State Farm. Wildfire outside of Las Vegas, NV. 2013. Flickr.com. Web. Dec 17. 2017
Like many a city person, I don’t always get out in nature enough. Much of my time is spent traversing the skyscraped downtown core of Vancouver, and the neighbourhoods of Mount Pleasant, Coal Harbour and the West End. Yet, there are few things I feel affection for like I do the Western red cedars that stretch into the sky in Stanley Park, the cherry blossoms – on certain blocks in early spring – that obscure everything else in sight. There is something in nature to be seen and felt, a reality impossible to circumvent that is both comforting, and increasingly alienating.
Any person who reads a little news or even pays attention to the weather currents of recent times knows that – meteorologically speaking – things are tough. There was a time that the planet felt sturdier than us, when global warming and climate change were just buzzwords that we knew were happening but whose observed results were not felt. But once you begin to feel the planet’s frailty, it’s impossible to run from it, and to not feel the fear of what is.
Yet, like so many things going on in the world, my anger finds an inadequate outlet. This summer, when the sun was blotted out by smoke from wildfires, I was angry at the thick wall of smoke; and when the leaves refused their familiar turn in late September, I was angry at the trees. When I read about the ever-quickening thaw of permafrost in the arctic, I was mad at the arctic and the ice that won’t persist in freezing. Somehow, it feels less painful to blame nature’s seeming inadequacies when it’s our own that really hurt.
Given the reckless and transparent priorities of the Trump administration, I’ve read a lot of things that have made me feel rage acutely. But few have summoned up my disgust with its deeply flawed value system – our flawed value system – like the shrinking of two national monuments in Utah: Bears Ears and Grand Staircase. Likewise, in Canada, we have our very own problems, with oil company Kinder Morgan being allowed to bypass the need for municipal and community approval in its process towards expanding their pipeline. While Trump bleats about giving control of the land back to the states, we haven’t even concocted a lie in British Columbia.
As Trump stated when announcing the decision, ”Public lands will once again be for public use because we know that people who are free to use their land and enjoy their land are the people most determined to conserve their land.” If this administration wasn’t the richest in American history and wasn’t hell bent on slashing the corporate tax rate in increasingly disparate times, this might be believable, but it seems like yet another encroaching of big business on the already-imperilled natural world. And we recede further from that natural world with each new storm, each thing we must hide away from.
At many events and rallies in Vancouver, it’s mentioned that the city is on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Prior to 2014, despite the reality being the same, it was something that went unacknowledged. But there are many things we once didn’t acknowledge that are readily known now. It is the trajectory of change and progress that leads to the future. So, with these recent attitudes towards nature, what road are we on exactly?
In But What if We’re Wrong?, writer Chuck Klosterman explores the concept of approaching the present as if it was the past:
“We constantly pretend our perception of the present day will not seem ludicrous in retrospect, simply because there doesn’t appear to be any other option. Yet there is another option, and the option is this: We must start from the premise that—in all likelihood—we are already wrong. And not “wrong” in the sense that we are examining questions and coming to incorrect conclusions, because most of our conclusions are reasoned and coherent. The problem is with the questions themselves.”
The desire to plod forward on our current trajectory is understandable, given the power of habit. Yet, removal of environmental protections – in Utah and British Columbia – doesn’t only represent the continuance of a habit of dominance, but a regressive backslide into a world that, even as we live within its old parameters, no longer exists. I’m disappointed in the permafrost for thawing, and the trees for not changing, but when do we truly begin asking the questions of ourselves? When do we begin to acknowledge that we are wrong and move into a reality that respects what nature now requires of us?
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