22nd January 2025. Another New Year in This Rather Strange World.

I am writing this on January 20^th 2025. I could have written it closer to the start of the year but today convinced me concerning some actions I have been considering in recent weeks. Various bits of environmental news were convincing me that we were not about to see new vigor in the global effort to rein in the environmental crisis. The fires in Los Angeles, still not fully contained, convinced me that the bad things climate change is now bringing are even worse than I had feared when I spoke about mass death in South Asia during some future summer heatwave. That would be horrific and is very likely in the next few years. But the Los Angeles fires, coming after numerous similar wildfires in North America, Australia, and elsewhere, really scare me because I life in a forested community.

The Palisades fire earlier in January. Photo from The Atlantic, Ethan Swope/AP.

My home sits at the top of a treed gully, in the heart of a small town, in a region described sometimes as the Hamptons of the North because of the abundance of very high value lake-front second homes, owned by people who spend much of their time elsewhere. M house is at high risk if wildfire ever comes here. Houses dotted through the forest is a recipe for disaster as LA has just witnessed. And my town and this region are definitely not equipped to tackle a serious wildfire when one eventually comes. Because it will.

This part of Ontario is not at as high a risk of wildfire as many more northern or western parts of Canada. Our climate is wetter. But fire has always been a part of our forests and warmer, dryer summers are coming.

Not much risk of fire in winter, but the trees are pretty close to my house.

Wildfire, and the fate of my house, is not the only aspect of the environmental crisis that concerns me. I’ve followed the long, slow, dismemberment of coral reefs around the world for the last quarter-century. Warming is just one of the threats that are taking this iconic ecosystem apart around the world and I have slowly learned that humanity is just about incapable of dealing with a crisis if that crisis arrives slowly but inexorably. We stand there with our mouths open. We grasp at evidence that all is not lost yet, failing to admit that the battle is still being lost and that coral reefs are disappearing before our eyes. Coral reefs will be the first ecosystem on the planet that we are going to eliminate totally.

This past December, the reefs at Raja Ampat, perhaps the most biodiverse coral reef on the planet, bleached severely. Bleaching and coral death is happening on reefs around the world, every year, and the corals cannot recover before they are hit again. A slow, drip, drip, drip kind of elimination of a magnificent ecosystem because without the corals everything else goes too. Photo from IndoOcean Project.

I’ve watched the evidence mount for this being the time of the 6^th mass extinction event on this planet. We are losing species, in all ecosystems, at rates that far exceed what is a normal rate of loss throughout geological history. I’ve personally observed that I no longer need to stop to clean my windshield on summer road trips because the number of insects, not just the number of species, is way down from what it was in the late 20^th century. I’ve listened to neighbors moan about how the fishing ain’t what it used to be, while refusing to admit that their fishing, coupled with the environmental changes we have caused, could be the reason our lakes have fewer fish than they used to. I’ve also observed my friends, on seeing a common mayfly (shadfly, fishfly – all the same beast), asking each other, “What is that?” An animal common enough in our early summers just decades ago to blacken window screens if a light was left on indoors.

Remember these. Now less common in many places and my neighbors don’t remember what they are. The mayfly, shadfly or fishfly is an Order of insects, the Ephemeroptera. They have long larval and juvenile lives in aquatic environments and then emerge to spend a brief time as non-feeding adults whose sole purpose in life is to get a mate, or two or three. Photo from National Wildlife Federation.

I’ve followed the science and the politics of the global effort to rein in climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And have been growing increasingly concerned as the high water mark in that effort – the Paris agreement to limit emissions – recedes into the past, while delegates to annual climate meetings cannot even find common grown around something so obvious as the need to stop using fossil fuels unless we can find a way to use them without emissions. Just because there are oil and gas deposits underground does not provide nations with a moral imperative to dig them up and use them.

As I have tracked the politics of the global environmental crisis, I have also seen the way in which our new, interconnected, on-line world has become one in which people seem unable to discriminate fact from fiction. For me, this began in 2016 when Kelley Ann Conway famously responded to a reporter’s question with something like, “Well, you have your facts, but we have alternative facts.” The growing distrust of authority which now seems widespread in North America and likely much more broadly, and the rapidly growing number of sources of “information” have led, I think, to a weakening of reliance on the legacy media with their fact-checkers, their need for corroborative evidence, and their concern with accuracy of what they report. I have family members who get their news from social media. I don’t mind people getting their news about the family, their friends, or the kookie lady down the street from social media – we have always had gossip in our cultures – but news about the state of the planet, the science that helps us decipher that state, and the political situation within and among countries that largely determines how we respond as a society? That news should come from authoritative sources.

On 7^th January 2025, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook and Instagram became even less reliable than they had been, joining media like X (Twitter) as essentially unregulated spaces. Photo from Toronto Star.

Now throw in some misdirection from obscenely rich men pushing their own perspectives on social media they own, plus the misdirection provided by various nefarious actors who find that the world wide web gives them the opportunity to appear important, accepted, even authoritative to those who follow what they say. The result is an uninformed society, untrusting of established (legacy) authority, and open to being seduced by outright fabrications that minimize any hope they will understand what is really going on.

And this afternoon, in the middle of his Inaugural Address, the 47^th President of the USA, after making numerous incorrect statements about the health of that nation said,”the United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons. And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on Mars.”

The new Emperor of America providing a first glimpse of his policy for the coming four years. No surprises, except for the nakedness of the attack on democracy. Photo from Associated Press.

Expands our territory? Does he think he is back in the wild west? Or does he really believe that just because he might like to add Greenland, the Panama Canal, and perhaps Canada to his nation, he is free to do so. I won’t even get into the absurdity of gobbling up a country geographically larger than your own and calling it the 51^st state.

And so we come to my New Years Resolution. Yes, I know. I did not tell you this is where this stream of consciousness was heading, but if POTUS47 can weave, I can damn well weave too!

To the resolution. I am going to post more frequently to this blog. I am going to build up its readership again. And I am going to post what, so far as I can tell, are factual accounts of the happenings around me as the environmental crisis unfolds. I will also find room for posts about more pleasant things, like my coming trip to Costa Rica. I hope some people will read it. And perhaps learn from it, or from the sources I direct people to. It does remain possible to figure out fact from fiction in this world, even if the entire US Federal government has now slipped over into that other universe where the Gulf of Mexico is the Gulf of American and Mount Denali is now Mount McKinley.