—Summer 2017: 45,000 people evacuated as British Columbia
faces worst wildfires since records began being kept in 1950;
media mostly remains silent on role of climate change
You will come aching—stomach
a gash in the body of hunger.
You will come on all fours, paws
carrying hidden reserves of power.
You will stride continents with a mouth of fire
and not care that we confessed the sin
of narcissism. It will be too late—forests
candling in the bone throat of summer,
mountains shedding glaciers like perspiration.
You will be hungry—thirsty
for everything. Nothing will sate
the collapsing spiral within.
You will lick the spilled milk of nebulae,
eat the blue fire of new pulsars—appease
the hungry ghosts with yet more nothing,
never be granted an audience with the Alpha
and only dimly glimpse the Omega.
You will both eat and be eaten in a feast of suns.
Author’s note: As a freelance journalist I work for one of the last non-corporate community newspapers in Western Canada, the Valley Voice. I was sitting in the editor’s chair for our August 24 edition, when British Columbia made global news for its unprecedented wildfire season, causing the evacuation of up to 45,000 people—a provincial record. As editor I was on a conference call that week with the BC Wildfire Service when they announced that the 2017 wildfire season had broken every record kept since 1950. Two years ago, the province of Saskatchewan had its chance at breaking records, with its 2015 wildfire season causing the evacuation of 13,000 people. Yet seldom do the major media report on the role of climate change in increasingly common ‘record’ wildfire years—two already this decade in BC alone. According to Deutsche Welle, “Extensive studies have found that large forest fires in the western US have been occurring nearly five times more often since the 1970s and 80s. Such fires are burning more than six times the land area as before, and lasting almost five times longer.”
READ MORE
How Climate Change is Increasing Forest Fires Around the World [DW]
2017 Wildfire Season Worst in BC History [The Valley Voice / PDF Document]
B.C. Wildfire Season Worst in Six Decades, Still Far From Over [Vancouver Sun]
Fire Evacuation Largest in Saskatchewan’s History [Global News Canada]
Sean Arthur Joyce is a journalist, poet and historian with seven books published, ranging from Canadian history to poetry to a new novel, Mountain Blues, due out in May 2018 from NeWest Press, Edmonton, Alberta.
