Texans have a right to warmth
It’s called climate change for a reason.
This was more than evident in the chilling accounts coming out of Texas last week as millions of people tried to cope with a sharp, prolonged temperature drop that froze power plants and water pipes.
Urban chaos ensued as people who normally take electricity and water supply for granted scrambled to keep warm and get enough water to see them through the day.
Many Albertans were left reeling at the sight since Texas’s petroleum riches, yen for independence, and swagger have long been seen as a model that many here yearn to copy. And yet there they were, humbled by the weather, their oil and gas virtually useless as a distinctively Canadian kind of cold bore down on them.
Given all the apocalyptic scenarios associated with the predictions around climate change, I don’t recall any that painted that particular picture.
But apocalyptic modelling has turned into reality much faster than predicted: raging wildfires in California and Australia; more intense and frequent hurricanes; rapidly shrinking ice sheets in the Arctic.
And according to some climate scientists there is a connection between the warming Arctic and that frozen infrastructure in Texas.
But northerners rarely get the kind of attention about their plight that Texans received even though 40 per cent of Canada’s land mass is in Arctic territory.
And yet northerners, and that includes the Canadian Inuit, as well as people in other countries that stretch into the Arctic, have been living with the frightening effects of warmer weather for years.
“As the permafrost melts, roads and airport runways buckle. Homes and buildings along the coast sink into the ground and fall into the sea. The natural ice cellars needed for food storage are no longer cold. Melting glaciers turn into dangerous torrents … the land that is such an important part of our spirit, our culture and our physical and economic well being is becoming an often unpredictable and precarious place for us.”
So writes Sheila Watt-Cloutier, an Inuk with decades of leadership experience, in her brilliantly-titled book, “The Right to be Cold.”
In a talk she gave in 2019, Watt-Cloutier described Inuit culture as being “built on the ice, the snow and the cold. It’s very foundation depends on the climate being cold, freezing cold.”
As the Arctic climate warms, she said, the Inuit’s very right to exist is challenged. They cannot live any longer as a people moulded and defined by snow and ice. But it seems most southerners don’t see that the impact climate change has on so many aspects of life in the Arctic will one day become their story too.
To be Canadian is to live with snow and ice for half the year. Unless of course you live in Victoria or thereabouts.
How will we have to change if the snow and ice disappears? How will we react if our most precious wilderness and landscapes are destroyed by drought, fire, or flood?
The causes of climate change are global in scope: carbon emissions, deforestation, increased livestock farming. But the effects are decidedly local and it’s the local that people are apt to fight for because the natural world right around them can’t be easily separated from who they are.
That’s why Indigenous people in parts of B.C. fight oil pipelines that might pollute their waterways. That’s why there was such an uproar in Alberta when the government recently opened up the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains to coal mining. Those mountains are part of who we are, how we define ourselves. If they are defiled, we are all defiled.
Texans have a right to depend on the climate being warm and not freezing them out of existence, just as we have a right to be cold (when we are outside!) so heat doesn’t wither us out of existence.
As people in the Arctic struggle with a much faster rate of warming than is happening further south we are seeing our future if we don’t take strong action to curb climate change.
For, as Watt-Cloutier says: “everyone benefits from a frozen Arctic.”
Just as everyone is bound to lose if it continues warming.