Dispatches From the Edge

 

The Sumass Prairie Flood
Abbotsford, B.C.

Reuters image

Ministry of Transportation images

Getty images

Dear Prime Minister Trudeau:
(c/c B.C. Premier John Horgan)

Welcome to the climate crisis. Too bad we missed our emissions targets for 2020. Oops. I hate to burst your bubble of denial, but setting emission reduction targets of 2050 is ludicrous. By 2050, if human life survives, perpetual heat domes will be baking all life for months at a time.

Tzeporah* is telling it true: the only way forward is the way you do not want to travel, capping fossil fuel use and scaling the industry down by mid-century. Stop with the pipelines. Stop clearcutting the few remaining old growth forests we have left. The capitalism extraction formula makes a few very rich, but it is costing the rest of us dearly, and will have  an even more devastating impact on our grandchildren's and great-grandchildren's lives, along with all non-human lives.

We just watched large portions of our province disappear underwater, people and animals suffering and dying, towns emptied, livelihoods wiped out overnight. I used to feel frustrated when government said it was too expensive to address climate change.  The price tag for not addressing it will be even higher. And the trouble is, we will be so busy reacting to crises, it will be impossible, now, to gain the upper hand enough to slow the pace of climate breakdown.

A series of storms are lined up off the coast; the second  is battering us now. It is long past time to stop making decisions based on economics, and to start making them in terms of survival on this planet. You were not elected to make life great for corporations; you were elected to serve the people and steward resources carefully for future generations.

I can't tell you how your smiling, smooth, empty words, words, words annoys me, along with your lack of action.

Signed,
A Raging Granny

for my challenge at earthweal: to write Verse Letters: a form of address like a dramatic monologue. As I watch Politico-Speak on the news, and those smug, smiling, over-privileged faces, while so many are suffering, it helps to send off a verbal slap or two. *Tzeporah Berman is a lifelong activist who speaks to government and industry about the accelerating climate crisis. 

The third atmospheric river system is set to hit tomorrow. The long tin buildings that house livestock on factory "farms" are full of drowned cattle. Three towns have lost a large percentage of their housing. Thousands are displaced with no where to go; they have lost everything. When climate refugees are within 100 miles, the climate crisis gets very real indeed. I can hardly bear to think of how many domestic and wild animal deaths there have been. I write from the edge of the West Coast, and the edge of hope.