“Perceptions,” by Gerry Warner

Op-Ed Commentary

Is the world on the brink of ecological collapse? Surely not! At least I hope not. But as we grind our way through another smoky summer with the air filled with carbon and other green-house gases and wildfires burning almost everywhere in B.C., you’ve got to wonder. And wonder a little fearfully at that.

It first hit me about a week ago when I began to hear radio reports about the so-called “Slocan Complex” of wildfires. I’m originally from that lush green part of the province in the West Kootenay near Nelson where my grandparents built a family farm after my grandfather was released from the horrors of the First World War.

Bob, who in his later years was elected mayor of Slocan City, singlehandedly built a water system that was linked to Mulvey Creek, which flows out of a spectacular range of gray granite peaks that became Valhalla Provincial Park about four hours west of Cranbrook and Kimberley. So, you can easily imagine how my ears perked up when I heard that the Mulvey Creek was one of the major valleys that makes up the Slocan Complex of blazes.

Since then, I’ve been unable to determine if the Mulvey Creek fire has reached our former farm site, but it’s directly in the path of the Slocan Complex blaze and dozens of homeowners in that area were forced to leave by the BC Wildfire Service.

Some have since returned to Slocan and Silverton, two small communities closest to the wild burn, but others remain evacuated. Meanwhile my tired brain remains flooded with memories of the idyllic times I spent visiting my grandparents on the farm, playing with the animals and drinking glacier-fed water from Mulvey Creek.

There are some memories that our battered old brains just won’t let go.

And when is all this chaos going to end? A week of wet weather would slow down the fires enough for everyone to return home and get on with their lives. But in the deeper reaches of our brains fearful memories will remain only to be roused again the next time a drought develops. You can count on that as surely as you can count on many to continue denying climate change as they insist that nothing has really changed and global warming is a sinister fraud brought on by nasty leftists and over-educated intellectuals.

That’s what happens when extremism and polarization takes over the body politic. It makes us enemies instead of friends who can respectively disagree.

This makes reaching consensus on climate change almost impossible to reach because even though global warming has the power to make our planet uninhabitable it moves slowly making it easy for the public to ignore it.

As a result, politicians concentrate on issues like taxes, the economy and the gender wars while the world literally burns up around us. Meanwhile, scientists warn an average temperature increase of 1.5 C will cross the threshold endangering life in general on Mother Earth. That could occur in less than a decade. Sad to say on some parts of our beleaguered planet have hit this point now.

With only a decade or so to live, I confess I don’t shed any tears over the coming demise of our planet. But I do get agitated when I think about our children, both unmarried, both childless. That’s their right of course, but I have to agree with them that this is not a good time in the Earth’s history to be raising children. If I was their age, I’d probably be doing the same thing.

So, in the meantime, I find solace in thinking about the hiking I did with my dad in the Valhalla Range above the Warner farm and how good that water tasted out of Mulvey Creek. And I hope that my bleak prognostications about the future don’t come to pass.

I’ve been wrong before.

Lead image: A view of the Mulvey Creek Wildfire on August 4. BC Wildfire Service photo

– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist, who never tires of thinking about the good ol’ days.

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