world aflame — hello, 2020

There’s so much debate about whether climate change is real and whether we’re accelerating it, but I don’t think there’s anything to debate. I was thinking about the number of catastrophic wildfires in the world that have occurred in the last few years, and there are a lot of them: this year alone, there are the bushfires all over Australia; the Amazon in Brazil; California in the US; Alberta in Canada; and summer fires in the Canadian Arctic and across Russia. The trend is undeniable — there are more and bigger wildfires around the globe each year.

Normally, BC burns terribly each summer but this year we got off lucky. I think it makes us forget how bad it has been every other year in the last decade. And in 2016, the city of Fort McMurray in Alberta was razed by fires — approximately 88,000 people were evacuated, and 1,600 structures were destroyed. California seems to burn every year as well, and on top of that they’re running out of water from consecutive years of droughts.

All of this just makes me wonder how quickly the global wildfire situation is going to worsen, when we’re going to have a big fire do some serious damage here in my community (we’ve had several in recent years but they’ve all be contained before doing too much damage), and ultimately, when we’re going to start seeing mass fatalities and casualties from them. I feel like it’s all an inevitability at this point so we may as well just enjoy the time we have left and fiddle away. That might sound ludicrous but eh, I think lying awake at night or wringing our hands thinking about things we can’t change or prevent is a more ludicrous option.

Just remember that we are all recycled particles of stardust and when we eventually burn to death, we will rejoin the dirt, plants, animals, other people, and yes, even stardust, and that’s a beautiful, amazing thing — there’s nothing to fear so fuck it. Fiddle on, friends.

Happy new year!

Summer 2018: Tale of a Scorched Earth, aka We Are Nero

It’s been hot as fuck here lately. It’s been hot as fuck almost everywhere lately — BC is on fire, Ontario is on fire, California is on fire, Russia is on fire, heatwaves are killing people in Montreal and all over Europe, cities and towns in the US and Africa are literally running out of water. Every year, it gets worse and worse.

And yet most people who aren’t running from fire or dying of heat stroke think this hot weather is just super. They’re thrilled there’s an abundance of beach weather these last few years. They’re possibly ignorant and definitely unconcerned about the amount of waste and pollution they are personally responsible for every day and how those things feed our gradual, consistently warming climate.

Usually I choose pics I find funny but also illustrate my point. This one isn’t funny but I like it enough to go with it anyway. It’s fucking depressing.

Virtually no one gives a shit about just how bad things are getting even though it’s all over the news. It seems like most people aren’t going to care until they are actually evacuating their homes, running for their lives from flames, just like all those other poor bastards not so far away.

It reminds me of the story of Nero, the Roman emperor who supposedly fiddled as Rome burned. Nero is a notorious character of history — a madman, a villain — and yet all of us are doing the exact same thing as him right now. Except it’s not just Rome, it’s the whole planet.

We’re fucked, and I mean that as in both ‘stupid’ and ‘doomed.’