The Fort McMurray Fire is more than you think
It’s strange seeing non-Canadians sharing posts about the Fort McMurray wildfire, because all the posts I’m seeing are just about how it’s big. And yeah, it is big. But this is also such a politically charged place.
The government does not allow the First Nations people living on the land to do their traditional controlled burnings to manage natural fuel build-ups, nourish the forest, and protect people. They haven’t allowed it since like the 40s. They will arrest elders. This means that when the forest burns, it’s explosive.
Back before it became poor taste, Fort McMurray was called Mordor. It’s a boom town pretty much owned by Suncor and Syncrude (and a handful of others), who hire loads of desperate maritimers to work extracting poison in the tar sands. The area has become a gash on the face of the earth, one of the most carbon heavy industrial projects we’ve ever seen.
Canada went back on the Kyoto Accords because the tar sands were more important to us than the health of the planet.
The Albertan and Canadian governments doubled down on the tar sands again and again. All of their eggs in this basket. When the global oil price went down, Alberta was rocked with unemployment and the Canadian dollar plummeted. This fire has the industry shut down right now, and we don’t know what will happen with so much of the workforce displaced, and supportive infrastructure damaged. The city doesn’t have electricity any more, the water isn’t safe to drink.
For the nearly 80,000 people currently evacuated who don’t know what’s going to happen, this is terrible.
For all Canadians, especially those in poverty who already struggled to afford food with a lower Canadian dollar because everything’s imported, this is terrible.
For all of humanity, this has been caused by global warming (unfathomable heat and unbelievably dry winter) and it will worsen global warming. The boreal forest of Canada is massive and one of the biggest carbon-to-oxygen converters in the northern hemisphere. These fires will continue. It’s only May.
Does the loss of resource extraction mean they’re going to go harder in different regions? In BC, activists are doing all we can to resist fracking and further displacement and disenfranchisement of First Nations people, but the pressure has never been so intense. They want pipelines in the north to bring fracked gas to ship out from salmon estuaries through narrow rocky waters to sell to China. How many eggs will the government put in that basket? What happens when a ship inevitably has an accident, and the fracked gas explodes? What happens if everything goes as planned, and the global temperature just keeps rising? This will impact all of us, no matter what.
So yeah. The fire is big. But it’s bigger than you think.