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On July 22, I awake to smoky skies, just enough to tint the sky a muddy pink. The winds must be pushing smoke from the fires in northern Alberta our way. I walk outside—it’s been another hot day, too hot for this high in the Rockies. I recall my childhood summers living along this mountain corridor west of the Yellowhead Pass: months with only a handful of warm days to be treasured, never the savage heat of the past few weeks.
\n\n\n\nIt turns out this is the hottest day on Earth since NASA started recording global temperature data in 1980. No doubt there have been hotter days, but not for a long time—climate scientists think it’s been more than 100,000 years. These temperatures are part of a longer trend of planetary warming driven by human activities. A NASA press release quotes administrator Bill Nelson saying, “In a year that has been the hottest on record to date, these past two weeks have been particularly brutal.”
\n\n\n\nIn the afternoon, I take a book and sit under a pine, my go-to for shade when the sun reaches south of the house. Every once in a while, a whiff of smoke catches in my nostrils. I check the Alberta wildfire map. A fire has popped up near the Jasper transfer station a short drive east of here, and there’s another south of town along the Icefields Parkway. I go back in to watch an episode of House of the Dragon with my partner: another cliffhanger. “Let’s watch one more,” I beg. I get up for a glass of water, and my phone beeps as I sit back down. The fire south of Jasper is out of control and getting bigger. Jasper is on evacuation alert.
\n\n\n\nOur show is forgotten. “Should I get gas tonight in case they close the highway by Tete Jaune?” Zane asks. If the highway through Jasper closes down, the only way out of our valley is west. They wouldn’t close that down, would they? It doesn’t seem likely, but better not to take chances. Our 1000-watt generator was efficient, but it broke down for good a couple weeks ago, and we’re using the backup, which gobbles gas. At moments like these I wish we’d already installed solar panels.
\n\n\n\n“OK,” I say. “You better get going. You can’t get caught on the other side of a blockade.”
\n\n\n\nMy phone dings again. The alert has been upgraded to an order. Jasper is being evacuated, and they’ve closed the highway by Tete Jaune. I race outside, but Zane and his truck are gone. There’s no signal west through the mountains, so he won’t get my messages, but I send one anyway: “Come home.”
\n\n\n\nIf we get lightning in this wind, the whole valley could go up like a matchbox.
It’s dark as I gather up my must-not-burn belongings: my father’s letters, my artwork, papers from the filing cabinet, a few irreplaceable books, gifts from my daughters. On each trip out to my Subaru, the hot wind whips smoke and ash into my headlamp beam. Inside, Smudgy scratches at the bars of the cats’ oversized carrier. Ru is happy to curl up in the bed I made them, but Smudgy isn’t a good traveller. I want them ready to go if we need to—if we get lightning in this wind, the whole valley could go up like a matchbox.
\n\n\n\nZane makes it safely home after driving in the opposite direction from a convoy of thousands of vehicles leaving Jasper National Park. At 4 a.m., my sister Anita, her partner Tom, and her daughter arrive at our old family home on the other side of the lake. With 25,000 people leaving Jasper, it took them six hours just to get out of town. The next day when I drop off chocolate chip cookies, Tom tells me stories of fistfights at gas stations.
\n\n\n\nJasper has been threatened with fire before, so it takes mitigation seriously. The town had removed standing deadfall left by the mountain pine beetle kills of a decade before and thinned out a lot of surrounding ground cover. I’m not worried about a wildfire reaching the townsite, but I check the map anyway. I see a red flame showing an out-of-control fire north of us—that’s new. It’s at least 40 km away over multiple mountain ranges, so no need to worry, but it still feels like the whole world is on fire.
\n\n\n\nNow the railway and the highway have grown silent. We watch the skies and the online maps. The fires are closing in on Jasper townsite.
\n\n\n\nThe next day starts out like the one before. We ration gas and keep an eye on the weather. Rain is forecast for the following day. That should stop the fires, surely.
\n\n\n\nDevon from the Valemount RCMP detachment stops by that afternoon. I’m at Anita’s across the lake when we see his bulky figure walk past the kitchen window. He’s here to get a headcount in case they need to evacuate this part of the valley. The fires have united outside Jasper, and they could come this way next. With the other cabin near mine, we’re just three households, seven souls. In a way, his visit is reassuring. I don’t think the fire will make it this far, but when you’re in bed sleeping, you can’t check an online map.
\n\n\n\nBack on our side of the valley, I collapse on the couch and fall into an exhausted sleep. I’m woken by a pounding on the door. It’s Tom: “There’s a fire up the mountain on the other side of the valley,” he says.
\n\n\n\n“Have you called it in?” I ask.
\n\n\n\n“Yep. It’s called in.”
\n\n\n\nI walk to the lakeshore to look at the smoke. I sit for a while, listening to the lapping water and wondering if helicopters are on their way. Looking east down the valley, I see a mushroom cloud of smoke above Jasper. How can they spare firefighters when they’re battling that colossus?
\n\n\n\nReports are sparse and unconfirmed: Bucketing has proven ineffective. The PetroCanada has exploded.
The helicopters arrive around the time Tom comes to say their family is leaving. The other cabin is evacuating too. I walk back to the lake to watch the helicopters dumping bucket after bucket on the fire. Then they leave and the valley grows quiet. We are alone, just Zane and me. No trains. No traffic. Just us.
\n\n\n\nThat evening, the fire arrives in Jasper.
\n\n\n\nAt first, reports are sparse and unconfirmed: Bucketing has proven ineffective. The fire has reached the town. The PetroCanada has exploded. A photo pops up online of flames devouring Maligne Lodge, a firefighter looking on. Then the first official report: “At just before 6 p.m. this evening, portions of the South Fire in Jasper National Park reached the outskirts of the Jasper townsite after being driven by strong wind gusts from the south and southeast.”
\n\n\n\nIt rains that night. In the morning, there are puddles on the road, and we see the first online videos. Is the entire town gone? No one seems to know.
\n\n\n\nDays pass before we know the extent of the destruction. Over 350 structures were burned, including Anita and Tom’s home, but much of the town was spared. The firefighters saved all critical infrastructure, including the hospital. (Not the old Seton General where I was born, but its replacement.) The Athabasca Hotel—where as a kid I would stare in awe at mounted moose and elk heads while Grandma used the phone—is still there. As are the distinctive peaked roofs of the Astoria, where my mother called my father from an outdoor payphone just hours before he died.
\n\n\n\nPhotos emerge of Bear 222 and her two cubs alive and apparently well after escaping the flames. The grizzly family had been relocated out of Jasper last year after they were caught eating food at a picnic area, but they were back this spring and living near Jasper Park Lodge. Because Momma Bear is outfitted with a GPS collar, we know they found shelter in the Athabasca River as the fire raged around them.
\n\n\n\nDriven by strong winds and weeks of high temperatures, the fire travelled 5 km in the 30 minutes before it hit Jasper, according to Alberta’s public safety minister. I hear flames reached well over 100 m, and that the fire threw off fireballs—can that be true?—and produced its own lightning. Ron Hallman, head of Parks Canada, said the firefighting crews faced “hell on Earth.” How could a monster like that be contained? It couldn’t.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Jasper-body-image.jpg\")
The next time I pass Jasper, I see the spires of charred trees lined up against the horizon like spent matches. As I get closer, I’m relieved to see sprigs of green pushing through the blackened earth. Along the shoulder graze Jasper’s famed elk. If you’ve ever visited, you’ve probably seen “the ladies” walking along the highway or passing through town. They’ve made it safely through the fire. Grazing near them are two mule deer. I’ve never seen deer and elk graze together. “Amidst the ashes, life finds a way,” quipped Jasper National Park on X.
\n\n\n\nAt the time of writing, the Jasper Fire Complex has burned over 33,000 hectares of forest and taken the life of one firefighter. The fire is now classed as “held,” and welcome rains have fallen, which should decrease fire activity. But this good news comes with an increased risk of unstable slopes and falling trees.
\n\n\n\nResidents have been allowed back in the homes that were saved, and traffic is moving on the highway. I’m grateful the road is open; it’s a big step to reopening the town, and many businesses in Jasper and Valemount rely on summer tourism. Jasperites are beginning the task of rebuilding their lives and homes. At the same time, I know this way of life is unsustainable. The vehicles that give us the freedom to travel are also contributing to the aggressive burning that turned the Jasper fire into the monster it became.
\n\n\n\nThis isn’t the first wildfire to take a home in my family. In 2021, my sister Elaine’s house overlooking BC’s Lake Okanagan was burned down by the White Rock Lake Fire. A few months later, she was interviewed by The Tyee. She was one of the few people interviewed who spoke about climate change. “I feel what we’ve done here is profoundly wrong,” she’d said. “I’m not happy with the world we’ve left.”
\n\n\n\nWhen I first read the piece, I was sitting with Elaine in her kitchen. “I can’t think about the quail that were taken by the fire,” she’d said, shaking her head. Her garden, where the quail made their home, was burned along with her house. Offering them water and seed was part of her daily routine.
\n\n\n\nWe must call for the largest emitters to pay their way and change their ways.
The quail are mostly scattered or gone, but the last time I visited my brother-in-law, I heard their familiar squeaky-toy call while I stood in the wreckage of the old garden. I wish Elaine could hear them too, but she can’t. I’d forgotten she’d told the interviewer she didn’t expect to live long enough to see the tree and animal populations recover.
\n\n\n\nElaine saw her culpability in this crisis, and I see mine. I need to do better. We all do. We need to cry for a change in priorities. We must call for the largest emitters to pay their way and change their ways. We must begin to see that we are part of a vast biosphere, and what we do matters. We may not be able to reverse all of what climate change will bring, but in the years ahead, every fraction of a degree will matter—not just to us, but to our descendants and our non-human kin.
\n","protected":false},"featured_media":2286,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[11,10,26,6,22],"tags":[271,81,71,90,60,560,562,561,207],"class_list":["post-2289","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate-change","category-magazine","category-natural-history","category-planet","category-voices","tag-alberta","tag-canada","tag-climate-crisis","tag-memoir","tag-opinion","tag-roberta-laurie","tag-rocky-mountains","tag-smoke","tag-wildfire"],"yoast_head":"\nSatellite image of the 2024 Jasper wildfire on July 23, 2024
\n"},"alt_text":"Satellite image of a thick grey plume of smoke from the Jasper wildfire complex rising bottom left to top right of frame.","media_type":"image","mime_type":"image/jpeg","media_details":{"width":1444,"height":963,"file":"2024/08/NASA_Jasper_fire_image.jpg","filesize":294767,"sizes":{"medium":{"file":"NASA_Jasper_fire_image-300x200.jpg","width":300,"height":200,"filesize":19733,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/NASA_Jasper_fire_image-300x200.jpg"},"large":{"file":"NASA_Jasper_fire_image-1024x683.jpg","width":1024,"height":683,"filesize":155984,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/NASA_Jasper_fire_image-1024x683.jpg"},"thumbnail":{"file":"NASA_Jasper_fire_image-150x150.jpg","width":150,"height":150,"filesize":7756,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/NASA_Jasper_fire_image-150x150.jpg"},"medium_large":{"file":"NASA_Jasper_fire_image-768x512.jpg","width":768,"height":512,"filesize":96595,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/NASA_Jasper_fire_image-768x512.jpg"},"full":{"file":"NASA_Jasper_fire_image.jpg","width":1444,"height":963,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/NASA_Jasper_fire_image.jpg"}},"image_meta":{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0","keywords":[]}},"source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/NASA_Jasper_fire_image.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media/2286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media"}],"about":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/types/attachment"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/users/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/comments?post=2286"}]}}],"wp:term":[[{"id":11,"link":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/category/planet/climate-change/","name":"Climate Change","slug":"climate-change","taxonomy":"category","yoast_head":"\nIt was 9:10 p.m. when my phone lit up with a text message: “2-3 large orcas moving East. If they stay where they are they may come down the channel.”
\n\n\n\nThe sun had just set, but blue-tinged light still seeped through the windows at my dad’s house on Saturna Island, the easternmost of BC’s Gulf Islands. I felt a sense of duty: my friend had travelled around the world from Scotland to visit me, lured by the tenuous promise of a whale sighting, and we’d yet to see anything. I grabbed our coats and ushered her out the door.
\n\n\n\nIt was May 2023, three years after the creation of the Southern Gulf Islands Whale Sighting Network, a coalition of citizen scientists and researchers watching for the whales. In messages and reports, we tracked the whales’ movements through the straits and channels, hoping not just to catch a glimpse, but also to help protect them.
\n\n\n\nOur hopes were high as we followed the phone message’s directions and climbed the hill to East Point, a nose of grass and rock that juts out towards the BC and Washington State mainland. We climbed the stairs down to the beach, waiting for the orcas to make their way through the channel between Saturna and nearby Tumbo Island. On the white sand, we found Sarah-Dawn, who had sent the original message. We kept vigil with her as the light faded from the sky, our phones flashing with notifications as our neighbours tracked the whales’ movements along the shore.
\n\n\n\nSound carries over water, so we heard the orcas for half an hour before they arrived at the beach. It was frustrating, hearing their exhales crack like gunshots through the channel as the night grew completely dark. It wasn’t until after 10 p.m. that the whales finally arrived. We followed them around the point by the sounds of their breathing and the quiet whoosh of their fins slicing through the water. We couldn’t even make out their shapes in the darkness.
\n\n\n\nOn the way home, my friend said she was still happy to have been in the presence of whales, even if she didn’t get to see them.
\n\n\n\nSince 2015, when my dad moved to a house on Saturna perched on a cliff overlooking the water, I’ve spent a lot of the summers feeling helpless as I watched the critically endangered southern resident killer whales (SRKWs)—as well as the transient (or Bigg’s) killer whales and humpbacks that call this area home—swimming by our windows.
\n\n\n\nOf course I was thrilled to see them, but buried beneath was another feeling, a deeper sadness, watching them search for food in a sparser and sparser ocean, seeing them hemmed in against the rocks by whale-watching boats and cargo ships. I could watch them, but it didn’t feel like there was much I could do—until our neighbour Susie Washington-Smyth helped to found the Southern Gulf Islands Whale Sighting Network.
\n\n\n\nThe idea for the network first arose in 2019, when the federal government announced an Interim Sanctuary Zone for the SRKWs that ran outside our window. As of December 2023, there are only 74 southern resident orcas remaining. The zone is a protected area for whales, which vessels—both motorized and non-motorized—are barred from entering. Both the design of the zone and the lack of public consultation raised questions for Susie and other Saturna residents.
\n\n\n\nWe followed them by the quiet whoosh of their fins slicing through the water.
“That got me thinking that [my neighbours and I] all watch whales,” Susie says. “And we all have a real interest in the health of the various populations, not just the southern residents, but all of the whales. Frankly, they’re our nearest neighbours, and we have an unusual relationship with them. So I decided that I would call in my [scientist] friends and see what we could do.”
\n\n\n\nBy 2020, Susie had set up the sighting network to train and connect whale-sighters on Saturna. Since then, the network has expanded to include Pender, Mayne, and Galiano Islands, with over 80 trained citizen scientists recording their observations, including my dad and me. Suddenly, there was something I could do to help, a network that could amplify my voice into something stronger.
\n\n\n\nThe network runs over Discord, an online messaging platform originally used by gamers that became popular for communities to use for connection during the pandemic. “One of the things that was really important to me,” says Susie, “is that we developed a horizontal organization rather than a vertical one, and that everybody took ownership. But to do that, everybody had to have access to information, and so Discord has provided that.”
\n\n\n\nWithin the Discord app, there are separate channels for sightings and photos from each of the different islands, a specific channel for SRKW sightings, general discussion, and even keys for identifying individual whales for members who want to dive deeper into their observations.
\n\n\n\n![\"An](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Whale-offshore-for-web.jpg\")
As I experienced on the night that my friend and I tried to catch a glimpse of the whales, the network allows sighters to alert each other to the whales’ presence and the direction they’re headed—not just on one island, but between the islands as well. It’s not unusual to see a message on the Saturna channel from a sighter on Pender letting us know that a group of whales are headed our way.
\n\n\n\nSusie says the network has been able to gather evidence of the whales’ patterns of local waterway use that she doesn’t think existed before.
\n\n\n\n“I think [what we knew] was probably anecdotal more than it was observational, and I think that’s really been a game-changer,” she says.
\n\n\n\nThe network makes their reports through the conservation organization Ocean Wise’s WhaleReport Alert app, which then notifies nearby ferries, cargo ships, and other commercial vessels about the whales’ presence. This system is particularly important in areas like Boundary Pass, where frequent whale routes overlap with shipping lanes, leading to acoustic and physical disturbance for the whales, and, in the worst cases, vessel strikes.
\n\n\n\nIt is a community of retirees and students and scientists and islanders coming together to make a difference.
My first day on Saturna in the summer of 2022, the southern residents came by to greet me. My dad and I rushed out on the deck to watch them surface under the early summer sun, puffs of misty air catching the rays. As the orcas headed east, I saw my neighbour Maureen watching from shore with a person who looked about my age.
\n\n\n\n“That’s Lauren, one of the new summer students,” my dad said to me. He waved and shouted over to her. “Lauren, this is my daughter Sofia I was telling you about!”
\n\n\n\nWe waved enthusiastically to each other. It’s always nice to meet other young people on Saturna, an island of only about 400 full-time residents, nearly half of them over 65. Luckily, Simon Fraser University (SFU) has been sending marine biology students over to do whale research every summer since 2020. And the sighters network has worked closely with the summer students, comparing data, sharing observations, and working together to record whale sightings as well as vessel infractions.
\n\n\n\nSays Lauren, “I don’t think I had ever met anyone as passionate as the sighters network: the complete love for whales and wanting to protect them and the environment, and how everything was just started by community members.”
\n\n\n\nIn 2022, Lucy Quayle—the SFU master’s student who was working on Saturna in 2020—created a website called Spyhopper alongside volunteer whale observer Dereck Peterson. The site tracks the reports made by the network, the Saturna Island Marine Research and Education Society, and the SFU researchers. Spyhopper displays the data graphically, including reports per month since 2020, reports per whale species, and reports per sighter. You can even see when specific whales were last spotted.
\n\n\n\nIn late September 2023, Susie invited me and my dad to a party at the bistro at the Saturna vineyard. It was a wrap-up celebration for the work the sighters network did over the summer, complete with local wine, wood-fired pizza, and more whale enthusiasts than I’ve ever seen together in one room. It was nice to finally put faces to Discord usernames. I saw Kathleen, a.k.a. Octopusboots—a sighter from Pender Island who manages the Discord—and felt like I was meeting a celebrity, as I’d seen her name flash across my phone screen so many times that summer.
\n\n\n\nI sat at a table with 2022 summer students Lauren and Olivia, along with the summer students who had taken over for them for the 2023 season. Lauren was buzzing with nerves: she and the other researchers were going to give a presentation on the data collected by the network since April 2020.
\n\n\n\nThe summer students got up to talk about their findings, and I was struck by what the candy-coloured bars on the PowerPoint showed: the network had made over 800 whale reports in 2023, and over 3,500 reports since it first started. While the federal government’s Interim Sanctuary Zones are only in effect during the summer, the network’s reports showed that whales—including SRKWs—swim through the Southern Gulf Islands year-round. The network’s data looking at vessels in the zones also showed that there were still hundreds of boats entering the prohibited areas each summer.
\n\n\n\nCommunity science builds relationships—among humans, and between humans and their neighbours of other species.
I looked around the room. There were scientists from SFU and the Raincoast Conservation Foundation nodding along with the results. There were islanders seeing their own work reflected in the charts on the screen. And there were representatives from Parks Canada, Transport Canada, and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) sitting among them, taking that work seriously.
\n\n\n\n“We aren’t shy to criticize, but our approach is we want to be as collegial as we can with the federal government, because we think that we’re all supposedly working for the same thing, which is to protect the cetaceans,” Susie says. “We want to work with them, we think that that’s the most effective way that we can begin to effect change. And we also think that it’s easier for us to be in the tent with them, rather than out of it and throwing stones.”
\n\n\n\nSusie tells me that the sighters have a direct line to the DFO enforcement division for reporting sanctuary zone violations and marine mammal infractions, and that Transport Canada is even using their data.
\n\n\n\nWhat strikes me about the sighting network is that it is a project running 24/7, 365 days a year. It is a community of retirees and students and scientists and islanders of all stripes coming together to make a difference for their neighbours, the whales. It is a group of people who have always observed the whales, who have always taken note of their patterns and behaviour, who are now putting that knowledge down on paper and working directly with researchers and government agencies to make sure the data is put to good use. Community science like this is important not only because it complements government science, but also because it builds relationships—among humans, and between humans and their neighbours of other species.
\n\n\n\nSo if you’ve looked out your own window and noticed fewer birds coming to your feeder, consider joining the Christmas Bird Count this year. If you miss seeing butterflies and other pollinators on your morning walks, you could join the David Suzuki Foundation’s BC-based Butterflies in My Backyard (BIMBY) project, or its Canada-wide Butterflyway project. If you’ve been noticing ill-looking sea stars when you go beachcombing, you could report this to the Multi-Agency Rocky Intertidal Network (MARINe) so they can add it to their Sea Star Wasting Syndrome map. More broadly, you could join a local naturalists’ club, check out the Government of Canada’s Citizen Science portal to find something that interests you, or just start recording your observations on the iNaturalist app.
\n\n\n\nThe point is, we don’t have to feel powerless. As a community, we can come together to make a difference.
\n\n\n\nIt’s still hard to watch the SRKW population dwindle, to see whale-watching boats getting too close and cargo ships looming menacingly in the distance. It can be hard to think about climate change and warming water and disappearing salmon stocks. But when the whales come, the members of the sighting network will be out there on our decks, making reports and sending messages. As the whales pass by our windows, we will be there to greet them along the way, trying to protect them in the best way we know how.
\n","protected":false},"featured_media":2171,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[42,10,26,6,38,40,22,9],"tags":[77,230,71,32,522,429,103,60,519,521,356,520,344,144],"class_list":["post-2169","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bc","category-magazine","category-natural-history","category-planet","category-plants-animals","category-science-tech","category-voices","category-west-coast","tag-animals","tag-citizen-science","tag-climate-crisis","tag-conservation","tag-gulf-islands","tag-marine-life","tag-oceans","tag-opinion","tag-orcas","tag-salish-sea","tag-science","tag-sofia-osborne","tag-whales","tag-wildlife"],"yoast_head":"\nAn orca swims past a cargo vessel in the Boundary Pass international shipping channel.
\n"},"alt_text":"An orca peeks above the water in the Boundary Pass international shipping channel, near the BC coast, near a cargo ship.","media_type":"image","mime_type":"image/jpeg","media_details":{"width":1500,"height":844,"file":"2024/05/Whale-and-Ship-for-Web.jpg","filesize":301020,"sizes":{"medium":{"file":"Whale-and-Ship-for-Web-300x169.jpg","width":300,"height":169,"filesize":14632,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Whale-and-Ship-for-Web-300x169.jpg"},"large":{"file":"Whale-and-Ship-for-Web-1024x576.jpg","width":1024,"height":576,"filesize":149034,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Whale-and-Ship-for-Web-1024x576.jpg"},"thumbnail":{"file":"Whale-and-Ship-for-Web-150x150.jpg","width":150,"height":150,"filesize":7569,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Whale-and-Ship-for-Web-150x150.jpg"},"medium_large":{"file":"Whale-and-Ship-for-Web-768x432.jpg","width":768,"height":432,"filesize":87590,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Whale-and-Ship-for-Web-768x432.jpg"},"full":{"file":"Whale-and-Ship-for-Web.jpg","width":1500,"height":844,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Whale-and-Ship-for-Web.jpg"}},"image_meta":{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0","keywords":[]}},"source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Whale-and-Ship-for-Web.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media/2171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media"}],"about":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/types/attachment"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/users/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/comments?post=2171"}]}}],"wp:term":[[{"id":42,"link":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/category/west-coast/bc/","name":"BC","slug":"bc","taxonomy":"category","yoast_head":"\nAlmost everything changes by inches, so slowly that you don’t realize it’s happening. When children are little, we cannot quite fathom that they won’t always be small enough for us to protect. The Earth, too, shifts in slow arcs of evolution, its shape worn down by wind and water, its cycles and seasons unchanged for millennia. We imagine there is always more time to prepare for change and alter course — until suddenly there isn’t.
\n\n\n\nLast summer, BC experienced a record-breaking and fatal heat wave; in the months that followed, additional extreme weather events rocked the province. The message of the last year is clear: the window to prepare or alter course has passed. But there seems no greater urgency today — among the public or in government — than there was last year.
\n\n\n\nAs the world we leave our children changes no longer by inches but by great awful leaps, we will be forced to take stock of this horrifying inheritance we’ve left behind. By our inaction, by our indifference to urgent warnings, by our belief that change comes slowly and that there is always more time to intervene, even when it is clear: there is no more time at all.
\n\n\n\nMy little brother spots the frog first and calls us over to look, pointing in excitement. A frog? A frog! We all come running. Frogs, we are convinced, would make the best pets — that is, if we can ever catch one. No matter how slow, how careful, how quiet we are, they always manage to hop away, our hands closing on empty air in the spot where they’d just been, grass rustling in their wake.
\n\n\n\nBut this frog is different. He is stuck inside the window well, a semi-circle of corrugated tin about two feet deep carving out space around the basement window. It’s too deep for him to escape on his own. We kneel alongside my brother, the mid-summer Ontario sun hot on our little heads. His chubby toddler finger points. “Look,” he whispers. “Catch?”
\n\n\n\nThe heat is oppressive. It is impossible to take a full breath, impossible to move at a normal pace.
As the oldest kid, this is my job. I reach wide, careful to avoid the tin — the metal gets so hot in the summer sun that it will burn my skin if I brush against it. I close my fingers in slow-motion around the frog’s body, waiting for him to wriggle and jump.
\n\n\n\nBut he is dry and weightless in my hand, an empty shell, hollow and unmoving. Dead. I drop his little body and it flutters across the rocks like an autumn leaf. I jerk back in surprise; the hot tin of the window well burns the underside of my arm, and I jerk again from the pain, falling backwards onto the grass.
\n\n\n\nThe weather app on my phone tells me it’s 39°C, but the large outdoor thermostat hanging next to my door shows 41°, and it’s not quite 11 am. If I stay out here too long (that is, more than three minutes) I start to feel drunk — dizzy, lightheaded, nauseous. Everything feels bleached out and paper-thin: the grass under my toes, the leaves on the trees, the dirt in the garden. The heat is oppressive, a physical weight on my body. It is impossible to take a full breath, impossible to move at a normal pace. Every task feels impossible: cooking, chores, sleeping, thinking. I press my hand to my children’s foreheads a hundred times a day to make sure they’re still hydrated enough to sweat.
\n\n\n\nThis is the tail-end of June 2021, and we are midway through a six-day heat wave that is going to get much, much worse before it gets better. It’s not really a heat wave at all, which would be uncommon, but not unheard of, here in Surrey, BC, on the west coast of Canada.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/The-Pain-of-Parenting-Through-the-Climate-Crisis_WebBody.jpeg\")
No, this is a heat dome, a weather term most of us have never heard before this week. Heat builds up under a high-pressure “lid” and can’t escape, even at night when temperatures should drop. Each day is disastrously warmer than the last.
\n\n\n\nBefore it eases, a total of 619 people will die throughout the province; a BC Coroners Service report issued nearly a year later will identify that most are elderly, living alone, and often in poverty, without means to cool off. Ambulance and emergency services will be so overwhelmed that people will wait hours for help after calling 911, adding to the deaths. Crops will shrivel up. A whole town will burn down, dried out like tinder after days on end under some of the hottest temperatures on record in the country.
\n\n\n\nI try not to think about how bad it is, what it means, as I put the kids to bed with fans running and bottles of water nearby. But after years of “canary in the coal mine” warnings on climate change, I know that this is now a legion of canaries: a screeching, terrifying, deadly symphony, and they’re all on my doorstep.
\n\n\n\nThey say this is a once-in-a-millennium occurrence. But it takes less than half a year for us to be rocked by more extreme weather. In November, BC is swamped by torrential rainfall caused by an “atmospheric river” — a weather phenomenon in which a massive corridor of warm moisture-heavy air is carried inland from the Pacific Ocean — leading to flash floods that wipe out bridges, highways, homes, towns. Countless livestock drown on flooded farms. Several people lose their lives, their cars swallowed up in washouts and mudslides.
\n\n\n\nA month later, we’re hit again: a polar vortex brings frigid air from the North Pole, driving overnight temperatures to -15°C near the coast, worse inland, and doubly frigid with the wind chill. I’ve experienced colder weather in my childhood in Ontario and Alberta, and during winter visits to the Maritimes to see my sister. But this is different. With its typically temperate climate, our region’s systems aren’t designed for this — we have limited city equipment to deal with ice or snow, not enough hydro crews to manage frozen wires. Many people don’t even own snow boots let alone snow tires, and I don’t know a single person with a block heater on their car.
\n\n\n\nI press my hand to my children’s foreheads a hundred times a day to make sure they’re still hydrated enough to sweat.
Our houses aren’t built for these extremes either. Certainly, my 80-year-old house isn’t. In a normal year it’s only a problem on a handful of days. But after living through a 60-degree change in temperature over a span of six months, from 40-plus in summer to -15 in winter, the notion of a “normal year” seems quaint at best, and foolhardy at worst.
\n\n\n\nDuring the heat dome, we ran a pair of aging window air conditioners all day and night for weeks (a luxury many people didn’t have at all) and the interior of the house still ran into the low 30s. During the vortex, our furnace was hard pressed to keep up at times, and we pulled out rarely used electric blankets. In both instances, we were ready to decamp to the homes of my siblings if necessary, where newer construction and ventilation systems kept things not just tolerable but borderline normal. Most things in life are manageable with the right tools and enough money to purchase them — even, it seems, a climate crisis.
\n\n\n\nShortly after the new year, my husband and I start talking about ways we can change the house, within our means, to make it better. Not “granite countertops and fancy appliances” better, but “ready to withstand whatever weather may be coming our way in the future” better. In the middle of a discussion about potential cooling systems, I break down, crying so hard I can barely catch my breath.
\n\n\n\n“What were we thinking?” I ask between sobs. “What were we thinking?”
\n\n\n\nMy pragmatic partner assumes I am talking about the house, this ancient imperfect too-small home that has kept us safely and gratefully housed in a region known for its ongoing housing crisis.
\n\n\n\n“It’s fine. It’s great. We can figure this out,” he says. “I’m adding a new fan in the attic, OK?”
\n\n\n\nHe knows the fact he can fix and build and wire without help from contractors will ease my stress about what we can or can’t afford. But I shake my head, stare at my hands in my lap. It’s not the money, or the house, or anything we can repair or renovate.
\n\n\n\n“I mean the kids. To bring them into… all this. What were we thinking?”
\n\n\n\nI’m in part responsible for a world no longer stable enough for my children to inherit in safety. We all are.
I’m not the first to wonder about the wisdom of having had children in a world that caught fire faster than we expected — or sooner than we wanted to believe, at any rate. I’ve written about it before. I’ve laid awake nights pondering it. The question was always pressing and ever-present but still, in most ways, vague: Climate change was out there somewhere. Climate change did not feel like it was in southwestern BC, where the transition from one season to another is a mild shift of rainfall averages.
\n\n\n\nBut when I kissed my children’s sweaty sleeping foreheads in the middle of the heat dome, the question was on my lips. And when I broke down over a conversation about cooling pumps, about the privilege to even have such a conversation, it was impossible to ignore. It’s a question without an answer, really. I have to wrestle with the grief that I am in part responsible for the world that is no longer stable enough for them to inherit in safety. We all are.
\n\n\n\nThere’s a series of trails through a ravine near my house, which permits me the illusion of being in some far-flung forest, miles from the city. In February, during a walk on a misty-grey day, I hear the distinctive croak of a frog. It takes me by surprise and I pause, standing still to listen for it again. It’s somewhere to my left, in a jumble of fallen logs, decomposed leaves, and pockets of rainwater.
\n\n\n\nHe croaks again, and then again. Is this the right time of year for a frog to be awake? Isn’t it too early, not warm enough? I have a sudden urge to find him, catch him up in my hands and carry him home. Frogs would make the very best pets, after all — if you could catch one. I am hit with the visceral ghost-memory of a dried-out husk of a frog in my hand.
\n\n\n\nHow he must have suffered, trapped there for days without water in the hot summer sun. If only we’d found him sooner, I think, the echo of childish grief. Surely we’d have saved him, if we’d known what was coming, rescued him if we’d just realized in time. Maybe. I hope so. But it seems it is easy to believe there’s still time to play, even when it is clear: there is no more time at all.
\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1073,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[11,20,8,10,26,6,22],"tags":[121,292,71,145,526,60,120],"class_list":["post-762","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate-change","category-kids-parenting","category-living","category-magazine","category-natural-history","category-planet","category-voices","tag-children","tag-christina-myers","tag-climate-crisis","tag-family","tag-grief","tag-opinion","tag-parenting"],"yoast_head":"\nWe imagine there is always more time — until there isn’t.
\n"},"alt_text":"A person wearing brown shoes stands at a red heart with yellow lines radiating from it drawn on a concrete sidewalk.","media_type":"image","mime_type":"image/jpeg","media_details":{"width":1500,"height":1000,"file":"2022/09/The-Pain-of-Parenting-Through-the-Climate-Crisis_WebHeader.jpg","filesize":"254277","sizes":{"medium":{"file":"The-Pain-of-Parenting-Through-the-Climate-Crisis_WebHeader-300x200.jpg","width":300,"height":200,"filesize":"20317","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/The-Pain-of-Parenting-Through-the-Climate-Crisis_WebHeader-300x200.jpg"},"large":{"file":"The-Pain-of-Parenting-Through-the-Climate-Crisis_WebHeader-1024x683.jpg","width":1024,"height":683,"filesize":"250082","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/The-Pain-of-Parenting-Through-the-Climate-Crisis_WebHeader-1024x683.jpg"},"thumbnail":{"file":"The-Pain-of-Parenting-Through-the-Climate-Crisis_WebHeader-150x150.jpg","width":150,"height":150,"filesize":"8195","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/The-Pain-of-Parenting-Through-the-Climate-Crisis_WebHeader-150x150.jpg"},"medium_large":{"file":"The-Pain-of-Parenting-Through-the-Climate-Crisis_WebHeader-768x512.jpg","width":768,"height":512,"filesize":"143241","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/The-Pain-of-Parenting-Through-the-Climate-Crisis_WebHeader-768x512.jpg"},"full":{"file":"The-Pain-of-Parenting-Through-the-Climate-Crisis_WebHeader.jpg","width":1500,"height":1000,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/The-Pain-of-Parenting-Through-the-Climate-Crisis_WebHeader.jpg"}},"image_meta":{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}},"source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/The-Pain-of-Parenting-Through-the-Climate-Crisis_WebHeader.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media/1073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media"}],"about":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/types/attachment"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/users/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/comments?post=1073"}]}}],"wp:term":[[{"id":11,"link":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/category/planet/climate-change/","name":"Climate Change","slug":"climate-change","taxonomy":"category","yoast_head":"\nWhen I was 10, my nana (maternal grandfather) remained stuck in the dense forests of Kishtwar on the banks of Kashmir’s Chenab River for nearly a fortnight. I waited for him every day until late at night. Before going to bed, I would park myself beside my nani (maternal grandmother) and enquire about his return. My queries were met with the same assurance: “He will definitely come back tomorrow.”
\n\n\n\nThat tomorrow came after 12 days. My nana came home with wild strawberries, mulberries, milk, and lots of maesh kreaj (local cheese) given to him by the Indigenous communities who lived in the forests.
\n\n\n\nI ran toward him, unable to contain my excitement and relief. My nana held me, tossed me up in the air, and kissed me on the forehead. I started bombarding him with questions, asking where and why he had disappeared for 12 days. “I was stuck in the forest due to work,” he said. My nana worked for the State of Jammu and Kashmir’s forest department, keeping a check on illegal hunting and tree-felling.
\n\n\n\nDuring the dams’ construction, hillsides will be blasted, trees will be cut down, and streams diverted.
When he returned from the forests, he brought something else with him: a story for each day. Through his stories, I learned how humans rely on water for survival, the nourishment forests hold for people and animals, and Indigenous peoples’ deep knowledge of the forest. One story I remember was about how Indigenous Gujjar women collect green dandelions (locally known as haand). Once clean and dried, they provide nutrients that boost the immunity of pregnant mothers.
\n\n\n\nIn October 2020, on the banks of the same Chenab River my nana once described as fragile, the Indian government approved the construction of seven hydropower dams in the Kishtwar region. These dams will generate 5,190 megawatts of hydroelectricity as part of the Indian government’s push to shift from coal to renewable energy.
\n\n\n\nBut in the lush forests and valleys of Kishtwar, the dams threaten delicate flora and fauna, and the ways of life of semi-nomadic and farming communities. Locals, activists, and scholars say the dams will come at huge environmental and human costs. Vast tracts of forest will be destroyed, and fertile agricultural land will be submerged, displacing over 20,000 people. Work on four of the seven dams is already underway.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Green-Power-at-any-Cost_WebBody-683x1024.jpg\")
“The power projects are coming up at the cost of the people, who forfeit their resources without getting anything from the government,” Zakir Bhat, a member of the Kishtwar district development council, told Outlook India. “We should be part of all decision-making about how to harness this region’s water resources.”
\n\n\n\nSince India’s independence in 1947, over 3,300 big dams have been built across the country, leading to the forced displacement of millions; advisasis (Indigenous people) have been particularly affected. The government offers compensation to those displaced, but it’s often meagre. Sometimes it doesn’t come at all. And, if it does, it probably won’t be enough to buy new land.
\n\n\n\nGujjars and Bakerwals — semi-nomadic Indigenous pastoralists whose main occupation is rearing cattle — are among locals protesting the dams’ construction. These communities depend on the forests, and cultivate forest land to grow rice and lentils. At higher altitudes where fodder is unavailable, their cows eat wild forest grass. The government has promised them compensation, but community members say it won’t be enough to sustain them. They worry they will be pushed into poverty.
\n\n\n\nLocal communities worry they will be pushed into poverty.
In the face of this news, I recalled the stories my nana had told me about the wealth of the forest. Forest-dwellers and officials posted inside the forest survived only thanks to the river, and forest produce. I recorded what he shared in my childhood diary. He told me he drank water from the Chenab and ate rice, lentils, chicken, and fish cooked by Gujjar women. Without their support, he would have struggled to sustain himself.
\n\n\n\nToday, I shudder when I think about what will happen to forest-dwellers once the dams are built. During construction, hillsides will be blasted, trees will be cut down, and streams diverted. Once the dams are complete, valley floors will be flooded. And the river ecosystems themselves will be changed. By trapping sediment, dams can bury rocky river beds where fish spawn. By slowing down or stopping the water, they can cause it to heat up, affecting temperature-sensitive species.
\n\n\n\nPooran Chand, president of Kisthwar’s union of village labourers, has lived and worked in the green surroundings of Kishtwar all his fifty years. His family has farmed rice, millet, and lentils in the region for generations. They have witnessed devastation wrought by large-scale dams in nearby areas.
\n\n\n\nChand recalls the construction of Baglihar Dam in the nearby Ramban district. Completed in 2008, the project displaced approximately 1,400 people. Flooding from the dam submerged the town of Pul Doda, destroying homes and businesses.
\n\n\n\nAny large dam poses ecological risks, and having seven in close proximity will only magnify those risks in Kishtwar.
Villagers in the district received little compensation in exchange for their fertile land and homes. They have lost their way of life, says Chand, noting that many are now day-labourers. Despite government promises of rehabilitation, many families rent small one- or two-room houses without water or electricity. Others are homeless.
\n\n\n\n“There is no stable option to manage their household expenses. They have to work twice as hard as before to get their families two square meals a day,” said Chand, who is staunchly opposed to the new dam projects in Kishtwar.
\n\n\n\nEvery summer, communities of Gujjars and Bakerwals used to migrate 600 km from the Kashmir Valley to land in the Himalayas with flocks of sheep, cows, buffaloes, and goats (land now flooded by the Baglihar Dam). Heavy blasting during dam construction destroyed their dhokas — temporary houses made of mud and woods — and rendered the territory unsafe. Now, they are forced to travel with their livestock to places they don’t know, sometimes running into conflicts with communities there.
\n\n\n\nThe government has promised the new dams will generate jobs, but locals are skeptical. They lack basic skills required to work in construction. “Promoting these dams as avenues of job generation in the villages is merely a facade,” said Irshad, a Kishtwar resident from the Gujjar community. “It is of no help to people like us as we keep migrating from the Himalayas to the plains every six months. Instead, it impacts our dhokas.”
\n\n\n\nThe Chenab River flows into Kishtwar from Himachal Pradesh and flows out to four other districts in Jammu and Kashmir before reaching Pakistan. Any large dam poses ecological risks, and having seven in close proximity will only magnify those risks in Kishtwar.
\n\n\n\nThe concerns reach beyond India to Pakistan. By altering the flow of the Chenab, the dams could reduce water available to Pakistani farmers. The project has ruffled political feathers in both countries, with Pakistan accusing India of violating a bi-lateral agreement about control over the rivers in the area.
\n\n\n\nHimanshu Thakkar, the coordinator of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers, and People–an informal network of organisations and individuals who work on issues related to large dams in South Asia — explained the dams are “run-of-river” projects, meaning they will generate energy from flowing water and have limited water storage.
\n\n\n\nOnce the dams are running, water will flow irregularly through them, harming fish and other aquatic life, as well as fishermen who rely on the river for their livelihood, said Thakkar. “Since it is not possible to store electricity, these dams will operate during peak hours of demand,” he explained. “Water flow will be disrupted at sudden moments. At times, there will be no water available in the river and, at others, the flow will suddenly increase.”
\n\n\n\nWhen I was a child, my nana told me stories. In his last days, I read the news to him. The difference: he had good stories to tell, I had bad ones.
The Himalayas are already prone to disasters like landslides and flash floods. The dams could worsen the risk, according to Khurshid Ahmad Lone, a high school geology teacher in Handwara, Jammu and Kashmir. To make matters worse, an earthquake of magnitude 8.5 or higher is overdue in the Jammu region of the Himalayas, according to a 2018 study conducted by seismologists from the Bangalore-based Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research.
\n\n\n\nIn addition, reservoirs release large amounts of methane — a greenhouse gas significantly more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide — as plants, plankton, algae, and soils at the bottom decompose.
\n\n\n\nWhen the news broke out about the approval of the Kishtwar dam projects, I was at my grandfather’s bedside. He had been diagnosed with cancer a few months earlier and I was taking care of his diet and medication. I read the news to him every day, and we discussed political developments that could lead to economic and environmental changes in the region.
\n\n\n\nThat small ritual became a symbolic representation of the cycle of life for me. When I was a child, my nana told me stories about the ways of the world. In his last days, I read out the news and explained stories to him. However, there was a significant difference: he had good stories to tell, while I had bad ones.
\n\n\n\nWhen I read the report about dam construction, he turned to me and asked, “Where will the people go? Why is the government doing this? All my life I have protected these trees and now they will cut them down.”
\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1345,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[12,49,10,26,6,7,22],"tags":[98,242,102,241,60,297],"class_list":["post-783","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-energy","category-human-rights","category-magazine","category-natural-history","category-planet","category-society","category-voices","tag-ecology","tag-hydroelectricity","tag-international-development","tag-kashmir","tag-opinion","tag-safina-nabi"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Baglihar Dam in Kashmir was completed in 2008. The lack of adequate compensation for locals displaced by the dam’s reservoir is cause for concern for those who will be impacted by the Indian government’s new hydro-electric projects.
\n"},"alt_text":"A concrete dam sits in a valley in Kashmir. The sunlit mountain to the left is rocky and dotted with golden grass and trees.","media_type":"image","mime_type":"image/jpeg","media_details":{"width":1500,"height":1000,"file":"2022/09/Green-Power-at-any-Cost_WebHeader.jpg","filesize":"303918","sizes":{"medium":{"file":"Green-Power-at-any-Cost_WebHeader-300x200.jpg","width":300,"height":200,"filesize":"15917","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Green-Power-at-any-Cost_WebHeader-300x200.jpg"},"large":{"file":"Green-Power-at-any-Cost_WebHeader-1024x683.jpg","width":1024,"height":683,"filesize":"183170","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Green-Power-at-any-Cost_WebHeader-1024x683.jpg"},"thumbnail":{"file":"Green-Power-at-any-Cost_WebHeader-150x150.jpg","width":150,"height":150,"filesize":"6606","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Green-Power-at-any-Cost_WebHeader-150x150.jpg"},"medium_large":{"file":"Green-Power-at-any-Cost_WebHeader-768x512.jpg","width":768,"height":512,"filesize":"101604","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Green-Power-at-any-Cost_WebHeader-768x512.jpg"},"full":{"file":"Green-Power-at-any-Cost_WebHeader.jpg","width":1500,"height":1000,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Green-Power-at-any-Cost_WebHeader.jpg"}},"image_meta":{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}},"source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Green-Power-at-any-Cost_WebHeader.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media/1345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media"}],"about":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/types/attachment"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/users/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/comments?post=1345"}]}}],"wp:term":[[{"id":12,"link":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/category/planet/energy/","name":"Energy","slug":"energy","taxonomy":"category","yoast_head":"\nIn September 2019, Hurricane Dorian devastated Grand Bahama and the Abacos in The Bahamas. A people accustomed to hurricanes, we were shocked by the terrifying superstorm, a slow-moving Category 5. Those of us on other islands in the archipelago nervously watched social media accounts of what was taking place. Many houses were flooded up to their second levels; others were packed with people who came knocking, desperate for a safe place to ride out the storm.
\n\n\n\nAs director of Equality Bahamas, a non-profit organization that promotes women’s and LGBTQ+ rights, I was involved in relief efforts. We set up a donation center at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas in New Providence that quickly grew into a distribution center for displaced people. Over six months, we supported over 700 people by providing weekly food packages, hygiene kits, menstrual hygiene products, bedding, baby items, school supplies, school uniform assistance, tarps, tools, career services, and connections to mental health services.
\n\n\n\nInternational organizations sent supplies and entered the country to offer assistance. States and organizations contributed money directly to the government of The Bahamas for relief efforts. International humanitarian organizations and UN agencies largely partnered with organizations that had greater capacity and connections than Equality Bahamas. We sustained our efforts by partnering with another local nongovernmental organization (NGO) with access to funding.
\n\n\n\nFood aid was typically selected based on cost and non-perishability, driven by the logic that the more food you can buy and the more easily you can store it, the more it can help. But reality is more complex; cheap, non-perishable choices tend to be unhealthy ones, while thoughtless packaging contributes to environmental problems. Day by day, I dealt with these challenges and thought about how we might reimagine the meaning of food security in disaster relief.
\n\n\n\nFunders typically don’t want to cover human resources, buildings, equipment, and the like. When it comes to disaster relief, everyone seems to want to provide food.
For months, water was one of the most pressing needs of those remaining in and displaced from Grand Bahama and the Abacos to other islands in The Bahamas. International NGOs sent cases and cases of single-use water bottles. I didn’t hear any discussion of purification products or methods as people rushed to get their hands on cases of water. I thought about the relationship between pallets stacked high with cases of bottled water and the rising sea levels that threaten to make these islands disappear within a century. We are still trying to get the landfill under control and, at the time, The Bahamas was just months into a single-use plastic ban.
\n\n\n\nThis response to an unprecedented climate event produced more waste that adversely affects the environment. On Day 1, we needed those cases of water. By Day 30, people would have been better off with water filters, water bladders, and reusable water containers.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Its-Time-to-Rethink-Disaster-Relief_WebBody.jpg\")
One of the largest components of the hurricane relief program we ran was the provision of weekly food packages. Due to budgetary constraints, limited space, and the volume of need, we needed items that were nonperishable and easy to distribute. Food packages varied from week to week, but typically included tuna, sardines, corned beef, corn, sweet peas, sugar, evaporated milk, tomato paste, rice, grits, tea, and juice. The protein was canned and high in sodium — a major issue considering the high local rate of heart and circulatory issues.
\n\n\n\nFrom the cardboard boxes used for food packages to the plastic wrapped around cases of nonperishable food, our waste filled a dumpster week after week. To make better use of funds, we started asking people to return their boxes from the previous week in exchange for a packed box, but some people lacked space to store the boxes or said the boxes got destroyed. We eventually shifted to recyclable plastic bags which cost less, but they were not sturdy enough. I lamented that we could not secure funding to provide each family with a reusable cloth bag, but we asked people to bring their own so we could stop using plastic bags.
\n\n\n\nI have noticed, over years of running a nongovernmental organization, that one of the major issues with funding is the obsession with particular kinds of activities. Funders typically do not want to cover the cost of human resources, buildings, equipment, and the like. When it comes to disaster relief, everyone — including international donors and individuals — seems to want to provide food, but there is too little focus on the type of food being distributed. Funders focus on quantity over quality and they tend to encourage NGOs to do the same through impact assessments that privilege quantifiable data.
\n\n\n\nOver six months, we had the pleasure of getting to know some of the people coming for assistance and had the opportunity to get feedback. While everyone was grateful, one message was clear: tuna and corned beef get tiring, and nonperishable food items are monotonous and not particularly healthy.
\n\n\n\nIt is easy to sit at a computer and make the cheapest selections to help the most people, but isn’t that the problem with international aid? In seeking to reach as many people as possible with limited funds, the system lost sight of the importance of prioritizing health. In The Bahamas, there are overwhelming numbers of people with hypertension and diabetes. The top causes of death from 2009 to 2019 were ischemic heart disease, stroke, and hypertensive heart disease. These should have been the first considerations.
\n\n\n\nWe have a responsibility to think about the long-term physical and mental effects of our actions and inaction. In this case, our food assistance had the potential to foster unhealthy eating habits, negatively affect physical health, and add a mental health stressor as people grew tired of the same items over and over again.
\n\n\n\nIn seeking to reach as many people as possible with limited funds, the system lost sight of the importance of prioritizing health.
I thought of adding a green market to the weekly distribution, but it was not financially feasible. Instead, I negotiated with donors to provide grocery vouchers so people could purchase fresh produce. There is no way to know how people spent the $40 — later reduced to $20 — and that’s fine. We, the people providing assistance, should trust recipients’ ability to make decisions for themselves.
\n\n\n\nAnother area that was initially overlooked was supplemental drinks for elderly people. International NGOs and individuals do not typically donate Boost, Ensure, MiraLAX, and comparable items. Similarly, we had to specifically request or use discretionary funding to purchase baby formula, such as lactose-free options, for those with specific dietary needs.
\n\n\n\nIn the Abacos, a few communities of Haitian migrants lost their homes and everything inside. Unlike most Bahamians who had family or friends who could house them, the Haitians had to stay in government-run shelters. Most were housed together in two shelters which made it easier to deliver programming tailored to their needs. Food packages were of little use to them because they did not have access to cooking facilities, so we made arrangements for volunteers to prepare breakfast one day per week.
\n\n\n\nWe quickly learned the typical Haitian breakfast is not like Bahamian or American breakfasts, so we consulted with Haitian people to create a menu featuring Haitian dishes, such as Haitian-style spaghetti, instead of typical Bahamian breakfasts of grits and tuna, corned beef, or souse, a popular breakfast dish typically made with chicken or pig feet and flavoured with lime and allspice. The Haitian food provided a source of comfort, giving them the taste of home.
\n\n\n\nWe need to be more mindful in responses to disaster, and set the intention not to create new disasters. How can we provide water to thousands without creating devastating waste that will end up in landfills? What food items can provide nourishment and foster health? What alternatives exist for those with allergies and specific needs?
\n\n\n\nHow can our food assistance programs prioritize the needs of vulnerable people, reduce harm to people and environment, and honor diverse cultures and traditions? These questions are difficult to answer. Thoughtful, effective responses are not cheap, nor are the lives and islands impacted by climate events and our responses to them.
\n\n\n\nWe need to be more mindful in responses to disaster, and set the intention not to create new disasters.
The Bahamas is still trying to recover from Hurricane Dorian. Infrastructure is being rebuilt and repaired, people are still displaced, some businesses are still closed, and families still need government assistance. This has, of course, been complicated by Covid-19. We remain concerned about the upcoming hurricane season and the damage another hurricane — whatever the strength and speed — could do.
\n\n\n\nSince Hurricane Dorian, and even more in the pandemic, Bahamians have become interested in backyard gardening. People are learning to grow their own food and see value in reducing our reliance on imported food. I hope we tap into the power of feeding ourselves, building strong communities with shared gardens and social enterprises that can respond to national crises with homegrown food. We may not be in the position to decline foreign aid, but we can set trends and protocols for international nongovernmental organizations to follow in our country. We live with the consequences of slavery and colonialism, and we risk being saddled with the negative consequences of aid.
\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1371,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[11,10,26,6,22],"tags":[307,212,213,214,75,407,76,60,125,104,140],"class_list":["post-1055","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate-change","category-magazine","category-natural-history","category-planet","category-voices","tag-alicia-wallace","tag-caribbean","tag-disaster-relief","tag-food-security","tag-health","tag-hurricane","tag-natural-disaster","tag-opinion","tag-plastic","tag-pollution","tag-water"],"yoast_head":"\nDestruction wrought by Hurricane Dorian in Marsh Harbour, The Bahamas
\n"},"alt_text":"The rubble of a house destroyed by Hurricane Dorian in front of a still partly standing pink house in The Bahamas.","media_type":"image","mime_type":"image/jpeg","media_details":{"width":1500,"height":1000,"file":"2022/09/Its-Time-to-Rethink-Disaster-Relief_WebHeader.jpg","filesize":"477225","sizes":{"medium":{"file":"Its-Time-to-Rethink-Disaster-Relief_WebHeader-300x200.jpg","width":300,"height":200,"filesize":"19079","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Its-Time-to-Rethink-Disaster-Relief_WebHeader-300x200.jpg"},"large":{"file":"Its-Time-to-Rethink-Disaster-Relief_WebHeader-1024x683.jpg","width":1024,"height":683,"filesize":"173749","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Its-Time-to-Rethink-Disaster-Relief_WebHeader-1024x683.jpg"},"thumbnail":{"file":"Its-Time-to-Rethink-Disaster-Relief_WebHeader-150x150.jpg","width":150,"height":150,"filesize":"8105","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Its-Time-to-Rethink-Disaster-Relief_WebHeader-150x150.jpg"},"medium_large":{"file":"Its-Time-to-Rethink-Disaster-Relief_WebHeader-768x512.jpg","width":768,"height":512,"filesize":"103691","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Its-Time-to-Rethink-Disaster-Relief_WebHeader-768x512.jpg"},"full":{"file":"Its-Time-to-Rethink-Disaster-Relief_WebHeader.jpg","width":1500,"height":1000,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Its-Time-to-Rethink-Disaster-Relief_WebHeader.jpg"}},"image_meta":{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}},"source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Its-Time-to-Rethink-Disaster-Relief_WebHeader.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media/1371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media"}],"about":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/types/attachment"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/users/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/comments?post=1371"}]}}],"wp:term":[[{"id":11,"link":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/category/planet/climate-change/","name":"Climate Change","slug":"climate-change","taxonomy":"category","yoast_head":"\nMy first in-your-face experience with climate change was the summer I turned 9. It was the mid-‘90s, and my family was visiting the Athabasca Glacier in Alberta’s Jasper National Park.
\n\n\n\nThe Athabasca is the best-known of the six “toes” of the Rocky Mountains’ massive Columbia Icefield. If you drive the world-famous Icefields Parkway, you’ll see it on the west side, around an hour south of Jasper. As of 2020, the icefield is a sprawling 200 hectares of rock and ice, straddling the Alberta-BC border.
\n\n\n\nTo get to the ice, you either pay a not-insignificant sum to ride a special bus equipped with giant, off-roading tires, or you walk up a rocky but well-trodden path. My family chose the path. As we hiked, we passed small trailside markers, each showing a different year.
\n\n\n\nThese signs, my father said, indicated how far the glacier’s icy terminus had previously reached. A quick glance showed that since 1890 — the first year marked — the glacier had steadily retreated. This was happening, my father explained, because humans were warming up the Earth, speeding up the melting of the ice. If we kept doing what we were doing, the planet would get hotter and the glacier would be gone.
\n\n\n\nSince the mid-1800s, the Athabasca Glacier has receded around 1.75 kilometres.
You know where this is going: The ice has continued to melt. Since the mid-1800s, the Athabasca Glacier has receded around 1.75 kilometres. Depending on summer temperatures and other factors, as much as 20 metres of horizontal ice is lost each year, alongside as much as 6.5 metres of vertical ice.
\n\n\n\nGlaciers do naturally recede. Over 11,000 years ago, Alberta was covered by ice that has since retreated. But what we’re seeing with the Athabasca isn’t normal melt, explains Bob Sandford, the water and climate security chair at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health.
\n\n\n\nSandford — a lifelong Albertan who’s lived in the Rockies for decades — has personally watched the Athabasca recede year after year. He’s also seen the data. He explains that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has published five reports that all looked at whether glacier melting is just cyclical. “And every time,” he says, “the answer comes back in a more complete and refined way, suggesting irrevocably that it’s increases in carbon dioxide that are causing this.”
\n\n\n\nI’ve always thought the Athabasca Glacier represented Alberta more accurately than Instagram-perfect Lake Louise. Just like the province, the glacier is impressive and demands your attention. It’s rugged yet also surprisingly accessible; Parks Canada says it’s the most-visited glacier in North America. And, like Alberta’s, its fate is interwoven with the fossil fuel industry.
\n\n\n\nI was born in rural Alberta and lived there until I was 18. Then — with an acceptance letter to a Toronto university — I left, knowing I would never return to live. But I did, and still do, look back. And, too often, my home province fills me with frustration, bewilderment, and even anger.
\n\n\n\nI left Alberta during the era of the Kyoto Protocol, in which Canada committed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 6% below 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012. When Kyoto was ratified in 2002, nearly 75% of Canadians — including my immediate family — supported it. But for the most part, it was blasphemy in Alberta, where the conservative provincial government campaigned against it.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Once-the-Glaciers-Disappear-We-Cant-Get-Them-Back_WebBody.jpg\")
Sometimes I wonder: What if Alberta’s turn-of-the-millennium government had taken a different path? Acknowledged that oil was a crucial part of the province’s past, but couldn’t be its future, then focused on a methodical transition to a low-carbon economy that could have served as a model for the entire world.
\n\n\n\nInstead, most subsequent provincial governments have continued to promote the fossil fuel industry’s expansion with policies that will see the province dragged in the history books. The current United Conservative Party government is particularly aggressive, cancelling its progressive predecessor’s made-in-Alberta carbon tax, creating a “war room” to promote a pro-fossil fuels agenda, and launching an inquiry into the already debunked theory that foreign-funded environmental groups are sabotaging the province’s energy sector.
\n\n\n\nIt doesn’t have to be like this. Alberta is a beautiful place full of talent, promise, and an economy nearly as complex as my feelings about the province. Yes, oil and gas is still the biggest industry, but in 2017, that sector’s contribution to the GDP was 16%! Too often, the province’s leaders and residents treat Alberta as some kind of disconnected bubble that exists primarily to feed the bottom line of the energy sector, regardless of consequences.
\n\n\n\nTrue, the oil industry has taken some positive steps. Between 2000 and 2017, operational greenhouse gas emissions from the oil sands were reduced by nearly 30%. But they still pump out approximately 70 metric megatonnes of greenhouse gases a year. (By comparison, in 2017, the roughly 6.9 million residents of Massachusetts produced just over 73 metric megatonnes.) And the industry wants that number to grow; the Oil Sands Advisory Group has proposed allowing emissions to reach 100 megatonnes, at which point they would be capped. The Athabasca is already receding 200 times faster than normal, and its home province is willing to allow its demise to happen even quicker.
\n\n\n\nMark Ednie, a scientist with Natural Resources Canada who monitors the glacier, explains that glaciers are a reflection of our past emissions: “What we’re seeing now is what the climate was like from 20, or even 50, years ago.” He says that even if the world went zero-carbon tomorrow, the glaciers would continue to melt as our air temperature is higher now than it was decades ago.
\n\n\n\nWhen I ask if there’s any way to save the Athabasca, Ednie replies without hesitation, “There’s nothing we can physically do.” Based on the models he’s seen, “The glacier will probably disappear between 2040 and 2100.” The higher altitude parts of the Columbia Icefield should persist for much longer, though.
\n\n\n\nSandford’s research is a bit more optimistic. While the Athabasca will be “much diminished within a generation,” he believes some part of the glacier will continue to overlook the Icefields Parkway into the next century.
\n\n\n\nBoth men agree glaciers are vanishing. They point to research by the University of British Columbia, which concluded that by 2100 up to 90% of Alberta’s glaciers could be gone. “They’re on their way out,” says Sandford, with audible sadness.
\n\n\n\nWhen glaciers are lost, roughly one in four Albertans could face seasonal water shortages.
The loss of the Athabasca will hurt tourism — those specialized glacier buses won’t have any ice to rumble over — but the biggest impact would likely be on the province’s water supply. Last August, a study by UBC scientists was published in the journal Nature Climate Change. It found that retreating glaciers in Alberta and BC — including the Athabasca — will cause Alberta’s various glacier-fed rivers to have “substantially lower” flow during the summer. Without additional measures, over 1 million Albertans (roughly one in four residents) could face seasonal water shortages. It also noted the communities most at risk; one of them is Hinton, my former hometown.
\n\n\n\nThe study’s lead author, Sam Anderson, told me that Alberta’s Environment and Parks ministry has reached out to him about his work. But while government employees might care about the province’s glaciers, there’s little evidence of that sentiment among its leaders. After not finding any provincial government statement about the Athabasca, I reached out to Alberta Environment and Parks. A staffer told me they would try to get a comment, but ultimately, my request was met with silence.
\n\n\n\n“The Alberta government doesn’t care about climate change,” Sandford told me without hesitation, adding he feels embarrassed to be Albertan. I can’t help but nod in agreement.
\n\n\n\nMy struggle with Alberta isn’t just that it too often resists science, but that it’s being economically foolish. We’re approaching “peak oil demand,” when the world’s thirst for oil will reach its highest point, then begin a permanent decline in both consumption and pricing. In 2017, Shell predicted we’d reach this stage in the early 2030s. Now, changing market conditions have BP, one of the world’s energy giants, saying we’ll hit it sometime this decade.
\n\n\n\nAlready, many billions of investment dollars have been diverted. Withdrawal of capital has hit the Alberta oil sands especially hard, presumably due to the high cost of getting their product to market, and its reputation for being dirtier than other sources of fossil fuels. Alberta oil patch revenue for 2020–2021 may not crack C$1.3 billion; in 2014–2015 it was over C$7 billion. According to public policy research centre Parkland Institute, the industry has shed over 53,000 jobs between 2014 and 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic.
\n\n\n\nDespite the ugliness of its politics, Alberta is a stunning place that should inspire the fight against climate change.
Alberta is attempting to diversify its economy somewhat. But the provincial government is undeniably most active when protecting an industry that’s not only killing the planet, but is itself dying. This focus is so disconnected from reality, I can’t help wondering if we’ve entered some kind of final phase of grifting that will end with a handful of people getting rich while ordinary Albertans are left with few jobs, a gutted economy, and a rocky slope where a glacier once stretched in Jasper National Park.
\n\n\n\nI hope to return to the Athabasca Glacier next summer, with my toddler. I want to recreate photos I took a few years ago with my first child, with the glacier in the background. The photos will be proof my children saw the Athabasca before it was reduced to a mere sliver of the Columbia Icefield.
\n\n\n\nThey will also remind me that, despite the ugliness of Alberta politics, the province is a stunning place that should inspire the fight against climate change. While we might lose the Athabasca Glacier, we can still honour it by advocating for policies that will keep the rest of the natural world from the same fate.
\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1114,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[11,10,26,6,22],"tags":[271,81,71,272,60,120,65,562],"class_list":["post-602","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate-change","category-magazine","category-natural-history","category-planet","category-voices","tag-alberta","tag-canada","tag-climate-crisis","tag-lindsay-kneteman","tag-opinion","tag-parenting","tag-politics","tag-rocky-mountains"],"yoast_head":"\nAlberta’s Athabasca Glacier
\n"},"alt_text":"Under a blue sky, glacial ice extends into the distance between two immense mountains in Alberta's Athabasca Glacier.","media_type":"image","mime_type":"image/jpeg","media_details":{"width":1500,"height":1000,"file":"2022/09/Once-the-Glaciers-Disappear-We-Cant-Get-Them-Back_WebHeader.jpg","filesize":"305119","sizes":{"medium":{"file":"Once-the-Glaciers-Disappear-We-Cant-Get-Them-Back_WebHeader-300x200.jpg","width":300,"height":200,"filesize":"16766","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Once-the-Glaciers-Disappear-We-Cant-Get-Them-Back_WebHeader-300x200.jpg"},"large":{"file":"Once-the-Glaciers-Disappear-We-Cant-Get-Them-Back_WebHeader-1024x683.jpg","width":1024,"height":683,"filesize":"158368","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Once-the-Glaciers-Disappear-We-Cant-Get-Them-Back_WebHeader-1024x683.jpg"},"thumbnail":{"file":"Once-the-Glaciers-Disappear-We-Cant-Get-Them-Back_WebHeader-150x150.jpg","width":150,"height":150,"filesize":"7095","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Once-the-Glaciers-Disappear-We-Cant-Get-Them-Back_WebHeader-150x150.jpg"},"medium_large":{"file":"Once-the-Glaciers-Disappear-We-Cant-Get-Them-Back_WebHeader-768x512.jpg","width":768,"height":512,"filesize":"93162","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Once-the-Glaciers-Disappear-We-Cant-Get-Them-Back_WebHeader-768x512.jpg"},"full":{"file":"Once-the-Glaciers-Disappear-We-Cant-Get-Them-Back_WebHeader.jpg","width":1500,"height":1000,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Once-the-Glaciers-Disappear-We-Cant-Get-Them-Back_WebHeader.jpg"}},"image_meta":{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}},"source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Once-the-Glaciers-Disappear-We-Cant-Get-Them-Back_WebHeader.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media/1114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media"}],"about":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/types/attachment"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/users/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/comments?post=1114"}]}}],"wp:term":[[{"id":11,"link":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/category/planet/climate-change/","name":"Climate Change","slug":"climate-change","taxonomy":"category","yoast_head":"\nIn satellite imagery, California looked as though it had been cut open. The small fires were puncture wounds; the larger ones, deep gashes. From each, a dense plume spilled across the landscape, like something leaking from the earth. In my Sacramento backyard, it was impossible to tell where the smoke was coming from or where it was going: the whole thing faded into a sunless, washed-out grey. On the worst days, visible flecks of ash filtered through the air, settling on rooftops and windshields.
\n\n\n\nAutumn usually marks the beginning of wildfire season in California. This year it came earlier and bigger. In mid-August, a lightning storm sparked hundreds of fires in dozens of counties. Over the ensuing weeks, they merged into several record-breaking megafires.
\n\n\n\nFrom late August to mid-September, the smoke was constant. Panic quickly faded, replaced by a low, constant hum of dread. Orange skies, red moon, raw throat, Excedrin. Patch the gaps in the windowsill with painter’s tape. Refresh AirNow.gov again. Watch the air purifier’s LED flip from purple (bad) to red (worse). Remind my mom in Oakland to make sure her air filter is HEPA-certified. Search Zillow for condos in Minneapolis.
\n\n\n\nLike most Californians, my home has not been threatened by flames. But if every fire is a natural disaster, each releases into the atmosphere another, more subtle disaster, one that diffuses, settles and lingers.
\n\n\n\nOrange skies, red moon, raw throat, Excedrin. Watch the air purifier’s LED flip from purple (bad) to red (worse).
Clean air is a gaseous soup composed primarily of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water vapor. Wildfire adds to this mixture such unsavory ingredients as carbon monoxide, ozone, and microscopic flotsam termed “particulate matter,” all of which can make it harder to breathe. Measurements of these and other pollutants are used to calculate the Air Quality Index (AQI), a rating of 0 to 500. An AQI above 100 indicates possible health effects for sensitive groups; at 150, air is considered unhealthy for the general public.
\n\n\n\nOn September 8, Sacramento recorded an AQI of 484. In some places, air pollution was so intense that measurements exceeded the usual top end of the index, clocking in above 700. Such was the poisoned soup that poured into millions of nostrils, down bronchial tubes, in and around alveoli.
\n\n\n\nThere aren’t many studies exploring the health effects of repeated, severe wildfire smoke exposure. Partially because, until recently, not many people had experienced repeated, severe wildfire smoke exposure. It is clear that wildfire smoke, like other kinds of air pollution, exacerbates asthma and other respiratory diseases. Researchers from the University of Montana found that air pollution from the 2017 wildfire season more than doubled the state’s influenza cases the following winter. The authors suggest that — as has been shown in mice — smoke exposure impairs the immune system’s ability to fight infection. They and other researchers anticipate that people exposed to smoke may also be more easily infected with Covid-19, and more likely to die from it.
\n\n\n\nResearchers anticipate people exposed to smoke may be more easily infected with Covid-19, and more likely to die from it.
Other studies have linked smoke exposure to a variety of health effects, including premature birth, heart attacks, and overall rates of death. But according to Dr. Colleen Reid, a University of Colorado environmental epidemiologist, most of the research has only examined the effects of a single period of smoke exposure. “I think we’re missing the fact that there are these repeated wildfires over time,” she said.
\n\n\n\nSince the onset of the fire season, Reid has received near-constant inquiries from media outlets and concerned citizens about how to stay safe. The compounding health demands of the pandemic (stay isolated), heat waves (stay cool) and smoke (stay inside) have made it hard to give advice people want to hear.
\n\n\n\nI, like many other Californians, spent weeks sandwiched between my window air-conditioning unit and air purifier. But that’s not feasible for thousands of unhoused people, hundreds of thousands of agricultural workers, and millions of families who simply cannot afford a $200 air purifier. Even for those who can, “telling people to shelter in place for long periods of time has mental health implications,” said Reid. She has experienced those implications firsthand, as smoke from Colorado fires kept her family in Boulder indoors for days on end.
\n\n\n\n“When you have a few days in a row where you can’t get outside and exercise because the air pollution is so bad — or when you have a few days in a row where I’m telling my children that we’re going to just stay inside and play — it’s hard,” she said. “If that becomes normal, that becomes really hard to think about.”
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Can-the-smoke-truly-clear-in-California_WebBody1-1024x512.jpg\"){kind=spacer}
And there is every indication that yearly megafires and smoke warnings will become normal. As University of Illinois atmospheric scientist Dr. Cristi Proistosescu wrote in probably the pithiest and most unsettling climate tweet of September: “Don’t think of it as the warmest month of August in California in the last century. Think of it as one of the coolest months of August in California in the next century.” At a recent conference, Reid says a speaker paraphrased the tweet thus: “Don’t think of 2020 as the worst fire season yet, but as the best of what’s to come.”
\n\n\n\nWhile that may be true in spirit, fire ecologist Dr. Allie Weill told me, it probably isn’t literally accurate. The lightning storm that ignited record-setting fires in August is still considered a rare event, one that made 2020 unusually destructive. “Every year is different, and that’s going to continue to be true,” Weill said. But in general, California fires are becoming larger and more destructive. Explaining why isn’t easy. There are “a lot of different reasons that combine into an almost a perfect storm,” she said.
\n\n\n\nFirst is what she calls “the story everyone knows”: fire suppression. For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples have used small, controlled burns to promote the growth of important plants and limit the amount of dried brush that could fuel larger fires. But starting in the early 20th century, US forest managers forbade the practice and attempted to completely eradicate wildfire from the western states. More recently, ecologists have come to see fire as an integral part of California’s landscape, even partnering with tribes to bring intentional burns back to the forest. But fire suppression has left forests in the Sierra Nevada dense and fuel-laden, making wildfires larger and more destructive.
\n\n\n\nDon’t think of 2020 as the worst fire season yet, but as the best of what’s to come.
The 2013 Rim Fire — at the time the third-largest fire in the state’s history — was touted by some ecologists as a consequence of decades of forest mismanagement. Two years after the fire, I picked up a summer job mapping the trees left in its wake. Though it had burned over 100,000 hectares of Sierra Nevada forest, it hadn’t done so evenly: some stands were transformed into meadows dotted with charcoal obelisks, while others seemed nearly untouched.
\n\n\n\nIt was in one of these more intact pieces of forest, kilometers into the backcountry and hours away from cell service, that I smelled smoke. Under the canopy, there was no telling how far it had travelled. But the scar of the Rim Fire, my boss assured me, was the safest place to be. The new flames, even if they were close, would flow toward more overgrown forest, away from us. She was right, although I never got used to the smell of burning pines.
\n\n\n\nThe complex history of fuel buildup and fire suppression is presumably what President Trump was trying to invoke with his 2018 remarks about the virtues of forest-raking. But that history does not apply to all of California. Some of the state’s deadliest fires occur not in any kind of forest, but in the shrubby chaparral of Southern California and the grasslands of wine country.
\n\n\n\nIn these environments, Weill says an oft-neglected factor is the continued intrusion of humans into lands that were formerly wild. In the past 30 years, California’s population has grown by nearly 10 million people. While cities have become denser, development has also sprawled into sparsely populated foothills and valleys. More development means more power lines, more cigarettes, more gender reveal explosions. In many of these areas, dry grass and shrubs can fuel even a stray spark into a megafire.
\n\n\n\nWeill, like me, lives in Sacramento, an urban center surrounded by miles of irrigated farmland. Exposed as we are to smoke, we’re pretty sheltered from actual flames. “It feels like a fire is very close when there’s smoke,” she admitted. “Especially when there’s ash dropping from the sky.” But in September, when she learned that some of her nearby friends had bags packed, she reassured them their chances of being evacuated were slim. “I don’t know where you would go that’s safer,” she said.
\n\n\n\nShe may have meant that as a comfort, but I paraphrase it in my head — there’s nowhere safer for you to go — and it’s chilling.
\n\n\n\nIt’s also somewhat true. Friends of mine, after fleeing north in September, were quickly chased out by Oregon’s own record-setting fires. Throughout their road trip through Montana and Idaho, smoke followed.
\n\n\n\nAlthough changes to fire patterns have been most obvious in California, they’re occurring all across western North America. As climate change creates hotter, drier conditions, fires in all ecosystems are growing larger and more destructive. Even if ideal forest management practices reduced fuel levels in forests, even if centralized development stemmed urban sprawl into wildlands, climate change would still cause more extreme fires. Things would still be on track to get worse as global temperatures continue to rise.
\n\n\n\nWhat we’re living right now is the future I was told about 20 years ago. I thought it was maybe 50 years out, but really it’s already happening.
Colorado’s Reid, who has studied fire for decades, knew climate change would produce massive megafires. She didn’t anticipate that it would happen so soon.
\n\n\n\n“I feel like what we’re living right now is the future I was told about 20 years ago. I thought it was maybe 50 years out, but really it’s already happening,” she said. “To think it’s on track to continue to get worse is really depressing.”
\n\n\n\nWhen I ask ecologist Weill if she plans to stay in California, she registers somewhere between resigned and sanguine. “We have our fires, but other places are having floods and hurricanes and whatever else,” she said. “There are few places that aren’t going to have issues.”
\n\n\n\nI too have no immediate plans to relocate. Periodic fantasies of moving to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan aside, my life is firmly rooted in California. I’m not sure how much more smoke will fill the sky before I reconsider.
\n\n\n\nThis article was originally published under the title “Can the Smoke Truly Clear in California?”
\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1393,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[44,11,48,8,26,6,22,9],"tags":[80,71,98,310,60,209,104,561,207],"class_list":["post-1058","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-california","category-climate-change","category-health","category-living","category-natural-history","category-planet","category-voices","category-west-coast","tag-california","tag-climate-crisis","tag-ecology","tag-jesse-kathan","tag-opinion","tag-oregon","tag-pollution","tag-smoke","tag-wildfire"],"yoast_head":"\nWildfire smoke obscured California’s Santa Cruz mountains in September 2020
\n"},"alt_text":"Tree-covered hills in California's Santa Cruz Mountains appear under an orange haze caused by wildfire smoke.","media_type":"image","mime_type":"image/jpeg","media_details":{"width":1500,"height":1000,"file":"2022/09/Can-the-Smoke-Truly-Clear-in-California_WebHeader.jpg","filesize":"147188","sizes":{"medium":{"file":"Can-the-Smoke-Truly-Clear-in-California_WebHeader-300x200.jpg","width":300,"height":200,"filesize":"8869","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Can-the-Smoke-Truly-Clear-in-California_WebHeader-300x200.jpg"},"large":{"file":"Can-the-Smoke-Truly-Clear-in-California_WebHeader-1024x683.jpg","width":1024,"height":683,"filesize":"84335","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Can-the-Smoke-Truly-Clear-in-California_WebHeader-1024x683.jpg"},"thumbnail":{"file":"Can-the-Smoke-Truly-Clear-in-California_WebHeader-150x150.jpg","width":150,"height":150,"filesize":"3951","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Can-the-Smoke-Truly-Clear-in-California_WebHeader-150x150.jpg"},"medium_large":{"file":"Can-the-Smoke-Truly-Clear-in-California_WebHeader-768x512.jpg","width":768,"height":512,"filesize":"49357","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Can-the-Smoke-Truly-Clear-in-California_WebHeader-768x512.jpg"},"full":{"file":"Can-the-Smoke-Truly-Clear-in-California_WebHeader.jpg","width":1500,"height":1000,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Can-the-Smoke-Truly-Clear-in-California_WebHeader.jpg"}},"image_meta":{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}},"source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Can-the-Smoke-Truly-Clear-in-California_WebHeader.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media/1393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media"}],"about":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/types/attachment"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/users/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/comments?post=1393"}]}}],"wp:term":[[{"id":44,"link":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/category/west-coast/california/","name":"California","slug":"california","taxonomy":"category","yoast_head":"\nAs a child, I swam at the beach all summer. My grandparents lived in a small seaside community in the Pacific Northwest, where I spent weeks in my swimsuit, running back and forth from the house to the water. My backyard ocean was a thriving ecosystem — full of kelp and barnacles, crabs and starfish.
\n\n\n\nGrowing up, I also watched the disappearance of starfish on the Point Roberts pilings and dwindling pods of orcas swimming the Georgia Strait. It’s a struggle to witness oil spills in our waters and the impact of overfishing on BC’s marine life.
\n\n\n\nOceans worldwide are facing a decline in biodiversity. Due to rising water temperatures and ocean acidification, large diverse ecosystems like coral reefs are struggling to withstand ever-increasing stressors. Yet, the steps being taken to address these issues are inadequate to stem the tide of climate change. Sometimes, I feel overwhelmed and helpless. I can’t help thinking North America’s heavy environmental footprint is shortsighted, engineered to serve capitalist systems that will fail us in the face of environmental collapse. Other times, I’m an idealist, asking, “What can I do that will make a difference?”
\n\n\n\nWe reached the Thai coast just in time for a typhoon, a reminder that weather patterns are getting more severe because of climate change.
The answer is never clear, but I try to integrate environmental action into my daily life. So when my partner and I decided to become SCUBA divemasters, we sought certification alongside the New Heaven Reef Conservation Program, an environmentally focused dive centre in Thailand working with scientists and schools to educate divers about reef ecosystems and ocean conservation. Alongside our Divemaster training, we would help with coral reef restoration.
\n\n\n\nAfter three days of travel, we reached the Chumphon Archipelago along Thailand’s southeastern coast, just in time for a tropical typhoon, a reminder that weather patterns are getting weirder — and more severe — because of climate change. We had one more leg of our journey: a passenger ferry to Koh Tao. In Thai, “koh” translates to “island.” Koh Tao, or Turtle Island, is the smallest populated island in the archipelago with an area of 21 km².
\n\n\n\nWhen we reached the place we’d call home for the next four months, the streets were flooded, reefs were destroyed, and the oldest dive boat on the island, King Kong, had capsized in the storm. As its remains were being hauled out of the bay, we dove into the work.
\n\n\n\nSafety checks. Mask and fins on. Regulators in. We flash each other the O.K. sign, and down we go.
\n\n\n\nDiving in tropical waters feels akin to experiencing an otherworldly dreamscape of Seussian shapes in vivid aquas, yellows, emeralds, and pinks. Even with the wreckage from the storm, the magic was not lost. Everything is silent underwater. It feels almost reverent. When we sank below the surface, we saw firsthand how the typhoon had damaged the reefs. Branching corals had been torn apart. Coral fragments could be seen in all directions, littering the ocean floor.
\n\n\n\nWe attended daily morning lectures on different aspects of marine conservation. We learned about marine ecology, and methods to protect and sustain reef health. I learned about many threats facing the coral reefs of Koh Tao. The coral itself is a colonial animal, meaning the larger coral structure is made up of many individual organisms called “polyps,” with tiny stinging tentacles used to capture and eat plankton. These polyps excrete a calcium skeleton, in which they live alongside single-celled organisms called zooxanthellae. They give corals their vibrant colouring and provide them energy through photosynthesis.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Stitching-Together-Coral-Reefs_WebBody.jpg\")
In order to survive, corals need to attach to hard surfaces like rocks and other solid structures to grow their skeletons. Depending on environmental conditions, a single coral species can grow in a wide variety of shapes and sizes.
\n\n\n\nAll different types are present in the bay near Koh Tao, growing five to 20 metres below the surface. There are massive and submassive corals that look like dense lumps and bumps, branching corals with fingers reaching up towards the surface, flat table corals, small mushroom corals, and wiggly, cartoonish soft corals.
\n\n\n\nSuspended in the sea, sunbeams lace through the warm depths. A curious batfish looks on from a few metres away. All around me are corals.
\n\n\n\nCoral reefs create biodiverse habitats that a quarter of all marine life depend on for survival. They provide coastal protection, abundant food sources, and shelter to animals, including fish and invertebrates. Because of the reef’s protection, the storm damage to the island was less severe than it could have been. By absorbing wave energy, coral reefs protect tropical coastlines from erosion. But reefs also trap man-made debris. It’s not unusual for plastic bags, bottles, and netting to get trapped on corals and washed into the bay during natural disasters.
\n\n\n\nSea temperatures, which are rising 24% faster than even three decades ago, are the predominant hazard to coral health. The coral animal is delicate; it can’t recover if conditions change too quickly. The stress from even a single degree rise in temperature can cause coral polyps to expel their zooxanthellae, turning their skeletons white in the process. This phenomenon is called “coral bleaching.” If the stress is temporary, bleached corals can still recover, but if the temperature increase persists, bleaching events can wipe out entire reefs. Tropical corals cannot survive long-term in temperatures above 30˚C, so rising water temperatures endanger the existence of entire underwater ecosystems.
\n\n\n\nThe stress from even a single degree rise in temperature can cause coral bleaching.
Waterside developments also harm coral reefs, because runoff of sediment and soil can build up on the ocean floor, covering hard surfaces corals need to latch onto to grow. Grey water and sewage runoff kickstart the nutrification process, providing nutrients to organisms like algae and sponges that compete with corals. Because tropical corals depend on photosynthesis for nutrients, clear waters promote healthy coral reefs. Waters that are too nutrient-rich can become dominated by large algae blooms, suffocating coral colonies no longer able to secure energy from photosynthesis.
\n\n\n\nWith 40% of people worldwide living along coastlines, we can understand how challenging it is for new coral colonies to grow. Then, there’s the impact of tourism: plastic pollution, boat traffic and anchoring, people touching corals accidentally (and on purpose)… even sunscreen can harm coral reefs. In summary, almost everything humans do stresses corals, yet corals make major contributions to the functioning of planet Earth.
\n\n\n\nBreathe in. Silence. Breathe out. Bubbles. This is my continual meditation. I remind myself to check my oxygen on a regular, but not regimented, schedule.
\n\n\n\nEvery day, the conservation team would dive for up to two hours. The project time? Determined by your personal rate of air consumption. The slower you breathed, the longer you could work at depth before your oxygen tank would be depleted. I was grateful I had a yoga practice to rely on.
\n\n\n\nOur tasks ranged from a weekly ecological monitoring survey on coral health and fish populations, to tending coral nurseries by tying loose coral fragments to secure structures. This strategy encourages broken corals to regrow around new structures, and saves these fragments from bleaching. It’s amazingly peaceful, to sit on the ocean floor slowly sewing coral fragments onto a stable structure, giving them a second chance at life. It was satisfying to return to nursery sites after a few weeks and see corals beginning to grow around the metal and regain their health. Like growing a garden, progress takes time.
\n\n\n\nIt’s amazingly peaceful, to sit on the ocean floor slowly sewing coral fragments onto a stable structure, giving them a second chance at life.
Over four months in Thailand, we saw and supported dozens of different school groups and a multitude of tourists who came through the basic three-day SCUBA training program at New Heaven. Students arrived as travellers looking for adventure and, after basic education on coral reef ecosystems, left as budding conservationists. I met instructors, interns, scientists, and volunteers who went on to publish research and make documentaries about the work we undertook.
\n\n\n\nSadly, reef restoration efforts like the one we joined on Koh Tao are short-term measures. Corals are extremely slow to form, growing at a rate of 2 to 10 centimetres per year. Under ideal conditions, it can take hundreds of years for a large coral colony to regrow. As bleaching events become more and more frequent, scientists predict as many as 90% of tropical coral reefs will die in the coming two decades. The threat of climate change must be reduced or eliminated, if not, the scientific consensus is clear: corals will not survive.
\n\n\n\nIt’s a bleak picture, but there are some things we can do. My biggest environmental takeaway from my time in Thailand was that reducing — or eliminating — our own plastic consumption might be one of the best things individuals can do to help our planet. Larger animals like turtles, sharks, and fish will mistake plastic for food, making clean-up dives more pressing for the survival of those who call coral reefs home.
\n\n\n\nWhen plastic trash winds up in the ocean, it can persist underwater for hundreds of years, with devastating impacts on marine life. It’s a big problem, but it can be addressed in part by any person in any part of the world.
\n\n\n\nWhen plastic trash winds up in the ocean, it can persist underwater for hundreds of years, with devastating impacts on marine life.
Since coming home, I’ve focused on finding restorative ways to connect with nature. I started a patio garden. I got a dog. I take long walks in the forest. My work as a writer and theatre creator is ever more environmentally charged. And I swim in the ocean, still.
\n\n\n\nOn February 15th, my swim at Wreck Beach in Vancouver was chilly. The water was barely above freezing and I could not feel my feet, but I submerged myself in the salty waves. Being in the ocean connects me to nature, to my home, to something more cosmic than my human experience. It is an experience full of wonder.
\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1396,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[11,10,26,6,38,22],"tags":[32,98,311,103,104,206],"class_list":["post-1059","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate-change","category-magazine","category-natural-history","category-planet","category-plants-animals","category-voices","tag-conservation","tag-ecology","tag-mika-laulainen","tag-oceans","tag-pollution","tag-thailand"],"yoast_head":"\nAnemones and fish at home in the waters surrounding a coral reef off the Thai island of Koh Tao
\n"},"alt_text":"A small school of fish swim above a red sea anemone near Koh Tao, Thailand.","media_type":"image","mime_type":"image/jpeg","media_details":{"width":1500,"height":1000,"file":"2022/09/Stitching-Together-Coral-Reefs_WebHeader.jpg","filesize":"223223","sizes":{"medium":{"file":"Stitching-Together-Coral-Reefs_WebHeader-300x200.jpg","width":300,"height":200,"filesize":"14750","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Stitching-Together-Coral-Reefs_WebHeader-300x200.jpg"},"large":{"file":"Stitching-Together-Coral-Reefs_WebHeader-1024x683.jpg","width":1024,"height":683,"filesize":"114049","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Stitching-Together-Coral-Reefs_WebHeader-1024x683.jpg"},"thumbnail":{"file":"Stitching-Together-Coral-Reefs_WebHeader-150x150.jpg","width":150,"height":150,"filesize":"6422","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Stitching-Together-Coral-Reefs_WebHeader-150x150.jpg"},"medium_large":{"file":"Stitching-Together-Coral-Reefs_WebHeader-768x512.jpg","width":768,"height":512,"filesize":"70358","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Stitching-Together-Coral-Reefs_WebHeader-768x512.jpg"},"full":{"file":"Stitching-Together-Coral-Reefs_WebHeader.jpg","width":1500,"height":1000,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Stitching-Together-Coral-Reefs_WebHeader.jpg"}},"image_meta":{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}},"source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Stitching-Together-Coral-Reefs_WebHeader.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media/1396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media"}],"about":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/types/attachment"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/users/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/comments?post=1396"}]}}],"wp:term":[[{"id":11,"link":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/category/planet/climate-change/","name":"Climate Change","slug":"climate-change","taxonomy":"category","yoast_head":"\nNear the end of August 2019, news broke that São Paulo’s skies had turned black from smoke — even though Brazil’s largest city is more than 3,000 kilometers from where most of the fires raged in the Amazon rainforest. I began to panic. My parents had just retired from the US back to Uruguay, my father’s homeland, and were living 1,500 km south of São Paulo, in Punta del Este. We frantically tracked the fires, which at one point were moving toward the Paraguay-Uruguay border. If those winds prevailed, smoke would engulf the country. Or worse, bring flames.
\n\n\n\nThis scenario was all too familiar for my folks. In 1992, when I was 3, we moved to Punta del Este for the first time from my hometown of San Diego, CA, to escape smoke borne on the Santa Ana winds. I had yet to be diagnosed with asthma, and suffered severe shortness of breath and uncontrollable coughing.
\n\n\n\nMy family did what many people are doing today, and many more will do in coming decades: moving away from natural disasters. The International Organization for Migration estimates there will be anywhere from 25 million to 1 billion climate migrants by 2050. We had the privilege of bringing our whole lives with us — including a beloved stuffed elephant bigger than I was. Most climate migrants won’t.
\n\n\n\nBut back to last year. The Amazon rainforest makes up half of the planet’s remaining tropical forests, and in 2019, it suffered the worst fires in a decade. The Amazonian biome was ravaged in Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay. On August 19, 38,227,000 hot spots were identified, and the rate of new fires starting didn’t slow until October.
\n\n\n\nThe Amazon rainforest makes up half of the planet’s remaining tropical forests, and in 2019, it suffered the worst fires in a decade.
The number of fires in the Brazilian Amazon between January and September 2019 was double that of the same period in 2018. The impacts are grave, according to Daniel Brindis, Greenpeace USA’s forests campaign director. “The loss of primary forest cannot be replaced,” he told me in an interview. “Forest restoration is possible, but costly, and alters the biological makeup of the forest. The emissions from deforestation and the fires can take decades to remove from the atmosphere.”
\n\n\n\nBecause of my asthma, breathing in smoke has caused recurring crises and anxiety in my life — my lungs can’t even handle a little cigarette smoke. As the fires raged through South America, I worried I’d need to create an evacuation plan for my parents. It broke my heart to contemplate canceling my first trip to Uruguay since gaining citizenship. I hadn’t been to the country in a decade, or seen my parents in a year. Fortunately, both smoke and fires stopped threatening Uruguay in late September, and I was able to join my family as planned.
\n\n\n\nNot only did the fires threaten my family home, they’ve also changed how I think about a dream I’ve had since childhood. My father would tuck me in with bedtime stories from his journey trekking across the Amazon rainforest in the 1970s. He’d escaped Uruguay after being tortured during the military dictatorship. Over six months, he traveled from Uruguay to Mexico, mostly on foot, with only a backpack. Without the proper visas, borders were a challenge, so he headed into the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador and Colombia to avoid checkpoints.
\n\n\n\nHe spent about a week alone walking north on trails through the forest. In his stories, he’d recall impossibly large insects, and lush greenery that grew back overnight after he’d cleared a patch to rest in. Once, he was startled awake by a python falling out of a tree and onto his legs! A passionate wildlife lover, I’ve always dreamed of following in his footsteps and getting to know the Amazon rainforest intimately.
\n\n\n\nAnd the Amazon’s 3 million plant and animal species aren’t the only draw for me. My Indigenous Charrúan ancestors were mostly killed by colonial disease, and the rest were massacred during a 19th-century genocide. But millions of Indigenous people still call the Amazon biome home. I want to learn from them, about their customs and role as keepers of the rainforest. I used to think I had all the time in the world to make this trip, but now it feels like time could be running out.
\n\n\n\nWhat we’re losing in the fires will be difficult or impossible to replace: biodiversity, a major carbon sink, Indigenous peoples’ ability to live off their lands, and more.
Of course, the impacts of the fires are so much wider than my own worries and dreams. Sure, I feel like my world’s on fire, and the Amazon residents’ world actually is. But their losses are all of our losses. Their world may not feel like it’s ours, but it is.
\n\n\n\nAround the planet, Indigenous people act as champions and stewards of precious ecosystems. Case in point, the Amazon rainforest covers only 4% of the Earth’s land surface, but is home to about 10% of all known plant and animal species. It’s impossible to tally the number of animal casualties that must have resulted from the fires. Slow-moving creatures like sloths, turtles, and anteaters had no chance to escape. Wild-cat conservation group Panthera reported that at least 500 jaguars lost their lives or habitat in the fires. And, again, people live there too. In Brazil, the Amazon is home to 20 million people, including 400 Indigenous groups.
\n\n\n\nThe Amazon rainforest also absorbs up to half a billion metric tons of C0₂ per year, and currently stores up to 200 billion metric tons of carbon in its plants and soils. When fires release that carbon and decrease the forest’s storage capacity, climate change accelerates. Much of what we’re losing in the fires will be difficult or impossible to replace: biodiversity, a major carbon sink, Indigenous peoples’ ability to live off their lands, and more.
\n\n\n\nThe Amazonian fires garnered a lot of attention last summer, but it still wasn’t as much as they deserved. For a start, my colleagues in the media focused mostly on the blazes in Brazil, but not those in Paraguay or Bolivia. Over 4 million hectares of Bolivian woodland and savanna have burned this year, an area the size of Switzerland.
\n\n\n\nTo stay updated on those fires, I followed the fundraising efforts of Bolivian eco-advocate Valeria Hinojosa. “The lack of media attention pushed Bolivia (and me) to rise up and make the world listen,” she told me in an interview. “As soon as I found out about the fires consuming thousands — and later millions — of hectares of nature in Bolivia, I added a donation page to my blog.” In a month, she raised over $200,000 from 4,500 donors. The funds covered the cost of supplying water tanks, gear for firefighters, and animal rescue, and there was still some money left to plant trees and provide solar panels to affected communities.
\n\n\n\nThe news cycle fizzled out before the flames did, as humanity’s empathy moved on to other hot spots.
We need more grassroots efforts led by communities who know best what they need. When the media does spotlight crises around the world, it often doesn’t tell readers how they can help those at the frontlines. We need to do better.
\n\n\n\nThe news cycle fizzled out before the flames did, as humanity’s empathy moved on to other hot spots. And the world might have paid even less attention: during the same period, Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo dealt with even more fires, which received minimal coverage.
\n\n\n\nEven with the attention the Amazon fires did receive, I feel like their causes are not well understood by the general public. While climate-change-induced drought probably played a role, the Amazon Environmental Research Institute says drought is insufficient to explain 2019’s increase in fire activity. Observers see evidence the fires were deliberately ignited to illegally clear forest and make room for cattle ranches and soybean crops used to feed livestock.
\n\n\n\nBrazil is the world’s largest beef exporter. Last year, the president of Brazilian meat-packing association Abiec predicted the country would export 1.8 million metric tons of beef in 2019. The World Bank says 75% of all deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is in service of cattle ranching. In turn, deforestation and land use change are responsible for about a quarter of Brazil’s current greenhouse gas emissions, according to the World Resource Institute’s Climate Watch database. As recently as 2005, they were the source of close to 60% of emissions.
\n\n\n\nThe World Bank says 75% of all deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is in service of cattle ranching.
Personally, I haven’t eaten beef for 13 years. I stopped eating meat at 17, when I was cooking for myself for the first time. Initially, it was because meat was expensive and I didn’t know how to cook it. Over time, my choice was reinforced as I learned about the livestock industry’s impact on the environment.
\n\n\n\nIf I did still eat meat today, I’d seriously reconsider it, knowing the true cost of a burger involved putting our planet’s biodiversity and climate at such risk. Beef is a major industry here in Uruguay, and an integral part of the culture. My parents have made it clear they’ll never give up meat, even when I’ve told them the current state of the environment has me hesitant to give them the grandchildren they so desperately want.
\n\n\n\nI stay tuned in to events in the Amazon by following Indigenous forest-protectors like youth activist Helena Gualinga in Ecuador. I hoped to finally visit the Amazon rainforest in March, but my planned trip to Gualinga’s homeland was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic. I’m still waiting for my chance to meet with people who dwell in the Amazon, and learn about their culture and customs. In the meantime, I hope to continue raising awareness of the problems they face.
\n\n\n\nLast year’s fires died out, but there’s no doubt they’ll be back. No matter their size in years to come, they’ll have a lasting impact on the ecosystems and communities in the Amazon, and on all of humanity — regardless of how far away we may be.
\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1591,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[11,50,10,26,6,7,22],"tags":[108,223,220,221,313,76,84,207],"class_list":["post-1087","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate-change","category-indigenous","category-magazine","category-natural-history","category-planet","category-society","category-voices","tag-amazon-rainforest","tag-brazil","tag-climate-migration","tag-deforestation","tag-lola-mendez","tag-natural-disaster","tag-south-america","tag-wildfire"],"yoast_head":"\nFires raging in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, in August 2019
\n"},"alt_text":"A fire burns a patch of ferns and trees in the Amazon rainforest, releasing thick smoke into the air.","media_type":"image","mime_type":"image/jpeg","media_details":{"width":1500,"height":1000,"file":"2022/10/amazon-fires-header.jpg","filesize":"304962","sizes":{"medium":{"file":"amazon-fires-header-300x200.jpg","width":300,"height":200,"filesize":"21951","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/amazon-fires-header-300x200.jpg"},"large":{"file":"amazon-fires-header-1024x683.jpg","width":1024,"height":683,"filesize":"200598","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/amazon-fires-header-1024x683.jpg"},"thumbnail":{"file":"amazon-fires-header-150x150.jpg","width":150,"height":150,"filesize":"9202","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/amazon-fires-header-150x150.jpg"},"medium_large":{"file":"amazon-fires-header-768x512.jpg","width":768,"height":512,"filesize":"121790","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/amazon-fires-header-768x512.jpg"},"full":{"file":"amazon-fires-header.jpg","width":1500,"height":1000,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/amazon-fires-header.jpg"}},"image_meta":{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"© Victor Moriyama / Greenpeace","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}},"source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/amazon-fires-header.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media/1591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media"}],"about":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/types/attachment"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/users/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/comments?post=1591"}]}}],"wp:term":[[{"id":11,"link":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/category/planet/climate-change/","name":"Climate Change","slug":"climate-change","taxonomy":"category","yoast_head":"\nI remember things about my homeland, the Philippines. Life was simple in our country town of Naic, on the big island of Luzon. Every day, I bathed in a tin tub in the yard of the house where I lived with 12 family members. Some days my mother and I perused the stalls of the busy palengke (open-air market) hand-in-hand, inhaling the sweet scent of new stationery and the nose-crinkling smell of fresh-caught fish.
\n\n\n\nAt the beach, I would wade along the shore and watch my grandfather emerge, like a mythic sea god, from a swim in Manila Bay. I remember the dirt roads my father and I jounced along, on a motorbike with a mechanism that played Bach’s Minuet in G major.
\n\n\n\nWhen I was 4, my family immigrated to the US, landing on Virginia’s suburban coastal plains. I never felt rooted there, among vacant lots, man-made lakes, and strip malls. Like many immigrant families, we didn’t have the luxury of leisure time to explore the outdoors. My father worked three blue-collar jobs, and my mother woke at 4 every morning to cook for us, before spending 12-hour shifts on an assembly line making electrical wires and cables. They didn’t get to see the light of day, so neither did I, really.
\n\n\n\nLike many immigrant families, we didn’t have the luxury of leisure time to explore the outdoors.
The moment I could, I fled to the glorious hills, iconic beaches, and vibrant culture of California; I’ve been here 13 years. But much as I love Northeast Los Angeles — flanked by downtown skyline and mountain views — it’s hard to call it home. I never forget that, here, I’m on the land of the Tongva: the first people of the Los Angeles Basin. I long for my past: the one in Naic, and also the one I’ve never known, that my ancestors lived.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nI can only trace my lineage back to my great-grandparents, who were each between a quarter and half Spanish. This European DNA seemed a thing of pride in my family. I don’t think any of my relatives ever bothered to unearth the stories of the ancestors who were native to our island, and contributed most of our genes. Almost 400 years of colonization changed our identities as Filipinos. For a lot of us, our homes were no longer in the sacred mountains, rice paddies, and mangroves of my reveries, but in westernized towns and cities. Most of us never looked back.
\n\n\n\nThree years ago, I started to, in my own way. I decided to redefine home for myself by connecting to the land where I was, since I couldn’t do it in my ancestral home. My local nature center seemed a good place to start, so I volunteered there.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Screen-Shot-2022-10-27-at-3.07.06-PM.png\")
The Audubon Center at Debs Park is a 17-acre park-within-a-park and solar-powered community space, an oasis in the middle of LA’s urban sprawl. Here — where bobcats, coyotes, and white-crowned sparrows dwell among native old-growth black walnut trees, oaks, toyon shrubs, and purple sage — I’ve learned things many of my LA-born-and-bred loved ones either take for granted, or have never known.
\n\n\n\nLos Angeles sits on the Pacific Flyway and is reportedly the “birdiest” city in the US. Over 520 avian species have been spotted here; 100 of them can be seen within Debs Park’s 282 acres. Northeast LA seems a sensible place for the National Audubon Society to have a foothold, thanks to the San Rafael Hills and the confluence of the Arroyo Seco and Los Angeles Rivers. This topography creates a dynamic habitat and rest area for migratory birds and pollinators.
\n\n\n\nWe were caretakers of the earth. What we took, we had to replace.
The Tongva, including the Hahamog’na band of Northeast LA, have always understood the ecological value of this place, where they thrived for at least 7,000 years pre-contact. “We were caretakers of the earth,” says Tongva elder and activist Gloria Arellanes. “What we took, we had to replace. We made offerings, we said prayers.”
\n\n\n\nBy the late 1700s, Spanish colonizers and missionaries saw the fertile land’s value, too. They set their sights on it to support their own agriculture, and the San Gabriel Mission. Arellanes describes the Tongva’s stories of first contact: “We would loosen the strings on our bows in a non-aggressive gesture, and we expected friendship. And yet, we were enslaved.” Systematically, the Tongva were forced out of their ancestral villages, indoctrinated, and enslaved to build the Mission, established in 1771.
\n\n\n\nOver the next two centuries, Northeast LA became a suburb. The rivers — once teeming with steelhead trout — were paved over to prevent flooding. A railway and freeway were constructed along the Arroyo Seco, cutting through the grassy hills. The Tongva are still here, but the land and watershed as they knew them are forever changed.
\n\n\n\nEventually, zoning laws in the 1940s created more multi-family housing in Northeast LA, attracting Mexican-Americans and eventually Central and South American immigrants. In the last couple of decades, gentrification has brought about more displacement — this time of the Latino families that lived here through the Chicano civil rights movement of the ’60s and ’70s, and the gang wars of the ’80s and ’90s.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Screen-Shot-2022-10-27-at-3.07.15-PM.png\")
Marcos Trinidad is the director of the Audubon Center at Debs Park. His Mexican-American family has lived in Northeast LA for five generations. “There’s a lot of skin in the game for me,” he says. The center allows him to keep a door open for local communities — Indigenous, immigrant, undocumented, and all — to reconcile and connect over something we’re all stakeholders in: the urban nature that surrounds us.
\n\n\n\nAt every opportunity, Trinidad keeps a seat at the table for the Tongva. He’s also spent years fostering a relationship with the Big Pine Paiute Tribe in Owens Valley — the source of most of the water Angelenos drink, use on our lawns, and fill our infinity pools with.
\n\n\n\nIn April 2017, I traveled to Owens Valley with Audubon Center staff and a group of high school students from YouthBuild, a nonprofit that provides job training to underserved young people. Almost all the kids were camping for the first time. Brisk air and golden light against our skin, we pitched our tents by a stream, the snow-capped Sierra Nevada mountains looming like great-grandfathers of the arid valley and the Owens River.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Screen-Shot-2022-10-27-at-3.07.24-PM.png\")
We visited tribal elder Kathy Bancroft at the Paiute Shoshone Cultural Center. Gathered in a circle, we listened as she recounted her ancestors’ history. Their innovative irrigation systems kept the valley lush, letting the Paiute subsist on native plants for millennia.
\n\n\n\nWhen settlers displaced the tribe in the 19th century, these traditions were lost. As in virtually all tribal histories, the tragedy didn’t end there. Starting in 1905, Los Angeles purchased a quarter million acres in Owens Valley in order to divert the Owens River from Owens Lake into an aqueduct to support agricultural expansion. The aqueduct was completed in 1913, and the lake was desiccated within 13 years.
\n\n\n\nBancroft took us there. From a windswept hill we could only see the smallest sliver of blue amid 100 square miles of barren salt flats. This dry lake bed has been called the country’s largest source of dust pollution by the US Environmental Protection Agency. The dust particles contain carcinogens, and cause lung damage and respiratory disease.
\n\n\n\nHearing these stories was a privilege. For those who don’t have the privilege of traveling hundreds of miles, city parks may be their only portal to nature. “Places like Death Valley, Yosemite, Joshua Tree, the ocean — their survival depends on people who live in cities,” says Trinidad. “When you look at legislation and you look at a lot of these environmental laws that are under attack — threatened species and birds, and all these wonderful things that we value — how do we expect to ever make that connection with folks who are not going camping or hiking? How do we expect them to pay into a system that is going to benefit an area that they’re never going to see?”
\n\n\n\nPlaces like Death Valley, Yosemite, Joshua Tree, the ocean — their survival depends on people who live in cities.
Showing people that nature exists in their backyard is one way to bridge the gap; inviting them to participate in conservation work is another. A few years ago, Trinidad started to rethink the term “citizen science,” which is how many organizations refer to programs in which the public helps scientists collect and analyze data.
\n\n\n\nMetropolitan LA is home to 13 million individuals, around 925,000 of them undocumented, according to analysis by Pew Research Center. Since the implications of “citizen science” excluded at least 7% of the local population, Trinidad adopted the term “community science.” Deeohn Ferris — the National Audubon Society’s VP of equity, diversity and inclusion — caught wind of Trinidad’s idea, and insisted the whole organization follow suit.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Dana-body.jpeg\")
For me, seeing other brown people at the Center identifying cedar waxwings and yellow-rumped warblers, hearing tribal elders tell their truths, is powerful. It goes deeper than just finding friends who also love the outdoors. I’ve been able to commune with people of color who embody something I couldn’t express before: that we are always connected to nature, because we’re part of it. I can’t lose my sense of home, because the earth is always beneath my feet.
\n\n\n\nAs humans, restoring our relationships to our environment is our only way forward.
I may never get close enough to know where and how my ancestors lived on Luzon, what they did to sustain their homeland. What I can do is care for what I’ve got, where I am, while I’m here. As humans, restoring our relationships to our environment — whether a lush mountain or a concrete jungle, a fish market or a flowing river — is our only way forward. We can learn from the past while working toward a better future, salvaging what we’ve lost ecologically, personally, spiritually. With each bird sighting, every breathless moment under an old oak tree, all the time spent community-building, the seeds are planted; I hope they flourish.
\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1590,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[44,45,10,26,7,22,9],"tags":[230,55,109,32,315,228,141,60,202],"class_list":["post-1089","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-california","category-cities","category-magazine","category-natural-history","category-society","category-voices","category-west-coast","tag-citizen-science","tag-colonization","tag-community","tag-conservation","tag-dana-poblete","tag-heritage","tag-nature","tag-opinion","tag-parks"],"yoast_head":"\nVolunteers at the Audubon Center at Debs Park plant seedlings in the urban oasis they are committed to conserving.
\n"},"alt_text":"A young woman wearing a cap, vest, and black pants uses a shovel to dig soil on a grassy hillside in Los Angeles.","media_type":"image","mime_type":"image/jpeg","media_details":{"width":1500,"height":1000,"file":"2022/10/Dana-header.jpg","filesize":"273546","sizes":{"medium":{"file":"Dana-header-300x200.jpg","width":300,"height":200,"filesize":"23073","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Dana-header-300x200.jpg"},"large":{"file":"Dana-header-1024x683.jpg","width":1024,"height":683,"filesize":"250082","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Dana-header-1024x683.jpg"},"thumbnail":{"file":"Dana-header-150x150.jpg","width":150,"height":150,"filesize":"9095","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Dana-header-150x150.jpg"},"medium_large":{"file":"Dana-header-768x512.jpg","width":768,"height":512,"filesize":"144533","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Dana-header-768x512.jpg"},"full":{"file":"Dana-header.jpg","width":1500,"height":1000,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Dana-header.jpg"}},"image_meta":{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}},"source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Dana-header.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media/1590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media"}],"about":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/types/attachment"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/users/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/comments?post=1590"}]}}],"wp:term":[[{"id":44,"link":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/category/west-coast/california/","name":"California","slug":"california","taxonomy":"category","yoast_head":"\nNot long after I turned 30, my family took a road trip through Northern California, where we had roots but no longer lived. My sister Caitlin and I lived on the east coast, and we craved the expanses of open land. My parents lived in Utah, with its wide desert vistas, but they wanted to be among the surf, the redwoods, and, most of all, the golden rolling hills of Marin and Sonoma counties where they had fallen in love.
\n\n\n\nOn the second day of our trip, my family drove through a long stretch of forest on Highway 1. When we emerged from the bowers, sunlight flooded the Subaru. Massive trunks gave way to hills covered in honey-colored grass and dotted with murky green oaks, standing in stunning contrast to the gold. We sucked in our breath at the sight, and my mother whispered, “Our hills.”
\n\n\n\nImpossibly young, my mother and father had hiked through the grass while their golden retriever pranced alongside. Later, they’d watched dairy cows graze methodically, while walking with babies strapped to their backs. Later still, once my father’s job had brought them to Utah, they spoke of California and the golden rolling hills like their grandparents had of the old country, where the flowers were brighter, and the weather was better, and life made more sense.
\n\n\n\nAs we watched, the gold grass and green oaks seemed to become more saturated with each second. I felt as if we could all read each other’s thoughts, and the thoughts of the land and all who had walked it before us — as if there was nothing purer or more distinctly for us at that moment than the golden rolling hills of California. In a time when we lived spread across a continent, we, the land, and the beauty were all there together for a moment.
\n\n\n\nThough yellow grass makes many think of drought or fire, Californians know their land is full of life. We see how the gold flows seamlessly over the rolling hills like Rapunzel’s hair down her back, how it all stands quiet under the blue sky. The golden hills are a California icon that stretch up the coast and through the Central Valley, from south of San Luis Obispo, north past Sacramento. They are covered primarily in wild oat grass that browns to a toasty gold in the summer, creating an uncomplicated landscape of contrasts.
\n\n\n\nIt’s a scene that has inspired artists and tourists for more than a century. Alongside Yosemite’s Half Dome and Bridalveil Fall, Ansel Adams turned his camera to these hills, turning the tawny to grey with his monochrome film. The hills, along with the rocky seashore and windswept pines, sparked the California Impressionist and California Plein Air painting schools in the first third of the twentieth century.
\n\n\n\nMy appreciation for golden hills makes me feel connected to the place I was born, makes me feel more like me.
The hills inspire, but they also calm and collect. There is something thrilling in their simplicity. You can feel that simultaneous energy and calmness in the music of Joni Mitchell and The Eagles. California folk singer Kate Wolf’s recording of “The Redtail Hawk” — which contains the refrain, “You can hear a song each time the wind sighs in the golden rolling hills of California” — was part of the soundtrack to my childhood. We played it again in the car during our road trip. Though the long, mournful chords seemed at odds with the brilliance of the view, we kept pushing repeat.
\n\n\n\nFor Golden State newcomers, learning to love the golden hills is a rite of passage. Long Island-raised Jonah Raskin writes: “The hills turned me into a Californian. They tested me, found me fit and read me my rights.” Though I am California-born, I understand Raskin’s sentiment. My appreciation for golden hills — which look so different than most of the hills in North America — makes me feel connected to the place I was born, makes me feel more like me.
\n\n\n\nCalifornia’s colonial settlements are nearly as old as anything on the east coast. Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo “discovered” San Diego Bay in 1542 and it was settled in 1769. San Francisco was founded five days before the Declaration of Independence was signed.
\n\n\n\nWhen Sir Francis Drake and Junípero Serra and Alexander Andreyevich Baranov and all the rest of the colonizing, evangelizing men arrived on the west coast, they were not greeted with golden rolling hills. They saw a scrubby land where tufts of bunchgrass erupted scattershot.
\n\n\n\nThe golden grass was not there yet. California’s iconic golden grass is a non-native, invasive species.
\n\n\n\nLike Catholicism and smallpox, the golden grass was brought by Europeans. From the 1500s on, the seeds traveled to the New World accidentally in ship ballast, and intentionally as food, medicine, and ornamentation. The most common seeds were wild oats, filaree, and ripgut brome, which are now, along with the other common golden grasses, known as “California annual type.” These are the plants of Spanish barnyards, and they came to cover the ground of the Golden State.
\n\n\n\nThe golden hills are anything but natural.
Though ecologists and ranchers have long known that the golden grass is not native, it’s not common knowledge. I was shocked to learn this fact while sitting in my DC office after the road trip. I’d Googled “golden rolling hills of California,” hoping to find a music video of Kate Wolf singing “Redtail Hawk.” What I found was the website of the Hastings Natural History Reservation, part of the University of California’s network of reserves dedicated to studying and promoting native species of flora and fauna. That site, and others, told me what I’d never suspected: the golden hills are anything but natural.
\n\n\n\nI asked my California friends and relatives about it, and was met exclusively with surprise. It’s not hard to understand why people don’t know that the golden grasses are not native: they look like they are. Northern California is a land of windswept beauty, where cypress trees grow in wild, bent forms and steep cliffs drop into the ocean. It makes sense for rainy Seattle to be green, and for dry California to be gold.
\n\n\n\nMost people’s understanding of their landscape is experiential, bodily. It’s what we see, smell, hear, and feel. Intuition and a third-grade knowledge of climates tells us that hearty green lawns and maple trees probably aren’t native to the Las Vegas suburbs. But since the non-native golden grass in California feels right, it is mostly assumed to be native.
\n\n\n\nThat’s why, when I learned the truth about the grass, I felt betrayed. Being in the grass with my family felt so fundamental, so natural and true; we were all from California, my family and the golden grass. We had a deep connection to the land, and learning that the grass wasn’t native cheapened it. But, like so much else, California’s landscape is an impure product of human development.
\n\n\n\nThis is what is pure, if purity exists: bunchgrass. Prior to European settlement and wild-oat-grass invasion, purple needlegrass, deer grass, and other native plants covered the majority of the Golden State’s rolling hills in perky bunches. Purple needlegrass stems grow up to one meter high, and are sometimes topped with purple-tinged fruits filled with seeds. From the fruits, awns up to ten centimeters can grow, giving the bunches a wild, split-ended look. They dot the landscape prettily, green or purply-red tufts that sprout up from the ground like kids’ pigtails. They’re attractive little nests. They look desert-y, Western, and practical.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Californias-Lying-Fields-of-Gold_WebBody1.jpg\")
Purple needlegrasses are botanical wonders, longer-lived than a tortoise — sometimes by hundreds of years — and perfectly evolved for California’s climate. “They can take fire and grazing; they’re deep-rooted and really tough,” says ecologist Mark Stromberg, who retired from his post as director of the Hastings Reserve a few years ago. “They would be great for Northern California.”
\n\n\n\nThe grasses grow spaced out from each other, so that each bunch can get enough water from the earth in times of drought — a perfect adaptation to the dry climate. They green early in the year and remain so through October, making them an abundant food source for grazing animals. Their deep and intricate root networks hold the hills in place, preventing landslides in inclement weather. They withstand fire, unlike the invasive grasses that turn to kindling as they dry out in the summer and fall.
\n\n\n\nDespite all these reasons, when I ask why native grasses are worth valuing, he first tells me they’re beautiful. The spaces between bunches allow vibrant flowers to grow. They attract necessary bees, butterflies, and birds. “European grasses to most people looks like a field of grass,” he says. “A clue that it’s native is that there are flowers and bees.”
\n\n\n\nListening to Stromberg, I find myself appreciating the native perennials. I look through old photos and find some pictures of bunchgrass. I stare at the skinny stalks. I like them; I want desperately to be on their side. I want to support the underdog, and to believe that this land is theirs.
\n\n\n\nBut I can’t quite. I’m beginning to place the golden grasses alongside chocolate cake and super-cheap products from Walmart: things I know are bad for me and the world, but are just so nice that I guiltily like them anyway. The only defense for the golden grass I can come up with is that the golden grass is more dramatic. Aesthetics seem a cheap defense, but there it is. Pretty as the native perennials are, they don’t drape hills like velvet. They can’t send ripples across the land in the wind. They’re not gold.
\n\n\n\nThe promise of gold in the ground brought the world to Northern California’s shores in 1849, the hope of turning orange groves to golden rivers of wealth brought people throughout the early 20th century, and the lure of golden statuettes brings people to Southern California today. There is no longer any gold in the ground, but it still seems fitting that our hills would be covered with it. How do bunchgrasses compete against that?
\n\n\n\nStudy of the California mission system gives ecologists insight into the spread of the annual-type grasses. Franciscan priest Junípero Serra founded the first mission in San Diego in 1769. The church complexes were built with bricks made from mud and local soil. At San Diego de Alcalá, the bricks show a small quantity of non-native seeds. As the missions were slowly built up the coast to Sonoma, each a day’s ride from the last, the bricks had an ever-increasing number of non-native seeds in them, illustrating the growing prevalence of the seeds as more and more Europeans came to the west coast.
\n\n\n\nThe presence of the seeds wasn’t enough to cause their takeover, though. Ecologist Stromberg discovered that plowing is what spelled the demise of the native grasses. Plowing cut off the growth of the perennials, allowing non-native species to thrive, eventually disrupting the biome.
\n\n\n\nIt’s estimated that only 1% of California’s native grassland remains. Since the days of the conquistadors, more than 4 million hectares (one tenth of California’s vast landmass) have been covered with the wild oats and other annual-type grasses. The result is waves of gold — and a tremendous loss of biodiversity.
\n\n\n\nOf American states, California is second only to Hawaii in the list of states whose native flora are most at risk, with 32% of indigenous plants seriously threatened. This is especially problematic because, like Hawaii, California has a unique climate, home to a large number of endemic species. According to the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, 61% of the nearly 3,500 plant species that grow in the California Floristic Province — which extends from southern Oregon past Ensenada, Mexico — are endemic. Over the last 250 years, they’ve been severely threatened by the golden grass.
\n\n\n\nBut, Stromberg tells me, at the bases of trees and in the narrow strips of land where plows couldn’t reach, the native plants and old soil system still exist. After his shock at learning that most of the grasses are invasive Mediterranean species, Stromberg says, “I realized I could find native grasses in almost any acre.” This discovery gave him hope that, with work, the native plants could continue to exist.
\n\n\n\nWhen Paul Kephart — an ecologist and landscape architect who specializes in restoration and design projects using native plants — works with bunchgrasses, he sees more than beauty, or even a recreation of an older world. He sees erosion-control, wildlife support, thermal moderation, stormwater management, and more. And, he says, clients increasingly see indigenous plants as having those values, too.
\n\n\n\nRecently, Kephart’s firm Rana Creek was involved with landscaping Apple’s Cupertino campus with 3 million native plants, and planting Facebook’s 3.5-hectare roof garden with indigenous trees, shrubs, and flowers. These clients, and many others, are clued into the eco-friendly promises that native plants provide. Given the likelihood of another terrible California drought, native plants that require little to no supplementary water are appealing.
\n\n\n\nBut native plants don’t easily regain root in their former soil. It has changed too much. “The microbial community in the soil is all messed up,” Stromberg says bluntly. Fixing it, and developing the hydrologic conditions for regrowth, is a long process. The bunchgrasses grow slowly — the old growth developed over hundreds of years. The microbial community alone takes around 100 years to return to its bunchgrass-friendly state.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Californias-Lying-Fields-of-Gold_WebBody2.jpg\")
“But,” says Kephart, “once they are established and the [plant] community is stable, they will last forever.”
\n\n\n\nKephart stimulates the situation by creating a modified version of the ideal conditions. The soil may no longer support native grasses, but if it still supports some native shrubs, Kephart will plant them. The shrubs’ presence will begin the process of soil improvements so native grasses may one day thrive.
\n\n\n\nFor Kephart, the biggest challenge of working with native plants is keeping the invasive plants at bay while the native ones gradually grow. His team controls invasive species through controlled mowing, grazing, burns, and hand-weeding. This is effective enough that Kephart has been able to landscape and restore large areas, sometimes hundreds of hectares at a time. But the frequent maintenance required can make replanting efforts like these prohibitive on a mass scale.
\n\n\n\nThe golden rolling hills of California are full of weeds.
Stromberg speaks of Kephart’s landscaping work as the way of the future: restoring a site here, landscaping a site there. “We tried all kinds of things to get large-scale land prepared for native grasses; we mowed and sprayed and burned and grazed. We worked with state parks. It didn’t go so well,” he says.
\n\n\n\nPlugging, seeding with sufficient density, and maintenance are simply too expensive. The cost makes planting native grasses a non-starter for conservation-minded ranchers, many of whom have worked with Stromberg. Cows are happy to eat the bunchgrasses, but keeping competitive plants out is simply too hard. “Non-native grassy weeds […] shade out and cover up the little baby native grasses that need three or four years to grow into bunchgrasses,” Stromberg explains.
\n\n\n\n“Weeds?” I ask, wondering exactly which plants he’s referring to.
\n\n\n\n“The yellow grasses. The golden rolling hills of California are full of weeds.”
\n\n\n\nBecause the weeds are sometimes burned away by wildfires, reseeding scorched areas with native plants once seemed a promising solution. But it has proved largely too challenging. The competitive weeds — my golden grasses — are one problem. California itself is another. “California is just too unstable,” Stromberg says. “With fires, floods, and earthquakes in such rapid succession, you’re reeling.”
\n\n\n\nHe recalls plans for post-fire reseeding being thwarted by mudslides that strike soon after the fire. In such cases, bunchgrasses could have anchored the soil and likely prevented a mudslide, if they’d had time to be planted and grow. Or if they hadn’t been practically tilled out of existence.
\n\n\n\nCalifornia is an example of how we can wreck something very easily, unintentionally.
Stromberg has given up on large-scale reseeding of this reeling land. The bunchgrasses will likely never fully regain their reign over the hills. Nor will the golden grass ever be anything but weeds. “California is an example of how we can wreck something very easily, unintentionally, and have a pretty hard time even considering fixing it,” Stromberg says.
\n\n\n\nThe best we can do in a situation such as this, perhaps, is keep encouraging ornamental landscaping and restoration work that enables co-existence. If both kinds of grasses can thrive, California can be partly as it was and should be, and partly as it has come to be known.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Californias-Lying-Fields-of-Gold_WebBody3.jpeg\")
Learning that balance is part of being North American. We live in countries built on stolen land, by conquerors who changed cultures, power structures, even the soil and roots within it. Our challenge today is to find a way to restore what was lost to the best of our abilities, knowing things can never truly go back to how they once were.
\n\n\n\nCalifornia’s grassland situation may be unique, but it is far from the only state to have a “natural” icon be not-exactly natural. Iowa, where swamps were drained to expand the famous prairie; Kentucky, whose famous bluegrass is as invasive as California’s gold; the states (Vermont, New Hampshire, Indiana, and Alabama among them) that have non-native state flowers — this country is full of such locales. And in all of them, people feel at home and try their best to live in landscapes that may not be entirely “natural.”
\n\n\n\nWe must remember that the land was not always as it is now. And learn about what was lost, and what was gained, and help the two coexist in perhaps paradoxical beauty.
\n\n\n\nKnowing what I now know, I can’t embrace the hills in the way my family always has. But I’ll still listen to Kate Wolf’s “The Redtail Hawk.” I’ll hug my parents and be grateful that they fell in love in this imperfect land. I’ll still be swept up in the harmonies — but the song’s sad tones will seem appropriate. Like bunchgrasses, long, mournful chords have their place in the golden hills.
\n","protected":false},"featured_media":971,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[44,26,6,38,22,9],"tags":[80,55,32,499,498,261],"class_list":["post-554","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-california","category-natural-history","category-planet","category-plants-animals","category-voices","category-west-coast","tag-california","tag-colonization","tag-conservation","tag-ecosystems","tag-invasive-species","tag-jessie-szalay"],"yoast_head":"\nCalifornia’s iconic golden rolling hills.
\n"},"alt_text":"Rolling hills in California, covered in golden grass and dotted sparsely with low trees, under a cloudless blue sky.","media_type":"image","mime_type":"image/jpeg","media_details":{"width":1500,"height":1000,"file":"2022/09/Californias-Lying-Fields-of-Gold_WebHeader.jpg","filesize":"189558","sizes":{"medium":{"file":"Californias-Lying-Fields-of-Gold_WebHeader-300x200.jpg","width":300,"height":200,"filesize":"8102","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Californias-Lying-Fields-of-Gold_WebHeader-300x200.jpg"},"large":{"file":"Californias-Lying-Fields-of-Gold_WebHeader-1024x683.jpg","width":1024,"height":683,"filesize":"76384","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Californias-Lying-Fields-of-Gold_WebHeader-1024x683.jpg"},"thumbnail":{"file":"Californias-Lying-Fields-of-Gold_WebHeader-150x150.jpg","width":150,"height":150,"filesize":"3549","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Californias-Lying-Fields-of-Gold_WebHeader-150x150.jpg"},"medium_large":{"file":"Californias-Lying-Fields-of-Gold_WebHeader-768x512.jpg","width":768,"height":512,"filesize":"43558","mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Californias-Lying-Fields-of-Gold_WebHeader-768x512.jpg"},"full":{"file":"Californias-Lying-Fields-of-Gold_WebHeader.jpg","width":1500,"height":1000,"mime_type":"image/jpeg","source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Californias-Lying-Fields-of-Gold_WebHeader.jpg"}},"image_meta":{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}},"source_url":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Californias-Lying-Fields-of-Gold_WebHeader.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media/971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media"}],"about":[{"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/types/attachment"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/users/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/wp-json/wp/v2/comments?post=971"}]}}],"wp:term":[[{"id":44,"link":"https://files.asparagusmagazine.com/category/west-coast/california/","name":"California","slug":"california","taxonomy":"category","yoast_head":"\n