistently frozen anymore. Routine ice trips are increasingly deadly in February, when the ice should be sturdiest.

In December 2023, the Yukon government’s official response to climate change noted 42 new actions to fight it, specifically noting green energy, wildfire protections, and smart electric heating systems. There is no mention of salmon specifically, but there is an action saying the government will “work with First Nations and communities to address a gap in lake-monitoring to capture changes in water in order to support fish habitat protection and community safety.” While permafrost is not mentioned either, there is a promise to undertake “flood risk hazard assessments for Yukon campgrounds and other key public infrastructure in territorial parks.”

When it comes to climate change, even a two-degree temperature increase can have significant overall effects. It can be the difference between freezing and melting; an animal living or dying. Canada is currently a part of the Paris Agreement—the international treaty created by the United Nations wherein countries pledge to limit their emissions to avoid a two-degree increase. Yet the Yukon’s average temperature is three degrees warmer than it’s ever been.

Both our shared physical environment and entire ways of being that have been in place since time immemorial are under threat. Bans on salmon fishing and government incentives on green tech will not solve this in and of themselves. Instead, there needs to be a priority on centring the skills passed down through generations from Indigenous knowledge-keepers, living in balance with the land, and a focus on sustainability as a continuous way of life. There is irrefutable evidence that global warming changes every part of the world: from the tiniest oxygen molecules in the water to the vast permafrost in the Earth. And what’s happening in the Yukon is foreshadowing for everywhere else: the climate can’t change so drastically while everything else stays the same.

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Indigenous communities have long been crucial to climate protection. According to the United Nations, Indigenous people have prioritized the environment for generations, meaning their contributions to the scientific community cannot be ignored. A pivot to two-eyed seeing is deeply necessary.

There are over a dozen First Nations in the Yukon, each with its own distinct cultural practices and communities. One initiative, called the Yukon First Nations Climate Action Fellowship, is trying to combine cultural traditions across the different nations with the fight against climate change by teaching young adults about biodiversity and living in harmony with the land. Dustin McKenzie-Hubbard, a member of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations, loves being one of the 13 fellows because it inspires him to make the world better for his daughter.

McKenzie-Hubbard says the fellowship has focused on turning away from a colonialist and consumerist mindset and that a strong sense of community is essential in dealing with these problems. Addressing climate change means centring Indigenous people’s calls for climate protection and understanding. “Everything you do affects someone else and everything,” he says. “We have to be mindful of what our impacts will do for ourselves in the next seven generations.”

Woods stresses the importance of incorporating Indigenous knowledge into conservation efforts, something she says is “disregarded in so many management spaces.”

“We do have 10,000 years of stewardship that is not incorporated into the current Western science and governance structure,” she says, describing how important it is for knowledge to be passed down from Elders to the younger generations, especially when it comes to the salmon. “I want to be able to fish the same way my grandmother taught my mom, and the way that I’ll teach my children.”

Photo by Jonathan Kemper

Kevin Sidlar’s garden has been a refuge for the past two decades, if not quite a major source of sustenance. For much of his adult life, he’s grown annual flowers, peas, and tomatoes in his backyard.

In the early days of 2020, something shifted within Sidlar. He felt nervous about disease and the security of our food systems. Surveying his abilities to meet his own basic needs in a suddenly uncertain future, the Thunder Bay resident decided to get serious about growing his own food.

Sidlar was sure that increasing his self-sufficiency would settle his nerves about what he felt could be an impending societal collapse, and spending more time with the earth would improve his mental health in the short term. He grew up on a farm that had been in his family for 100 years, and he’d absorbed the rhythms and methods surrounding him. “Gardening teaches me responsibility. Also, I’ve got more fresh food in the house, that leaves me less reliant on the grocery store and frozen foods,” he says. An application developer for the region’s major phone and internet company by day, Sidlar delves deep into one or two hobbies at a time. In his 40s, his major avocations have included foraging for wild mushrooms, sailing, and drumming with a local band. Translating that energy to food production made sense.

For one thing, grocery stores didn’t carry some of Sidlar’s childhood favourites, like kohlrabi, perhaps because it’s impossible to machine harvest large quantities. Also, shade from nearby apartment buildings and trees limits the kinds of crops viable in population-dense urban areas, and Sidlar wanted to diversify the crops he was able to grow. He found a Facebook post advertising affordable rental garden plots located a few minutes’ drive from his home, just within city limits.

Adventure 38 was Jay Tarabocchia’s response to the growing needs of his urban neighbours. He and his father were only able to use a small portion of the 38 acres they lived on, and Tarabocchia had seen how much joy and contentment gardening had brought his father in his senior years. Having moved back to Thunder Bay from Ottawa to care for his dad in the family home of 50 years, Tarabocchia extended use of the land to would-be gardeners who lacked the space. “I thought, ‘Why don’t we do some kind of project to keep expanding on the gardening theme, keep him excited for life?’ So I started making more gardens.” It wasn’t long before he thought to share the space with others.

Nutrient-rich soil and unimpeded sunlight offered exciting opportunities at Sidlar’s rental plot—he could finally grow corn after innumerable failed backyard attempts. His first growing season was a learning experience, though, and he took note of how different the conditions were between his lakeside backyard and the farm plot, which is farther inland.

Lake Superior affects the weather in Thunder Bay, which means more moderate temperatures in town. Adventure 38 experiences a shorter, more intense season. The hotter summer days offer greater outputs, provided gardeners are able to time sowings appropriately. Crops requiring higher evening temperatures, like okra, corn, and peppers, do well there. Seed packages offer guidelines, but it’s only through trial and error that farmers learn when to plant which crops, and which plant relationships are mutually beneficial when interplanted. This long-term thinking with considerations for the rhythms of the seasons gives Sidlar a sense of profound satisfaction, and an afternoon spent in the dirt offers a quiet ease that can be hard to attain in late-stage capitalism’s dizzying circus.

The deep disconnect many of us have from food sources has deleterious effects on mental and physical health. Joining a community garden like Tarabocchia’s is one way to stitch our relationships with food, ourselves, and the earth back together.

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When food prices shot up enough that many fully employed people weren’t able to feed themselves or their families, it was time to go back to basics. Whether the unending, oppressive food scarcity is partially or entirely artificial, the only recourse many Canadians have is to seize the means of production.

Almost everyone has felt the mounting pressure from climbing food prices in the last two years. The Bank of Canada has, since 1991, tried to keep inflation to two percent yearly, yet grocery store prices have risen steadily since December 2021. The metric for prices is the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which uses a “basket” of foods most families consider staples to calculate the changing costs of a trip to the grocery store. As of August 2023 it contained hundreds of items spanning different cultural and dietary considerations: avocados, baby food, chicken, dried lentils. In 2022, the CPI for food had its largest year-over-year increase in 41 years at 11.4 percent. The metric for all items went up 6.8 percent, and that year saw an increase in average wages of only five percent. Following a 2022 poll, Statistics Canada estimated that 20 percent of Canadians would need to use a food bank in the next six months.

Primary causes for the jump in food prices include supply chain interruptions with COVID-19 outbreaks and facility closures, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and changing weather. With concurrent increases in housing and energy costs, most people have difficult choices to make. While harnessing solar or geothermal energy may be outside the budget for many, the average Canadian can take steps toward improving their food security.

Once thought of as a quaint hobby primarily enjoyed by retired folks, gardening has taken off and captured the hearts of people across demographics. Due to a surge in first-time home gardeners, stores in Canada’s cities were sold out of many gardening supplies in spring 2020, and similar purchasing frenzies occurred in 2021. As the vast majority of Canadians live in cities and lack the space, soil, and light sufficient to grow much food, community gardening solutions have proliferated to meet our changing needs.

A meta-analysis of community gardens in Canada and five other countries showed a 19 percent increase in use from 2018 through 2019. Following decreased interest at the onset of the pandemic, numbers surged again in 2021 and levelled off in 2022. The city of Edmonton created 350 ad-hoc community garden allotments in 2020, while Victoria reallocated resources at Beacon Hill Park to grow food for distribution, prioritizing socially vulnerable populations. Brampton responded to pandemic gardening needs by distributing gardening materials to home growers, who either consumed the food they grew or donated it to the community.

In Winnipeg, Wolseley Community Gardens (WCG) sprung up in 2021 as a response to some of this increased demand. They offer garden space mostly to those living in multi-family dwellings and apartment buildings. WCG co-chair Jade Raizenne says that they received 47 applications for 20 plots in 2021; 39 in 2022; and 37 in 2023. The group expanded the garden each year, so it now hosts 24 raised beds, a native pollinator garden, and an orchard of fruit trees. “Since we started, everyone I’ve talked to has mentioned how much they love coming here, and how good it is for their mental health. One man who doesn’t rent a plot, but walks through the orchards every day, said it’s often the high point of his day,” Raizenne says. At times of social unrest and anxiety, community gardens are resilient, offering respite and a relatively safe third space in cities.

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As globalization and capitalism accelerate, operators of large farms have found it increasingly challenging to make a living growing food. Rates of suicide among farmers have soared in the past decade, and many young adults coming of age in the aughts were unable to envision a financially feasible future farming. Large farms became more technologically advanced over the past 20 years, with the proliferation of drones, robotics, and sensing technologies. While these advances can drastically increase quantities of food being produced, the ecological costs may not be fully understood.

The opposite is true for less tech-dependent, older methods. Permaculture has been a buzzword for the last two decades, and merits consideration by anyone looking to optimize their land use. It’s a framework that works with the land, rather than imposing changes in an effort to yield species that may not do well in a given region. Colonizers famously brought invasive species with them wherever they went, and despite how charming some of these species can be, like bellflower, they can choke out native plants that offer more to ecosystems. Most invasive plants, though, can be replaced by a native species with a little research.

And in a growing number of gardens, ancient, Indigenous cultivation methods are in use despite settlers’ efforts to supplant them. Three Sisters is commonly practiced among gardeners and the symbiosis of beans, squash, and corn gives each crop advantages they lack when grown individually. Intertwining stalks and varying growth habits makes that triumvirate impossible to machine harvest, so we see how cultivation with respect for innate qualities of plants and the earth they grow in is inextricably linked with slow food practices.

Regardless of what type of food plants are grown where, it is clear that monoculture is the enemy of sustainability. When agents of industry realized that one species of orange and one variety of banana performed best, those varieties were grown on huge farms to the exclusion of all others. Today, the only banana commercially available is the Cavendish seedless, which is a clone. Because every tree on a plantation has the same DNA, if a novel fungus attacks, the entire crop can be wiped out. This already happened with the Cavendish’s predecessor, the Gros Michel, in the 1950s. Without genetic diversity allowing for adaptations to changing pathogens, farmers have had to continually increase pesticide use on bananas. In the past decade, some years saw seasons of near-total losses of navel oranges and russet potatoes. Late-stage capitalism and an unconscious preference for uniformity have brought food production systems to a point where staple crops are needlessly vulnerable in ways that biodiverse farms aren’t.

At community gardens the world over, including Adventure 38, gardeners are constantly learning through trial and error, and by exchanging ideas. There are innumerable choices that farmers make, consciously and not. Whether to use pesticides, fertilizers, and whether to use cost-effective synthetic products versus old-school organics like bone meal and composted manure are just a few of the variables to consider. People are experimenting with and reviving traditions that had almost been forgotten, like hugelkultur. This German practice creates large mounds of decaying logs, offering lower-effort raised beds than the more commonly seen flat rectangles, fabricated with lumber. The sloping sides increase available growing space, and soil quality improves as the wood decomposes. One person whose plot neighbours Sidlar’s uses two-litre plastic bottles, standing upright in small hills. They fill with rainwater, overflow runs downslope, and these reservoirs keep plants happy without having to get out a hose. Not having to irrigate cuts down on labour, allowing the grower to make fewer trips to tend to their farm.

As small farmers return to pre-tractor methods that may decrease yield, they find that some kinds of input become unnecessary. Fertilizer prices skyrocketed following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and ensuing sanctions, as Russia and Belarus are two of the world’s top exporters. But bringing kitchen scraps to a composter, learning more about how to revitalize soil, and narrowing the scope of a farm have allowed hobby farmers and intentional communities to approach self-sufficiency. Sourcing hyperlocal materials such as a neighbour’s livestock manure can decrease dependence on global supply chains while building connections with others.

The idea of gardening was deeply implanted in Sidlar’s family history, but those new to gardening can consult books, radio programs, and community members. For those who are able, gardeners and small farmers are always looking for labour, and trading effort for produce is one way to broaden the reach of community gardens. For folks whose time is consumed by work, community-supported agriculture (CSA) boxes of produce can connect them with local food systems. This gives farmers more money for input at the beginning of the season, and customers get high-quality, local food at an accessible location without having to brave the markets.

It’s more of a challenge, but self-grown food is popular in the city, too. At the Thunder Bay Conservatory, a grassroots organization has put on workshops teaching alternative gardening methods, like straw-bale planting. Not everyone can rent and transport themselves to a garden, or perform the manual labour required. Time, fuel, and physical ability considerations make community gardens inaccessible to many. Planting into the surface of straw bales brings the garden a few feet off the ground, making them accessible to some wheelchair users or folks with physical limitations. Methods like these show that almost everyone can learn how to grow their own food.

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While Canadians may be waiting a long while for agricultural trends to change, on a microscopic level, small farmers and gardeners can steer things in a more sustainable direction. Though quantities will always be smaller than what factory farms provide, the benefits to small-crop growth are immeasurable. Paying close attention to the relationships between plants and weather facilitates an attunement with natural rhythms. And being emotionally invested in food production prevents waste. “If I put my sweat into a tomato, I’m eating it before it goes bad,” Sidlar says.

CSA kohlrabi in Thunder Bay may cost more than the cheapest alternatives at big box stores. But it has more intact enzymes, a lower carbon cost, and promotes a future of resilient, biodiverse small-scale agriculture that won’t accelerate climate catastrophe or exploit disadvantaged farm labourers elsewhere. It’s probably a lot tastier, too.

Photo by Mooneydriver

In the middle of the 2023 fire season, A Critical Incident Stress Management counsellor came to our fire base. The season had been unprecedentedly busy, even with wildfires ramping up in recent years, and my crew in southern British Columbia had racked up more than 70 days on the fireline with no sign of it slowing down.

The counsellor’s visit was proactive. During a previous record-breaking year, I had witnessed the accumulating fatigue that led us to turn on one another. Pushed to our limits through months on end with little sleep, the social structure of the crew fractured, and infighting became common. But this year, my crew supervisor wanted to get ahead of the turmoil.

All 20 of us sit in a circle, and one by one we begin to air our grievances. One crew member speaks up. “I go home, and I just can’t listen to anyone. They tell me stories or things about their life and I just don’t care. I can’t help but trivialize everything they’re going through.” The rest of us nod our heads in agreement.

“I was at MEC and I just kept having power fantasies about beating the cashier to a pulp,” another crew member says. I feel a twinge of guilt. I’ve had similar intrusive thoughts, but I would have a hard time admitting it to a group.

“I don’t feel close to anyone in my life anymore,” I say when it’s my turn to speak. “I feel that all my friends, my family, are drifting away and I can’t stop it.” More nodding heads.

A second-year crew member raises his hand. “I just… I… miss my son.” He can’t say anything else. Tears come instead.

The counsellor speaks. “Listen, you guys are all living up here.” He raises his arm way above his head, and his wrist makes a shaky gesture. He’s referring to weeks with little sleep, the constant high-pressure thinking: contain the fire, avoid death. He’s referring to being away from our loved ones, to several months of moving from one objective to the next without any thought for ourselves or others. He’s referring to 19-year-old Devyn Gale, who died on the fireline near Revelstoke, B.C. just a few weeks before his visit. Again, we nod. I guess the counsellor is right—our normal is somewhere in the region around three feet above our heads.

“Now, when you leave the fireline and spend time at home, everyone else is down here.” His arm lowers to waist height. “Of course, being home is going to feel bad, it’s now an abnormal place for all of you.” The conclusion: being on the fireline is easy now. We have been in it long enough to adapt. It’s leaving it that’s hard.

The group counselling session helped us to recognize each other as members of a common struggle, reminding us to get through it together. However, as seasonal workers, we are laid off in October. Away from the support of our crewmates, in an environment that lives at waist height.

After a few weeks, some recover. They sleep long hours, rekindle relationships with their partners. Bodies worn out, the winter is spent recuperating. They travel, ski, and read. Some return from a chaotic summer and continue working or studying just as they had before. They do arborist work, massage therapy diplomas, forestry degrees. Life goes on.

Others do not fare so well. For many, off-season is a cruel time. It is lonely; the close ties with crewmates are severed. It is inexplicable; family and friends have a hard time understanding what we’ve been through. It is exhausting; previous months of herding fires and digging guards take a toll on the body. In an effort to reclaim, some spend their entire savings on gambling and compulsive drinking. However, usually the suffering is secret, silent. It lives under layers of despair, rotting in the decrepitude of hopelessness and isolation.

This was my fourth year on the job, and despite the struggle, I love it. I have worked in grease-stained industrial kitchens and on the icy ski slopes of New England; but to me, nothing compares to being a wildfire fighter. Nowhere else have I felt the camaraderie of carrying a fire hose with my squadmates until our legs give out, the meditative bliss of chainsaw bucking, or the satisfaction of successfully establishing a fire guard around a community. The job is challenging, thrilling, and communal, all in the astounding desolation of the Canadian wilderness.

After this season ended, I came to expect detachment and lingering fatigue. But this time something was different. Food tasteless, television and books uninteresting. I stumbled to my family doctor. The diagnosis: major depression.

It is one thing to be in such a sorry state for the five-month off-season. It is another to think that some of these burnt-out, emotionally comatose workers will return year after year without question. We are leaving. Across Canada, there are high rates of turnover and a chronic lack of retention.

One solution would be to improve mental health support during the off-season. For example, year-round access to insured therapy would be helpful. However, this would be a band-aid solution to an issue that stems from being overworked in the summer months, an issue that ultimately comes from working under an old model that is in need of revision.

The demands of the job have grown. Wildfire seasons have become more strenuous and crews are spending more days on deployment. As the nature of the job changes, the job itself must adapt to the growing destruction. Treating recovery during the season as a part of the job could be a good step. Earning paid time off after successive deployments would incentivize recovery instead of it being a financial cost to workers. And, at least in my home province of B.C., the ministry is adapting. Deployment length and rest periods have become more flexible. Pay has increased a bit. Washing ash and soot off our bodies is now considered on-the-clock work time. Gradually, things seem to be improving, one motion, one addendum at a time.

There is still more to be done. Depression should not be common among the workforce and burnout should not be an inevitable reality of the job. It may take more union clamouring and scheduling adjustments to make the job more sustainable.

It is unfortunate that my co-workers and I became wildfire fighters at a time when summers became more vicious, when the regulations of the job lagged behind the demands. That we are the ones caught in the gears of an intensity shift. I hope that those of us who are burnt-out, depressed, and isolated are catalysts for a change ahead, and not a sign of what’s to come.

As a marine biologist I see how the average person’s eyes glaze over when they are confronted with sobering facts and figures. I get it. It can seem so abstract, particularly when you live in an urban centre. I believe people are most inspired to take action when they love blue spaces. As climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe writes in her book Saving Us: “We need to bring our hearts to the table, not just our heads.”

Before industrial times, First Peoples and settlers had deep connections to the global ocean. Ordinary people kept track of the tides, weather, and seasons, because those dictated when you could travel downriver by canoe or cross a bay on sea ice. Water also provided food. The availability of fish, shellfish, marine mammals and seabirds was determined by migration patterns, mating seasons, and the health of marine life, so you can be sure people were paying attention.

But as fishing technology advanced, intense commercial fisheries developed, leading to the depletion of marine life.And our deep and expansive blue spaces were exploited as places to hide things that are unsightly and unwanted on the land. Once garbage and waste have been dumped into the ocean, chemicals dissipate, debris sinks, and entire ecosystems lose the ability to thrive. It all happens out of sight and out of mind.

Water is present in some form, wherever you are in the world. Fresh water is connected through surface rivers and tributaries, underground in the permafrost and in the water table flowing towards the ocean. Its journey doesn’t end there; it circulates through powerful currents, all over the planet, evaporating at the surface once it reaches the equator. Leaving the heavy salt behind, water then dances in the atmosphere with the clouds and wind, coming back to earth eventually as snow, sleet, rain, or fog. It seeps through the soil nourishing our plants, flowing over rocks and picking up minerals before beginning the cycle once more.Water is a beautiful thing, so how do we reconnect with it?

Start small, by getting familiar with a single blue space. Take the time to sit near water, say at an urban stream, then watch it move, and notice the life within and around it. Let this become part of your routine, just like doing groceries or watching your favourite TV show.

My retired father spends lots of time by the sea. He notices when there are whales around, when the capelin are rolling, and if a shell becomes more abundant. He asks me to explain what’s happening biologically, because the more he observes, the more he cares.

Pay attention and you will notice when things start falling out of balance. Then you might find yourself picking up that bit of garbage on the riverbank. If you notice that the source of the garbage is a municipal garbage bin that needs more frequent emptying, you may call the town council. Small individual actions to prevent waste from entering the ecosystem of that blue space, are tangible and come quite naturally as you build a relationship with water bodies.

Keep focusing on how you can make changes in keeping with your growing care for our water systems. That might look like consuming less and responsibly: choosing shampoo bars over liquid shampoo in a bottle or using a refillable water bottle or silicone food saver bag, to reduce plastic waste.

As former U.S. First Lady and environmentalist Lady Bird Johnson noted in 1967, “The environment is where we all meet, where we all have a mutual interest; it is the one thing all of us share. It is not only a mirror of ourselves, but a focusing lens on what we can become.”

The next step is take your newfound love of water public. Our actions can inspire others to consume with the global ocean in mind. Sharing responsible companies’ posts on social media works, as does old-fashioned conversation. I use a natural clay deodorant that comes in a glass pot that the company invites consumers to return so they can reuse them. It smells great, so when people ask me about it I tell them about the brand and their environmental programs.

Working with fishers and undergraduate students on conservation projects, I drop it into conversation that I never go in the field without picking up marine debris. Small acts of love for the ocean can be contagious. Once on a field trip with a fisher we did an impromptu inventory of the debris along the shoreline: tangled nets, plastic gasoline jugs, beer cans … and so the list goes on. We found plastic lobster tags discarded 20 years ago and still intact, as if they’d been tossed overboard just yesterday. The fisher couldn’t believe this tangible example of how plastic doesn’t biodegrade and how litter just accumulates, slowly leaching its chemicals and eventually micro and nano plastics. He vowed not to contribute to this garbage problem.

Another way to show your love: participate in a community science program that recruits and trains the public to help collect data that feeds scientific research programs. If there isn’t one in your area there are lots of online apps and platforms that individuals or groups can contribute to; organizations such as eOceans, and the Marine Debris Tracker app can point you towards community-based science projects. The data you collect will be used to help advise governments who have the power to make decisions around blue spaces and their resources.

To continually renew your sense of wonder, you could join a snorkelling or cold-plunge group, or learn to surf. You’ll soon find you’ve signed up for more than just a hobby. For example, it should come as no surprise that surfers are among the most passionate and active ocean activists out there: Coral Gardeners was started by a 16-year-old French-Polynesian surfer to restore reef communities all over the world; Surf Riders lobbied for a plastic-bag ban and blocked offshore drilling in California; and Surfers Against Sewage has cleaned up coastlines all around the UK. You’re in a serious relationship with the global ocean now, so join forces with like-minded water lovers!

Last thing: as you physically get into the water, let it hold you up, let it move you with its waves. Feel its temperature. Feel its wildness. Then thank it for making our planet habitable and being so easy to love. In the words of American marine biologist Sylvia Earle:

“Stick your face in the blue heart of the planet.”

Illustration by Brintha Koneshachandra

Dear Mom,

The other day, I was making us breakfast and I reached into the fridge to grab the container of yogurt to eat with our puri. Now, you would think, having done essentially this every weekend of my entire life, I would not screech, “Ugh! Mom, where is the yogurt?! Why do you have to put the daar in the yogurt container?!” But here we are.

I shouted at you, irritated, yet knowing that I do the exact same thing. I save every yogurt and take-out container; I even have favourites.

If I ever need a container, I’d know exactly where to look. The dishwasher. “Dishwasher guilt” is nothing new. For a variety of psychological and economic reasons, refugees and immigrants tend to resist using this appliance. The idea of saving water and electricity is an important aspect. I turn the tap off when I am brushing my teeth. I turn the shower off when I am conditioning my hair. By this logic, the dishwasher is simply a nuisance. It is often used as additional storage—a glorified dishrack, the perfect place for mountains of reusable containers. There is even a common joke that not using the dishwasher for its intended purpose is the quintessential sign of one’s immigrant roots.

And as you can guess, Mom, when I moved out, I too did not use the dishwasher.

When I moved out, I didn’t downsize. I wear clothes from over 10 years ago. I love receiving hand-me-downs from my bhabi, even at 34 years old. Sometimes, even my close friend offers up clothing that she is ready to part with. I love thrifting. There is no shame in sharing.

And you, Mother, taught me that. I wore many hand-me-downs. But you made it my own. You put hairspray in my hair, lent me your pretty earrings, and told me I looked great. Your friends, with daughters quite a few years older than me, would give you bags of their unwanted clothes. Sure, I didn’t particularly love wearing clothing three sizes too big for me to school, but I certainly did make the most of it. In Grade 3, did you know my best friend and I wore those giant jackets together at recess and lunch? Her arm through the left, my arm through the right, holding each other in the middle. We would zip it right up and walk around scaring people: “We are the two-headed monster!” It really provided endless fun.

And, when I need to repair a beloved clothing item to prolong its longevity, Nani always has my back. Again, I know just where to look. The deep blue, circular Royal Dansk Danish Butter Cookie tin. Yup, this is where you store the “sewing kit.” Nothing goes to waste.

There were never a lot of strict rules in our house, were there? But one was always implied, right? Don’t waste. Thanks, Mom.

Just like the chai you sip (and remove the single teabag to reuse throughout the day), our past is steeped in conservation. Maybe these practices support the stereotype that South Asian people are cheap. What most do not realize is how deeply these habits are ingrained in our history of imperialism, instability, and corruption. It is really no surprise that protecting our resources has been passed down through generations. From being forcibly expelled from your homeland with nothing, to living as a single mother—whether it is about scarcity or logic, this is how we live.

Looking back, our culture and communities have been practicing sustainability for centuries, perhaps respecting and appreciating the abundance of what we had, not the lack of it.

So, I am writing this letter to thank you, Mom, for teaching me about sustainability, long before it was cool.

With love and gratitude,

Saffina Jinnah

Illustration by Julia Galotta

I’m a young woman, who can, to my knowledge, get pregnant and has long-held dreams of being a mother. When I was a child, I spent my days dutifully caring for my dolls—who were named Baby and Popstar. When I turned 13, I started babysitting the two toddlers who lived next door. When I moved to Ottawa to study, I volunteered at Planned Parenthood, spending my off-time supporting pregnant folks who were looking to explore their options. In other words: I’ve spent my life to date surrounded by themes of reproduction, children, and family planning. But, these days, when I think about being a mother myself in the future, existential anxiety creeps into me—a paralyzing fear of having children in a world in rapid ecological decline.

I am 22 years old. I want to have a child sometime in the next decade. But what will the world be like when my prospective child is growing up?

The planet is in trouble. We know this. Sea levels are continuing to rise, Arctic sea ice is in decline, and the earth just keeps heating up. In 2016, the late Stephen Hawking famously predicted that humans have 1,000 years left on earth. It feels like everything is falling apart around us.

A thousand years is a long time, but I think most conscientious, climate change-believing people, myself included, are less concerned about the number, and more concerned about the symptoms of earthly decline and what it means for the human species. Will my child’s world be plagued with wildfires, floods, and rapidly declining air quality? Will their favourite animals be extinct, and will rural landscapes be covered by skyscrapers and freeways? As the 1,000 year-mark draws closer, what will the symptoms of a climate apocalypse be, and how will this burden weigh on my child?

The crux of pre-parental climate anxiety is extreme uncertainty. Will my child wind up in the care of a spaceship operated by Jeff Bezos to transport eight billion humans to Mars? Or, more realistically, will they be able to afford the likely seven-figure price tag for the Apocalypse Express to escape this dying planet?

The dread of earthly decline is quite terrifying, and this kind of anxiety is hard to prepare for. I’ve had panic attacks over school, family, relationships—all of which can be soothed or reasoned with. But climate anxiety is different. I can talk myself out of alarmism, but the general concern over a dying planet is actually quite rational.

Let’s look at my parents’ generation—was ecological decline even a thought? Probably not. The dominant thinking was clear: so long as you weren’t out of wedlock and had the means to care for a child, you were all set. Granted, abortion access was limited, heterosexuality was compulsory, and the risk of disownment and/or ostracization in the case of having children out of wedlock was actually quite substantial. But still, this is the second terror of climate anxiety— there are really no elders to empathize with you. It’s a first-of-its-kind anxiety. Perhaps if you speak to the Cold War generation, you could get a little bit of insight into apocalyptic anxiety more generally, but the idea of the world dying beneath our feet is a novel prospect.

Cue the resentment. Why did I have to be born in the ’90s, the last generation for which climate wasn’t at the forefront of our tiny little childhood brains? And why does my prospective child have to be born in the 2020s or 2030s, when climate terror is probably going to be seared into their brain in utero? Feeling resentful about this timely predicament is something I’ve come to realize is quite normal. I’ve spoken to my 20-something girlfriends and it’s not unique. If we had been able to have children just one generation earlier, it seems like we could be mothers in blissful ignorance.

So here I am: ability to reproduce, likely. Typical childbearing age, check. Full confidence that my child will have a safe and sustainable environment to grow up in? No. I’m working through it. Alarmist thinking is common with climate anxiety. I don’t think anyone should feel guilty for having a child in 2022. In fact, I think new, unjaded, and change-focused humans are the most likely antidote to climate change. Also, if I’m being honest, these past two years of the COVID-19 pandemic have made me even more certain that despite great loss, communal mourning, and pain, humans can make it through. We just need to be on the same page (which is a big feat, I know).

I also can’t ignore the bittersweet side to this climate anxiety: it’s made me infinitely more empathetic to my fellow humans, and to the earth I walk on. I’m grateful for things I don’t think earlier generations even noticed: the air I breathe, the water I drink, and so on. I also use this anxiety to fuel much of my everyday work toward climate justice. I don’t think I would be as interested in living sustainably and building community as I would be without climate anxieties. Climate anxiety and subsequent climate activism have, in many ways, helped me to unlearn the hyper-individualism that capitalism taught me. I can only hope that this belief in community and radical empathy is also passed on to my child and their generation.

So, it’s not all bad, but it can be pretty bad. But let’s be clear—if I didn’t want to work through it, I think that’s okay, too. If I didn’t want kids, then the childfree life would be for me. But that’s not me. I want kids, but I want kids in a world that isn’t doomed. So, until my child is brought into this world, I will be spending my time working toward creating a world where they will be safe and be able to thrive.

Photo courtesy Natasha Kuperman

In Hazelton, B.C., one organization is undertaking an ambitious project: to regenerate the public forests of Canada’s north. Seed the North, founded in 2020 by infrastructure developer and architect Natasha Kuperman, isn’t the first to tackle reforestation. However, it has set out to do so with a fresh approach that combines clean technology with deeply rooted Indigenous knowledge.

Seed the North’s core mission is to gather seeds with value to the local ecosystem, encase them in a biochar-based coating (a carbon-rich soil enhancer made from agricultural waste), and then use drones to distribute them across thousands of hectares. Kuperman explains that the coating makes seeds drought-resilient and less likely to be eaten by predators. “Those are the two greatest contributors to seed in the wild not having [a] sufficient survival rate,” she says.

Kuperman and her team focus on areas that are overlooked by conventional reforestation strategies, like planting nursery-grown seedlings that are commissioned and paid for by logging organizations. But the more remote and further north an area is, “the more expensive and logistically difficult it is to seed at scale,” Kuperman says. That’s why Seed the North uses drones—they are the lowest carbon impact tool that can efficiently and affordably seed such large swathes of land.

Many of these areas are also home to Indigenous communities, which face the consequences of compromised ecosystems—for example, habitat loss reduces access to traditional food sources. Currently, Seed the North works with, learns from, and employs people from multiple communities of the Tsimshian and Gitxsan, particularly the Kitselas First Nations and the Luutkudziiwus Wilp. These communities’ knowledge about local ecosystems is then incorporated into Seed the North’s work.

Kuperman says that Seed the North is different from other reforestation efforts because it doesn’t just focus on the trees, or even the forests—it is concerned with landscape-level analysis. That means accounting for the full ecology of an area and identifying patterns that can reveal the impacts of past disturbances. Understanding a forest’s past then enables better planning for its future.

The organization’s scientific approach also sets it apart. “Historically,” Kuperman says, “direct seeding—like broadcast seeding from an airplane or helicopter—has largely been a failure.” But she chalks this up to a lack of precision, offering up birch trees as an example.

A birch seed has a 25 percent chance of viability: three out of four seeds have no embryos inside. So, when past direct seeding restoration projects have used birch seed, it’s likely they’ve been planting blanks. But Seed the North’s approach is to rigorously process the seeds and examine them for viability and germination value. The birch seeds are then planted with companion plants like alder that fix nitrogen in the soil, helping birch trees divide.

In the bigger picture, the care that Seed the North takes with its seeds matters because birch trees have high albedo, a quality that measures how much a surface reflects light. Snow and ice also have high albedo, but as winters shorten and the amount of snow declines, that amount of albedo decreases. In the north, albedo is the single greatest source of climate feedback. As reflectivity declines, the surface of the Earth absorbs more solar radiation, therefore increasing temperatures and causing more ice to melt.

“We can’t exclusively focus on tree planting,” Kuperman says, emphasizing that we need to understand these “larger governing forces” in order to make meaningful change.

Looking ahead, Kuperman hopes to continue building a “robust workforce” in Hazelton. In her vision for Seed the North’s future, the organization will also expand into small towns across Northern Canada and work with those communities to collect and process seeds that will help address local disturbances to the landscape, like wildfires or road building. Kuperman hopes there will be “a constant exchange of knowledge” with these communities: Elders will share what they know about the forest, and Seed the North will reciprocate by providing services, training, and funds.

All this community-based ecological restoration work, Kuperman hopes, will “help mitigate this ticking time bomb that’s called climate change.”

Photo by iStock; Design by Valerie Thai

In August 2021, the UN Secretary-General declared the findings of a recent global climate report “a code red for humanity.” In response, a team of journalists and researchers released the “Climate Coverage in Canada” report in November, which heard from 143 scientists, 148 journalists, and 1,006 members of the public on how they perceive news about climate change.

While early findings indicate scientists and journalists agree that the earth is growing warmer due to human activity, the Canadian public seems less sure—only 80 percent of those surveyed said the earth is warming because of human activity, as compared to 97 percent of scientists and journalists. Sean Holman, an author of the study and professor of environmental and climate journalism at the University of Victoria, says that if journalists and scientists are in consensus about climate change, it’s worth examining why Canadian news coverage doesn’t reflect the severity of the crisis at hand.

Canadian news management isn’t on the same page

The study found a disconnect between what journalists want to cover and what they’re assigned. Of those less willing or able to cover climate change, 44 percent of journalists cited a lack of interest from newsroom management. “Journalists on the ground understand how climate change is affecting Canada,” says Holman. “But those running Canadian newsrooms might not have the same understanding.”

Neither journalists nor scientists have faith that current coverage properly equips voters to make political decisions about climate change. Only 18 percent of scientists and 21 percent of journalists believe the public knows enough about climate change to make informed voting decisions. Beyond providing more climate coverage, scientists and journalists agree newsrooms shouldn’t provide a platform for op-eds that reject climate science findings. Holman remarks that while media organizations such as the BBC and the Los Angeles Times have policies against climate science rejectionism, some major Canadian news media outlets seem to be in the business of promoting it.

More cooperation is needed between scientists and journalists

Though scientists and journalists surveyed had similar understandings of climate change, nearly half of the scientists said concerns about being politicized or misrepresented kept them from doing media interviews. Both groups say climate scientists should be consulted in editorial decision-making about related coverage.

“There’s an opportunity there … for scientists and journalists to be talking more,” Holman says. “We need to be creating a shared community to support evidence-based decision-making.” One solution with widespread support was forums hosted by journalists, where the public can directly ask scientists questions about climate change and its impacts.

What comes next for climate coverage?

The study explored how regular news coverage can better incorporate climate change information. More than 90 percent of scientists and journalists wanted to see stories about natural disasters and extreme weather that explain how those events are likely to increase, both in severity and number, because of climate change.

From the 175 open recommendations submitted by scientists and journalists, the study heard support for another strategy: localized rather than globalized coverage. “Climate change often feels like it’s something happening far away rather than something close at hand,” Holman says. He emphasizes specific and regional information should be available, so people feel like they can make a difference in their everyday lives.

Photo by XURZON; Design by Valerie Thai

At least 595 people died in B.C. from heat-related deaths during the summer of 2021. Most of these occurred during the province’s “heat dome” event, which took place from June 25 to July 1, and saw temperatures rise as high as 49.6 degrees Celsius. Many climate activists and researchers believe that was just a taste of what’s to come as extreme weather events cause mass death with increasing frequency.

When climate-related mass deaths come, they’re expected to affect disabled people in greater numbers. While a full coroner’s report detailing how many of those who died in the 2021 heat wave were disabled has yet to be released, Sébastien Jodoin, a Canada Research Chair in Human Rights, Health, and the Environment at McGill University in Montreal and the founding director of the Disability-Inclusive Climate Action Research Program (DICARP), expects it to mirror the coroner’s data from Montreal’s 2018 heat wave. That event killed 66 people, 72 percent of whom were chronically ill.

“When you looked at the coroner’s report of people who died,” says Jodoin, “they found that a quarter had schizophrenia.”

Jodoin, who pivoted his research to looking at how disabled people are left out of climate planning after he developed multiple sclerosis (MS) at 33 years old, notes that a common medication that schizophrenics take makes them more sensitive to heat. However, he believes that what ultimately increases schizophrenics’ risk is that they are often poor, isolated, and harder to reach when it comes to government communication.

“They actually would have needed some sort of additional measures to be safe during this period and there was nothing in place to protect them,” Jodoin explains. “So, it kind of illustrates both that there’s vulnerability and … lack of planning.”

Climate change is currently affecting disabled people in Canada and around the world especially hard. Rolling blackouts caused by overtaxed power grids are disrupting the use of ventilators or other assistive devices, extreme temperatures and smog are causing flare-ups for people who have respiratory or autoimmune disabilities, and emergency response planning for extreme weather events often do not consider the needs or particular vulnerabilities of disabled people. Even increases in the toxicity of controlled drugs causing more disabled people to die from overdoses can be linked to the climate, since climate change has been linked to increased drug use. The climate future is likely to be filled with preventable deaths of disabled people. Yet, climate change planning rarely includes disabled people, many of whom are vulnerable in multiple ways because of poverty or other intersecting marginalizations.

Jodoin, who has analyzed climate adaptation policies around the world, found that disability was rarely mentioned in these critical national and international documents. What’s more, disabled people are sometimes physically excluded from the negotiation table.

“[Climate negotiations are] not accessible sometimes to wheelchair users,” Jodoin says. “There was an incident last November where an Israeli minister [Karine Elharrar] … was not able to enter the negotiation room because she was a wheelchair user.”

Jodoin notes that disabled people aren’t discussed in most of Canada’s national adaptation policies for climate change, the set of government publications that cover everything from policy frameworks, to platforms, to in-depth plans for specific departments or ministries. He says these frameworks do, however, often mention Indigenous people and women as potentially being more at risk.

That omission means that disabled people will be less likely to get centred in planning. But Susana Deranger, a climate and disability activist of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and a member of the Indigenous Climate Action steering committee, an Indigenous-led organization working to find solutions to climate change, also believes it neglects the fact that disabled people are disproportionately Indigenous.

“Systemic racism makes experiences of disability much worse,” they say. “Thirty percent of Indigenous people are disabled…. That’s an extremely high number.”

Deranger worries that climate change or climate emergencies will make it harder for disabled Indigenous people to access health care, traditional foods, and even medical care and supplies in remote Indigenous communities.

Deranger isn’t surprised that disabled BIPOC people are being left out of these plans. They believe that the same forces that motivate ableist beliefs that disabled people are disposable are also what led us to the climate catastrophe—the colonial belief that the land and people are important only in how they’re instrumental to capitalism.

“Capitalism and colonialism go hand in hand and are linked to everything that’s wrong,” they say.

Andrea McDowell, who works on air quality and climate change at the municipal level, believes more preparation needs to go into protecting disabled people from climate impacts.

“Disabled people are the largest minority group in Canada,” she says. “That’s a very large number of people who are being left out of important and even life-saving work.”

McDowell’s 18-year-old, Echo McDowell, has a rare form of dwarfism and worries about the ways she’s already being left out of emergency planning. Echo recalls an example where she was left behind during a school fire drill because no one knew what to do to get her to safety.

“I had to spend a while making specific plans with the administration so that they wouldn’t end up leaving me in the building,” she explains.

Being left behind in an emergency is McDowell’s fear for all disabled people. “You look at Hurricane Katrina and the people who died were often disabled and that was largely because the response didn’t take … the needs of disabled people into account,” she says. “If the response isn’t accessible, then disabled people will die.”

It seems like governments aren’t making evacuating disabled people a priority, are creating emergency shelters that aren’t accessible, are not planning for medical care or vital medicines, and are stockpiling food that disabled people with dietary requirements can’t eat. There are so few ways that disabled people’s needs are being included in climate emergency planning.

“[People often say] we need to consider disabled people. But there’s so little representation in the organizations and the committees that are making those decisions,” says McDowell.

While a diverse representation of disabled people should be centred in climate movements, disabled people are not just often left out—they’re also sometimes seen as the problem.

For example, bans on plastic straws have trampled over disabled people’s needs, single-use plastics that save disabled people’s lives are often demonized, and one Ontario doctor has called for a reduction in inhaler prescriptions to combat climate change. Climate movements often target the things disabled people need to survive—something that’s been referred to as “eco-ableism.”

“My life is dependent on single-use plastics,” says McDowell, who is a Type 1 diabetic (T1D). “So, I spent a lot of time thinking about the environmental movement … and ableism.” Due to the use of testing strips and needles, managing T1D requires the use of a significant amount of single-use plastics.

She believes that climate justice and environmental groups need to do more to reach out. “Look around the table. Recognize that there’s a very large and important constituency that’s not being included, and fix it,” she says. “We have completely overlooked disability for the past several decades or centuries. Maybe it’s time we find some local visibility initiatives relating to the environment or climate and support them.”

Deranger agrees that the environmental movement is not doing enough to make space for disabled people—or to include those who are marginalized in other ways and who are also disabled. Despite efforts to include more Indigenous people and people of colour in climate activism, they say it often leaves out disabled people in those groups. “There’s nothing like Braille or ASL or anything for them to participate,” they explain. “When they’re planning venues, they’re not thinking about disabled people. If there’s rallies and marches and people can’t walk very far with them, they’re never planned [for].”

Deranger doesn’t believe it has to be that way, citing an experience at a rally in Mexico where there was a truck participants could hop onto if they couldn’t walk or got tired. “But I don’t see that [here],” they say.

The movement loses out when it doesn’t include everyone, according to Deranger. “The solution to climate justice is to listen to Indigenous Peoples but listen to Indigenous disabled people as well,” they assert. “[Inclusion is seen as] another burden to fighting rallies, fighting marches, planning events.… It’s already overwhelming. So … we can’t add that on. We don’t have the resources. We don’t have the capacity. Well, make it.”

In 2020, American disability activist Alice Wong gave a talk called “The Last Disabled Oracle.” In it, she discussed how disabled people sounded the alarm during the pandemic about the importance of masks, accessibility, and interdependence.

“It became very clear who was considered disposable and who was not,” she said in her talk. “The casual ableism, racism, and ageism went unchecked in debates around restarting the economy with terms such as ‘acceptable losses’ and ‘high risk’ as if those lives weren’t worth living or saving.”

Wong later tweeted: “Disabled people know what it means to be vulnerable and interdependent. We are modern-day oracles. It’s time people listened to us.”

Many activists are worried that the disregard public health officials are showing to the concerns of disabled people during the pandemic will be mirrored in the climate future. But, that future could be made easier if only more people listened to disabled people. Rather than being sidelined, many disabled activists argue, they should be leading government efforts to adapt to a changing climate.

“[As a disabled person,] you’re already existing in an environment that is hostile towards you, and that’s not an experience that abled people have,” says McDowell. “I think there’s a lot to learn there about the kind of adaptability and resourcefulness and problem solving that disabled people often need to do just to exist in the world.”

Deranger also sees disabled people as holders of wisdom others could benefit from. “Everybody has to realize that disability is … a social justice issue just like climate change is,” they say. “Listen to disabled people—disabled people live with and recognize climate change just as much as anyone else andif you want to learn about coping mechanisms and resilience, go to disabled people, listen, and learn.”

Photo by byNRQEMI; Design by Valerie Thai

Over a century since their introduction, cars dominate the streets of cities and towns across Canada to such a degree that many people feel there is no real alternative. In January 2022, Turo Canada in partnership with Léger found that 83 percent of Canadians have their own or lease a vehicle and 81 percent of vehicle owners feel it would be impossible not to. There’s a reason for that: car-dependent communities are the product of decades of collaboration between industry and government.

Today, the supremacy of the automobile can feel like an immutable reality—but it wasn’t always that way. In 1913, there were only about 50,000 motor vehicles on Canadian roads, but the year prior, the Canadian Highway Association had already started pushing for a national highway system. By 1919, they were starting to get their way. The government of Robert Borden passed the Canadian Highway Act that year, directing highway funding to the provinces, followed by even more during the Great Depression. Finally, in 1949, the government of Louis St. Laurent passed what became known as the Trans-Canada Highway Act to set federal standards and provide federal funding, which reached up to 90 percent on some segments. The Trans-Canada Highway was considered complete, as per the Act, in 1971.

The history of highway funding is one example of the central role that governments have played in enabling the automobile-dependent society we live in today, but it is not the only one. Over the years, federal and provincial governments expanded road networks, provided incentives for automotive manufacturing, and created the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation to make mortgages more accessible to people, while setting standards that encouraged suburban development. This partnership between industry and government was mutually beneficial, but it hasn’t been without consequences.

Vehicle ownership costs on average between $8,600 and $13,000 a year, according to the Canadian Automobile Association, and that was before recent inflation. Meanwhile, 1,762 people were killed by motor vehicles in 2019, and another 8,917 people were seriously injured. The environmental toll is also significant, with suburban living having a bigger carbon footprint than urban dwelling, and transportation accounting for 25 percent of national emissions in 2019, second only to the oil and gas sector. Those emissions grew by 54 percent between 1990 and 2019, in part because of the increased number of large trucks and SUVs on Canadian roads.

To address the transport sector’s contribution to climate change, the Canadian government and its provincial counterparts have coalesced around a plan to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles, with a goal of reaching 100 percent of passenger car and truck sales by 2035. To incentivize that shift, the federal government is offering rebates of up to $5,000 for the purchase of a zero-emissions vehicle, subsidies for the construction of electric vehicle chargers, and is working with industry to ensure production facilities are in place.

On its face, electrification seems universally positive since it will be essential to any transition in the transportation sector—but it also signals a lack of vision. “Automobility as a technology and as a set of desires is never fundamentally challenged,” explains James Wilt, the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars? Public Transit in the Age of Google, Uber, and Elon Musk. Instead, Wilt says, the government’s policy assumes “all you need to do is get people out of an internal combustion engine vehicle and into an electric battery vehicle.”

That is in part because of a common assumption that electric vehicles are without environmental cost since they do not produce tailpipe emissions. It can be seen in the language of “zero emissions.” Yet, as Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN) professor John Sandlos says, “To conceive of those vehicles as being ‘green,’ wholly green, and without cost, that would be a mistake.” In most scenarios, an electric vehicle has a lower emissions footprint than one powered by gas or diesel, but that does not mean they do not have an adverse impact of their own. A greater share of their emissions are generated in the production stage rather than from their use, and their batteries account for a significant portion of that environmental cost.

As part of the federal government’s push to grow electric vehicle production, it wants Canada to become a key node in the mineral supply chain for the batteries that power them. Former Minister of Innovation, Science, and Industry Navdeep Bains calls this Canada’s “competitive advantage,” explaining that “we are the only nation in the western hemisphere with an abundance of cobalt, graphite, lithium, and nickel, the minerals needed to make next-generation electric batteries.” The 2021 federal budget was praised by the Mining Association for introducing new funding and tax incentives under the government’s Mines to Mobility initiative. U.S. officials have also referred to Canada as a “51st state” for minerals after a concerted push by the Liberals for an integrated supply chain.

For government, the expansion of domestic mining is positioned as a significant economic opportunity, while “the mining industry sees that as an opportunity to portray themselves as clean and green,” says Sandlos. But in order to lay the groundwork for increased extraction, the costs are being downplayed. “Part of the problem goes back to our measures of what is economic success,” explains MiningWatch Canada communications and outreach coordinator Jamie Kneen. “The reason that these things look like good economic options to governments is that there are big dollars invested and high-paying jobs are created, but not that many jobs, and a lot of the real costs of mining are externalized.”

According to Wilt, such a plan “is premised on the continued dispossession and underdevelopment of Indigenous nations, especially in the North.” While mining can provide opportunities like high-paid jobs and training, it also comes with many consequences, and communities—be they Indigenous or non-Indigenous—are not always able to effectively assert their rights to ensure mining developments minimize the harms and deliver the promised benefits.

The government is championing its strategy, but it’s still early days. Kneen explains that opposition to lithium and graphite projects in Quebec is already mounting, and most existing Canadian mining is still for minerals that wouldn’t be going into batteries. That means there’s time to ensure mining projects must meet a more rigorous standard. “It’s a question of having much stricter and much more effective regulations in place,” says Kneen, “including things like free, prior, and informed consent for Indigenous communities and processes that provide meaningful democratic engagement and that respect Indigenous authorities and their decision-making, so that people are not being asked to sacrifice beyond what’s already been stolen from them.”

Sandlos warns against “a Wild West rush” for battery minerals and asserts the need to learn from the mistakes made during the oil boom earlier in the 2000s. In her book Fossilized: Environmental Policy in Canada’s Petro-Provinces, University of Waterloo professor Angela Carter describes that period as one in which provinces were “neglecting the environmental risks and impacts of oil extraction in their rush to capture the spoils.” In her research, Carter outlines how, in seeking to capitalize on high oil prices, governments subsidized oil companies, rolled back environmental regulations, and even stifled environmental research. Those actions not only had impacts on local environments and the climate, they were also accompanied by the oil industry having greater influence over policy and growing inequality, particularly in the provinces where that extraction was taking place.

As we look forward to a potential mining boom driven by electric vehicles, an environmental assessment process that gives people real power over resource developments could be one way to avoid a similar fate. “If there are communities near a mining development, those communities should be involved in the planning,” Sandlos explains, “especially if this mining is happening in the proximity of Indigenous communities which have particular rights to land, and culturally I think they would say they have certain obligations to the land as well.” In his view, that process could require companies to sign agreements that create community-controlled oversight bodies to audit the mines.

Each of these projects should also have to do a full accounting of their costs, says Arn Keeling, an MUN professor and collaborator with Sandlos on the Toxic Legacies Project. “If we’re going to talk about electrification, what’s the true cost?” he asks. “Well, the true cost means paying every dime” of the social, environmental, and infrastructural costs, not being distracted by “promises of windfall profits that usually get privatized anyway.” There will be opposition to higher standards for mining projects, but they are essential to responsible development. “The neoliberal way of thinking about this is to see all this as red tape,” says Sandlos, but “it’s the way of imposing a land ethic on doing this kind of development and being willing to put the brakes on developments that don’t make sense.”

Beyond ensuring mining is done in a more responsible way, the government’s transport policy needs a broader rethink. “The first of the three Rs is reduce,” says Kneen. “Reducing demand through efficiency and technology is great, but we also need to look at the structures of the way we do things.” The suburban, auto-oriented communities we have today are the product of decades of government policy that encouraged us to live that way, and a transport policy that meets the scale of the climate crisis requires a similar level of ambition. “I wouldn’t want to see electric vehicles become an excuse for more suburban development,” says Sandlos.

As an alternative to requiring most Canadians to buy electric vehicles, Wilt argues for a “radical decommodification of transportation” where governments prioritize policies and investments that encourage people to ditch their cars—whether gas, diesel, or electric—in favour of taking public transit, riding a bicycle, or walking where it’s feasible. In practice, that means directing significantly more funding to expand transit systems and cycling infrastructure in urban, suburban, and even rural communities across the country. It also requires federal and provincial governments to not just pay the capital costs of buying new buses or building new subway lines, but subsidize the daily operating costs usually shouldered by cash-strapped municipal governments.

Finding success with such a transport policy requires thinking about the broader community too, in the same way the automobile incentivized suburbanization. “All levels of government are focused on profit opportunities for shareholders,” explains Kneen, “and it’s not a policy that’s really responding to people’s needs.” Instead, Wilt argues such a shift “requires densification and socialization of housing” to ensure investments in transit, cycling, and pedestrian infrastructure don’t just serve to further gentrify cities with new condo developments and prices that many people can’t afford. “It really does revolve around understanding mobility as a fundamental right and responsibility for all of us to collectively share,” he says.

The government is embarking on a project that continues to centre automobiles, while requiring a significant increase in resource extraction at home and abroad—extraction that will have consequences for communities and local environments. It’s a policy that doesn’t fundamentally challenge the status quo, other than swapping internal combustion engines for batteries, even as our reliance on automobiles has created inequities and harms that this transition offers us the chance to address. The transition away from fossil fuels will require minerals, but the amount depends on the path we ultimately pursue—and one that reorients mobility toward public transit is far less resource-intensive than one where many Canadians continue to rely on automobiles.

As Wilt puts it, “The question is not so much whether the policy can or will be effective, it’s more, ‘Is this the future that we want?’” We have a rare opportunity to think seriously about how we want to live in the century to come. It would be a shame to let mining and automotive companies make that decision for us.