I don’t think I’ve seen it this orange down here. I know it was bad back in 2023 when northern Ontario and Quebec were on fire… And Nova Scotia. It hasn’t been like this here. It was always mitigated.
Seeing people fleeing their homes by boat is fucked up. It’s angering. I’ve said it elsewhere but I can’t imagine what it’s like losing your home. Losing all your things. I don’t ever want to. I’ve heard the trauma from my mom about her parents during war time. I can imagine it gets passed on for generations… I even think about my El Salvadorian friend, who’s dad lost his family during an earthquake. He had trauma years later.
But this here could have been mitigated…
Spraying the land with herbicides to kill off the deciduous trees and only have coniferous trees is messed up. Have a monoculture landscape for logging timber? Deciduous trees hold more moisture. Killing them, you’re now creating match sticks for the fire. You’re asking to mess with the environment. It’s like what they did with logging the forests in the Carpathian mountains. It resulted in landslides and floods. And that resulted in deaths. These fires can result in deaths – directly and/or indirectly.
Add in the fact that we have hotter summers, the fire doesn’t “sleep” or cool down as I’ve recently learnt – so now our volunteer firefighters have a hard time fighting this.
Throw in lack of respiratory PPE…
I have no idea what the hell this government is doing. But they’re just reactive and not even acknowledging our Indigenous People in this environmental war.
If people think this doesn’t touch them… It does. The shit air quality here sucks. It might not impact you as a healthy person, but your body feels it. Your parents feel it. Your kids feel it. Your pets feel it. Our animals feel it. Heck our birds. They’re delicate creatures. We might not be in the eye of the storm but it’s here. Now, even if we don’t see it here, we should care. We’ve got friends and fam up there. We might not know them but they’re still fam. Just like we’d want someone to take care of us, advocate for us, you should care for others out there.
What happens here impacts them and what happens up there impacts us. (I’m convinced Toronto is the stepping stone for raccoons to survive up north lol.) This world is interconnected in so many different ways. One strange rock does an excellent way of explaining this…. The sand from Africa is needed by the Amazon forest… And it’s wild that it travels an ocean distance. We have an amazing planet that needs to be taken care of. We really need to hold our politicians and CEO’s accountable. We need changes now, not later.
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