This time, vote as if your life depends on it.

Another forest fire threatens another community in BC

IN MY HOME IN SAANICH, recently socked in under a persistent dome of noxious smog, I had everything on my mind. It was not a comfortable feeling, stacked as it was on top of pandemic perturbation and a clatter of intertwined environmental, social and economic crises, all seemingly now coming to a head. They spun like bumper cars in my brain, colliding wildly in all directions, bashing, smashing and revving up anguish.

One crashed into the memory of a line from the 1973 movie, Jesus Christ Superstar, and knocked it free. But as it rose to the surface after all those years, it morphed into a despairing dirge for our times: Every time I look at us I don’t understand; Why we let the things we did get so out of hand.

Millions of acres have burned in Washington, Oregon and California, and millions more in the Pantanal wetlands—wetlands!—of Brazil, where the carcasses of jaguars, caimans and fallen birds have reduced the landscape to a charred boneyard. Add to that, the immense fires that have burned almost everywhere in these last few years, including in Australia where more than a billion fleeing animals died in their tracks, and in Fort McMurray, the heart of oil country, where a 2016 fire chased everyone out of town, ravaged 1.5 million acres and left behind almost $10B in damages.

Add to that the parade of hurricanes on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, the rapidly melting Arctic ice, the oceans full of toxins and plastic, the loss of tundra, old growth forests and untold species—in summary, the exploitation of just about everything.

Add to that the polarization of society, the increasingly skewed disparity between privilege and poverty, the resigned acceptance of lies as truth and of broken government promises and international accords as the legitimate new normal, and the restless volatility that thrums ever more loudly in a very tense (and trigger-twitchy) undercurrent.

Add to that our long-time individual and political stonewalling on action and legislation for sustainability in every aspect of life, and on the building of a new and better economy around that.

Real progress escapes us. Instead, we continue to stumble over a long string of consequences, always earnestly preoccupied with the most recent ones while carefully avoiding their intertwined link back to root causes that should have been dealt with decades ago. Implausibly, many of us still fill the air with skepticism about human responsibility for this slurry of a mess, still question the validity of science (while reaping its benefits every single day), still consume and discard as if the world is one long, never-ending buffet table.

Surely we are awaiting our judgement day at this rate, and it won’t be coming from on high.

Thankfully the skies have restored to blue, and—deep breath—the world is still full of kindness and good. But let’s not be lulled. Things have to change. We cannot go back to the normal we enjoyed before 2020 started going down. If the pandemic has a silver lining, it’s that we can see this now, can no longer ignore what we’ve been discounting for years.

Better days can start right now, and indeed, they must. A provincial election is happening this fall, and other elections may yet be called.  Don’t walk away. Yes, all the political gobbledegook and evasion and ill-explained monkey business is galling, but it is still our province, our country and our world. We are key, and right now we hold the most powerful key.

Voting is action. It is redemption. This time, vote as if your life depends on it.

Trudy Duivenvoorden Mitic is a writer, new grandmother, and Master Gardener. Her books include People in Transition and Ernie Coombs: Mr Dressup (both from Fitzhenry & Whiteside).