Last
weekend, I drove with Pixl Press
director Anne Voute beneath smoke-induced blushing skies from Vancouver to
Calgary. We were heading for the eighth annual writers festival, When Words Collide in Calgary. As we drove,
we were thinking: wildfires.
The drive
took us out of BC’s coastal western hemlock region northwest towards Kamloops
into the heart of wildfire country where hundreds of thousands of hectares of
forest are now burning. The day we left, a wildfire had broken out much closer
to home—between Hope and Agassiz, just west of BC Highway 7. We smelled the
smoke as it billowed up and filled the valley. While a majority of fires were
concentrated in areas northwest and southwest of Prince George, a number of
them were already filling our coastal skies with enough particulates to create
a red ball of the sun—and prompt air advisories throughout BC. The smoke stayed
with us throughout the entire drive to Calgary.
In a
recent article in “The Grist”, Kate Yoder mentioned the
extensive heat maps that cover most of Europe. A new shade—magenta—was created
to show the extreme over 35 degree temperatures blanketing much of Spain, France
and Germany. According to Yoder, the Carr Fire in California was one of the most
severe in their history; it burned down 1,000 homes and even spun a fire
tornado through the air—uber scary!
“Over a decade
or so, we’re going to have more fire, more destructive fire, more billions that
will have to be spent on it,” California Governor Jerry Brown
said recently. “All that is the ‘new normal’ that we will have to face.” Yoder
asks: “Why on earth is the word normal being
thrown around to describe such extraordinary times?” Normal is a dangerous term to use for many reasons. Most places
can’t afford a future where climate change and sea level rise are the ‘new
normal.’ Calling anything like this ‘normal’ suggests acceptance and hints at
complacency.
In my upcoming book A Diary in the Age of Water, limnologist Lynna contemplates in her journal on our tendency to turn a blind eye to environmental destruction. In one of her entries, Lynna discusses UBC fisheries biologist Daniel Pauly’s description of generational differences in the perception of dwindling fish populations. In 1995, Pauly coined the term ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ to describe peoples’ shifting concept of ‘normal and healthy’ in a shifting landscape. Inevitably, the past ‘normal’ is forgotten as the new ‘normal’ is embraced.
“Personally,” says Pauly in
an interview with Yoder, “I think it’s wrong [to use the ‘new normal’]. We’re
in the middle of a shift that can destroy what we hold dear, and to call this ‘normal’
is absurd.”
The term ‘normal’ suggests a static and relatively constant phenomenon, one that can be measured and predicted based on a known pattern. One of the reasons some people dismiss the reality of climate change is its very unpredictability (if we can’t measure it, it isn’t real). We are on the steep side of a curve whose slope is shifting with each year. NPR correspondent Kirk Siegler defined it this way: “The ‘new normal’ may be that things are just going to keep getting worse.”
On our
approach to Kamloops, we drove through kilometres of Engelmann Spruce and
subalpine fir, changing to Ponderosa Pine with pockets of sagebrush Chaparral
near Merrit. Last year, Kamloops lurked beneath a gray blanket of wildfire
smoke and smelled of an old campfire; this year, despite ongoing wildfire
activity nearby, we could see where we were going. The winds were on our side—for
the time being. That would change; by the time we returned to Vancouver, the
winds had moved southwest to blanket the lower mainland with a peach-coloured
sky.
As we
headed for Golden, dominant vegetation shifted to Interior Cedar / Hemlock,
where extreme drought conditions prevailed. We saw evidence of previous and
recent fires in the Engelmann Spruce and Subalpine Fir forest stands as we
continued through the south end of the Rocky Mountain Trench into the Rockies
then on to Banff, Canmore and finally Calgary. Smoke clung like grease to steep
mountain sides and blanketed the valleys.
Blue cliffs emerged from gray-pink low cloud, floating and suspended
like a Lao Tse painting. Then, like ghosts, they vanished.
The
limnologist in my book A Diary in the Age of Water also writes about Peter Kahn, professor of psychology at the University of
Washington, who coined the term ‘environmental
generational amnesia’ to describe how
each generation can only recognize—and appreciate—the ecological changes they
experience in their lifetimes. In an article in The
Meaning Of Water I argued that
the inability to feel and connect beyond our immediate line of sight is a good
thing—a kind of selective memory that allows us to adapt to each “new normal.”
Mothers of several children can testify to the benefits of “forgetting” their
hours of labour to give birth. Hence the ability and willingness to repeat this
very painful experience.
Is this part of successful
biological adaptation in all of us? The ability to reset? But, for the
environment and our relationship with it, it is never really a reset. It is
more like quiet acquiescence as we whittle our environment—and ourselves along
with It—one unobtrusive forest at a time. I’m reminded of the lobster in the
pot of water slowly coming to a boil. It doesn’t realize it’s dying until it
does. And on some level, it doesn’t care—it is not sufficiently aware of its
environment to appreciate what the incremental change means to its own
survival. When does dis-ease turn to alarm? Who is to say that if that lobster
wasn’t confined in a pot it would not have slowly edged away from the source of
heat—like some of us deciding not to buy property in a 100-year floodplain?
The phenomenon described by
Kahn’s environmental generational amnesia is not so much about not
understanding or caring about the past, but of not being sufficiently connected
to and caring about the present.
Each generation has its
chance to connect and make a difference. Each generation is its own “reset”,
providing a fresh perspective, and free to connect in its own way. It is all
about connection. To return to my example of the mother gladly giving birth again
and again—it is not that she has forgotten the pain; it is rather that she
chooses to relegate her memory of it behind something far more beautiful and
wondrous to remember: the miraculous birth of her child. Environmental
generational amnesia is really part of a larger amnesia, one that encompasses
many generations; a selective memory driven by lack of connection and
short-sighted greed.
A Diary in the Age of Water explores identity and our concept of what is “normal”—as a nation and an individual—in a world that is rapidly and incomprehensibly changing.
“Those who cannot remember
the past are condemned to repeat it.”—George Santayana
