Wildfires and wild storms are the new normal
OTTAWA—The word of the day is klimaangst. It translates into climate anxiety, but the German term just has more panache. The English word seems a bit washed out.
“Eco-anxiety”: another word in English that just doesn’t capture the tightness of one’s breath when you turn on the news.
A third First Nations community burned, this time in the Okanagan of British Columbia. Twenty-one communities in British Columbia hit all-time maximum temperatures in one day in June. Temperature records were shattered in July in Switzerland with 38.8 C, and 37 C in Denmark. The Rinker Lake Complex fire north of Thunder Bay has burned off more than 389,000 hectares, the largest the province has ever experienced.
Firefighters fighting wildfires across Canada, the United States, France, and Greece have said they’ve never seen anything like this in reaction to the speed and ferocity of the wildfires, and it’s a pattern across the Northern Hemisphere.
And then there’s the ferocity of summer storms now! Ottawa had its wettest July on record. Flooding across thousands of homes occurred. St. Catharines, Ont., and Edmonton have also seen their fair share of flooding.
Just to add to the existential weight, weather experts say El Niño hasn’t even hit its peak yet—which may be the peakiest El Niño peak ever recorded, of course.
Prime Minister Mark Carney says the Trudeau-era climate plan was too expensive for Canadians, and too divisive domestically in a time of global risk and uncertainty. Pipelines and energy are urgent needs, real priorities, says the federal government.
Gee, thanks, prime minister, but it doesn’t feel all that comforting today. The Beaverton’s Aug. 5 satirical headline was so close to the truth that it was unnerving: “Carney vows to fast-track West Coast Pipeline before entire West Coast burns to the ground.”
In 2026, the weather itself became a fear for many Canadians. This is not a column about the science of climate change. This is a column about coping with climate change as we’ve pissed away the last two decades when we should have done something about it.
Some say the German language has a depth and sophistication to describe the human condition because of their philosophers and thinkers such as Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche. Whatever the reasons, klimaangst has a ring to it.
It is the rushing question when you smell campfire smoke in the air—is it really just campfire smoke? It’s the shallow breath you take when skipping over wildfire videos on social media, and then scrolling back out of a sense of obligation. It’s the existential weight that feels like a heaviness, the burden of wondering how we’ll make it through? It’s the shock and frustration that some don’t see it or even feel it at all.
It doesn’t help the soul to have governments pushing big corporate gains over Canadians’ sense of safety. It doesn’t help the spirit to have governments backstop oil and gas instead of clean energy. This is an example of the two-to-four-year political cycle pushing short-term gain to literally our peril. There is no such thing as “short-term gain” with the petroleum industry, except for the oil and gas companies’ stock options. There is no short term left to help the Earth recover.
Now’s the time to turn to Elders and ask them how to cope. They might say to return to relationships with each other, talk about how we cope together instead of focusing on stock options and corporate net profits. They might say return to the land, and rebuild our relationship with the land and trees and water. Calm always helps in times of rupture.
Rose LeMay is Tlingit from the West Coast and the CEO of the Indigenous Reconciliation Group. She writes twice a month about Indigenous inclusion and reconciliation. In Tlingit worldview, the stories are the knowledge system, sometimes told through myth and sometimes contradicting the myths told by others. But always with at least some truth.
The Hill Times