Photo by sakarin14 via Adobe Stock

Arctic Canada is filling with puddles.

Springtime in the Yukon looks astonishingly similar to June in Ontario. The days are long. Deer bite the heads off flowers deep in the forest. Icy mountains still loom in the distance, but here in the city of Whitehorse, wet mud squishes with every step. People wear shorts and t-shirts. Trucks are parked in nearly every driveway, dried clay caked onto their tires. Spring in Whitehorse is beautiful, if you forget that it comes at the cost of a forever-changed climate.

Annual mean temperatures in northern Canada have increased by 2.3 C from 1948 to 2016, with temperatures rising most rapidly in the Yukon and the Northwest Territories. By 2019, a new report from Environment and Climate Change Canada revealed that northern Canada, specifically the Yukon, is warming three times faster than anywhere else because of Arctic amplification.

Arctic amplification is like a magnifying glass reflecting off a mirror: heat from the sun bounces off the bright landscape, which then mixes with warm water vapour in the atmosphere. This heat isn’t being absorbed in the ground because of the ice, so it has nowhere to go: heat rises, but it becomes trapped in the atmosphere. As more ice melts, more vapour is created, which then causes the ice to melt even further. Essentially, Arctic amplification means that the region is caught in an intense greenhouse gas effect leading to biodiversity loss, habitat degradation, and mudslides.

For residents of northern Canada, the effects of the climate crisis are being felt faster and more aggressively than any policy can take effect. They’re threatening Indigenous ways of life that have been in place for thousands of years, making it increasingly difficult to pass down spiritual and cultural customs to young people. They’re also threatening the very ground the North is built on. But the climate crisis isn’t exclusive to the Yukon—if the oldest (and coldest) parts of the Earth are heating up, it signifies a dangerous warning to the rest of the world.

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Indigenous communities throughout the Yukon and Alaska regions have depended on Chinook salmon as a key food source for millennia, moving along the 3,190 kilometre-long Yukon River to fish. Brooke Woods, a Koyukon Dene woman, is a tribal citizen of Rampart Village and grew up on the Alaska side of the Yukon River. She spent six years as executive chair for the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission and currently works for the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Alaska, focusing on climate policy and fisheries management. She stresses that the salmon aren’t just food for her community; salmon fishing is also a livelihood with a deep spiritual connection. It’s important to people to use all parts of the fish, and it’s common to find salmon skeletons mounted above Dene doorways. “[Our] communities are along the Yukon River for a reason. We are salmon-dependant people,” she says.

But now, climate change is leading to the continued loss of the salmon: an essential part of the Yukon River’s ecosystem that was once abundant along its stretch. And Indigenous people in the area have largely resorted to buying salmon from other areas or trying to harvest other fish due to the decline. “So many parts of our life have changed because of the salmon declines…impacting us mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually and culturally,” Woods says.

Chinook salmon differ from Atlantic salmon on the other side of the country because of one key factor: they die less than a month after spawning. They also take up to eight years to reach maturity and reproduce. Though salmon live most of their life in saltwater, their eggs need freshwater to hatch. Because of this, the adult salmon usually return to their own birthplace to release the next generation of spawn, with females laying between 2,000 to 10,000 eggs. However, climate change is altering these freshwater rivers quickly, and the salmon eggs are soft and highly sensitive to temperature and environment. When the water is too warm, too polluted, too salty, or just too different from what it used to be, the hatchlings can’t survive. Right now, only about one percent of chinook salmon eggs survive to adulthood. In other words, climate change is a factor in degrading the salmon’s habitat beyond survivability.

Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the U.S. believe warmer waters make it harder for Chinook salmon in the river to keep a healthy diet and stabilize their metabolism. According to the NOAA, salmon grow faster in warmer water but struggle to find prey—like other small fish or invertebrates—meaning they will lay fewer eggs and have a lower chance of survival. Warmer rivers are also causing salmon to die from heat stress, according to a study from the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) also reports that as temperatures rise, it’s harder for water to retain its oxygen levels. Salmon—like all forms of aquatic life—need stable oxygen levels to survive. When the water gets too warm and the oxygen levels deplete too much, salmon suffocate and die.

In April 2024, the U.S. and Canadian federal governments teamed up to create a historic—yet controversial—agreement: ban all Chinook salmon fishing in the Yukon and Alaska for seven years in an effort to grow the population. According to the ban, both First Nation and Tribal subsistence fisheries—the method of harvesting fish specifically involving Indigenous knowledge and traditions—is prohibited “when there are fewer than 71,000 adult Chinook salmon.” Once this number is met, limited commercial, personal, and sport fishing could begin again. The salmon are counted by sonar at several sites in the region, and in 2023, only around 14,000 Chinook were counted at the Eagle sonar site near the Canadian border.

Detailed tracking of the Chinook salmon population began in the 1980s. According to the EPA, in 1984, around 1.2 million Chinook were tracked at the southernmost part of their migration—the Salish Sea region of the Pacific Ocean. With over 3,000 kilometres of migration from the Yukon River, through the Bering Sea, down to the Salish Sea before coming back up the Yukon River again, Chinook salmon have some of the largest migration patterns in the world. But fewer and fewer Chinook are surviving this migration for long enough to make it to their spawning grounds.

The 2024 Yukon River Chinook salmon run—the annual migration of salmon along the river to spawn—was the third-lowest in history, with fewer than 65,000 salmon making the voyage to the Pilot Station—the closest sonar site to the mouth of the river. Of those fish, an estimated 24,112 passed through the Eagle Sonar site near the Yukon border. The worst year on record was 2022, when an astonishing total of 12,025 Chinook salmon were counted for the season through the Eagle sonar site. This number is 80 percent lower than the historical average; some previous years have seen up to 500,000.

At the heart of the salmon run is Whitehorse. Whitehorse holds the world’s longest wooden fish ladder, a structure crucial for letting salmon pass through to their spawning grounds. It looks like a winding staircase filled with flowing water: salmon instinctively migrate and seek out changing currents. The water attracts the salmon, who swim upstream, jumping from step to step. Just like a staircase, these ladders have steps that allow the fish to “climb” upwards: this is especially helpful if parts of the river are blocked by dams or other predators waiting for their next meal. Conservation groups monitor the Whitehorse fish ladder yearly and use sonars to track how many fish pass through.

Jordan Blay has lived in the Yukon since 1985, and grew up fishing in Annie Lake 50 kilometres outside Whitehorse. He notes salmon, halibut and several types of trout among the fish he could catch around the Yukon and Alaska. “The record was 18 castes, 18 fish,” he says. However, in recent years, he says there are considerably fewer fish in large bodies of water, like the Yukon River.

Blay describes the spring of 2022 as “abysmal” for salmon. “If I remember right, it was something like six fish went through the ladder,” he says. Hardly any fish were seen on some days. Blay’s estimation isn’t far off: fish ladder supervisor Amy Jacobsen told the CBC that only 13 salmon passed through by August 10, 2023. More fish passed through after this, but August is the height of their travels.

When numbers are low, Fisheries and Oceans Canada prohibits sport fishing. Depending on the numbers and body of water, a prohibition can affect both personal fishing and Indigenous subsistence fishing. However, even if not explicitly stated by Canadian or Alaskan governments, First Nations leaders often voluntarily ask their citizens to refrain from fishing when the populations are in decline.

Historically, Indigenous-operated fisheries have had more robust fish populations than modern commercial fisheries due to longstanding practices of environmental reciprocity and continued traditions surrounding the Earth’s seasonal cycles. Woods explains that the salmon decline is a relatively new phenomenon. “We do have 10,000 years of relationship with salmon, and we have always maintained our cultural values when it comes to harvesting king [Chinook] salmon,” she says. “That has been successful, that has kept salmon runs alive and well.”

Woods says the low salmon population could have disastrous effects on future generations, noting that cultural traditions and education are passed down from older family members, and how she learned from her mother and grandmother when fishing. “Growing up, we had multi-generational family members coming together to harvest, process and share salmon,” she says. She’s concerned younger community members won’t be able to learn in the same way she did, which will pose serious challenges to their health and culture.

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Apart from warming the Yukon River, climate change means the physical landscape of the Yukon is shifting. Deep below the surface of the Earth in northern Canada is permafrost: permanently frozen soil and sediment held together by ice. The Yukon has some of the oldest pieces of permafrost in the world, with scientists estimating it’s been in place for three million years. In Whitehorse, permafrost accounts for up to 50 percent of the ground’s surface, according to Yukon University. Because of climate change, the permafrost is now melting.

“One of the biggest ways we see issues with permafrost in our human environment is probably through infrastructure and the highways,” says Alison Perrin, a senior research professional at Yukon University’s Research Centre. Perrin has been researching climate change and climate change policy in the North for the last 10 years. “It’s kind of like the supporting foundation of the North.”

In the same way a foundation provides stability for a house, permafrost creates stability on the ground in northern Canada. The crumbling permafrost threatens the livelihood of the communities—like the Kluane First Nation—that have existed in these remote areas for thousands of years before Canada was colonized.

Shirley Smith is an Indigenous Elder from the Kwanlin Dün First Nation. Their traditional land is located in what’s alsoknown as Whitehorse. One of her biggest worries is how the next generation will be able to learn about cultural traditions and living off the land sustainably. Warmer winters with increased precipitation meant that one winter, she had six feet of snow alongside her house, making it difficult to get to cultural and sacred sites.

Climate change presents a real threat to Indigenous communities’ abilities to pass their cultures and spiritual practices on to next generations. Smith says that the best place to teach younger generations about climate change is on the land, recalling that some of her traditional knowledge about hunting and fishing sustainably was passed down by her father on trips. But these lessons aren’t being taught as much anymore, she says. Still, any time at all learning from older people is deeply valuable for younger ones. “Even if they just go for two days, three days, teach them or show them how to live off the land,” she says.

Alongside threatening Indigenous ways of life and knowing, warming ice can also mean physical danger. Communities in northern Canada are remote and far between, leaving people with few options when it comes to emergency evacuations. Perrin uses Nunavut as an example of one place in the North where people’s ability to survive in the winter depends on stability below them in the forms of ice and permafrost. Communities in the North are mobile, moving to different locations to fish, trap, hunt. It’s about survival, tradition, spirituality, culture and lineage all at once. But this mobility isn’t possible when the ice cracks: suddenly, a longstanding tradition of walking across a frozen river doesn’t guarantee safety. And yet, “their lives depend on going out on the ice,” she says.

Only 30 kilometres outside of Whitehorse, reports have been made about tears in the Earth from the permafrost melting, causing trees to collapse as the dirt breaks open. These physical changes can mean less stability on the Alaska Highway, a 2,400-kilometre road that runs through B.C., the Yukon and Alaska. The highway is an essential method of transportation connecting remote First Nations communities and importing goods to northern areas. If parts of it become unusable, it could seriously threaten these communities’ health and wellbeing.

Further, melting permafrost can cause other issues: methane, carbon dioxide or potentially toxic microbes are often found within the sediment, furthering the overall problem of climate change, Perrin explains. “As permafrost thaws, it contributes to greenhouse gas effect,” she says.

Part of Perrin’s research investigates how climate change affects the Yukon over long periods. One report she coauthored, titled “Yukon climate change indicators and key findings,” published in 2022 by Yukon University’s Research Centre, looks at how the volume of Arctic sea ice has decreased since 1979. With a melting rate of about 300 cubic kilometres per year, the report estimates that most ice that was there in total has melted within the past decade.

Permafrost thaw, warmer temperatures and wildfires can cause extreme events like the landslides in Whitehorse, something that would have been unheard of until just a few years ago. For residents, the North is quickly becoming unrecognizable. Willow Brewster, a paramedic who’s lived in Whitehorse since she was a toddler in the 1990s, says she remembers long, frigid days too cold to hold a snowball. Now, she says, there’s sometimes slush in December and landslides by spring. In July 2024, a landslide caused by massive amounts of rain—another symptom of climate change—caused an 82-kilometre highway closure. While no one was hurt, it left people unable to travel between Carcross, Yukon and Fraser, B.C. Landslides are one result of climate-change related permafrost melting, according to a 2023 Simon Fraser University and Yukon Geological Survey report.

“I was driving through puddles in December because all of the snow was melting because it was plus five [degrees],” Brewster says. “It’s [an] eerie kind of feeling where it just feels kind of wrong.”

Brewster also sees injuries becoming more frequent. Her grandmother, who has lived in the Yukon for several decades, fell in the ice in 2016. In 2022, two people fell into icy water when crossing a seemingly frozen river near Pilot Station, Alaska, resulting in one death. Brewster describes freezing temperatures as “sporadic,” and says you can’t always expect the ice to be consistently frozen anymore. Routine ice trips are increasingly deadly in February, when the ice should be sturdiest.

In December 2023, the Yukon government’s official response to climate change noted 42 new actions to fight it, specifically noting green energy, wildfire protections, and smart electric heating systems. There is no mention of salmon specifically, but there is an action saying the government will “work with First Nations and communities to address a gap in lake-monitoring to capture changes in water in order to support fish habitat protection and community safety.” While permafrost is not mentioned either, there is a promise to undertake “flood risk hazard assessments for Yukon campgrounds and other key public infrastructure in territorial parks.”

When it comes to climate change, even a two-degree temperature increase can have significant overall effects. It can be the difference between freezing and melting; an animal living or dying. Canada is currently a part of the Paris Agreement—the international treaty created by the United Nations wherein countries pledge to limit their emissions to avoid a two-degree increase. Yet the Yukon’s average temperature is three degrees warmer than it’s ever been.

Both our shared physical environment and entire ways of being that have been in place since time immemorial are under threat. Bans on salmon fishing and government incentives on green tech will not solve this in and of themselves. Instead, there needs to be a priority on centring the skills passed down through generations from Indigenous knowledge-keepers, living in balance with the land, and a focus on sustainability as a continuous way of life. There is irrefutable evidence that global warming changes every part of the world: from the tiniest oxygen molecules in the water to the vast permafrost in the Earth. And what’s happening in the Yukon is foreshadowing for everywhere else: the climate can’t change so drastically while everything else stays the same.

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Indigenous communities have long been crucial to climate protection. According to the United Nations, Indigenous people have prioritized the environment for generations, meaning their contributions to the scientific community cannot be ignored. A pivot to two-eyed seeing is deeply necessary.

There are over a dozen First Nations in the Yukon, each with its own distinct cultural practices and communities. One initiative, called the Yukon First Nations Climate Action Fellowship, is trying to combine cultural traditions across the different nations with the fight against climate change by teaching young adults about biodiversity and living in harmony with the land. Dustin McKenzie-Hubbard, a member of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations, loves being one of the 13 fellows because it inspires him to make the world better for his daughter.

McKenzie-Hubbard says the fellowship has focused on turning away from a colonialist and consumerist mindset and that a strong sense of community is essential in dealing with these problems. Addressing climate change means centring Indigenous people’s calls for climate protection and understanding. “Everything you do affects someone else and everything,” he says. “We have to be mindful of what our impacts will do for ourselves in the next seven generations.”

Woods stresses the importance of incorporating Indigenous knowledge into conservation efforts, something she says is “disregarded in so many management spaces.”

“We do have 10,000 years of stewardship that is not incorporated into the current Western science and governance structure,” she says, describing how important it is for knowledge to be passed down from Elders to the younger generations, especially when it comes to the salmon. “I want to be able to fish the same way my grandmother taught my mom, and the way that I’ll teach my children.”

Photo by SCUBALUNA

Merely the size of a fingernail, with a striped pattern on their shells, zebra and quagga mussels have a powerful grip. They make their way into new bodies of water by clinging to the hulls of boats and ships. Once they invade a water body, they attach themselves to native mussels, causing them to suffocate. They can also cause diseases for other aquatic life that may eat them, decrease water quality, and clog any infrastructure they come across, like pipes and docks.

All invasive species are a kind of poison. But zebra and quagga mussels are particularly dangerous. These mussels, which are native to Eurasia, encrust everythng they come in contact with. They filter algae out of water that local species depend on for food, devouring it all for themselves. They can completely kill off native mussel species. And now, it seems to be an inevitable reality that they’ll soon colonize British Columbia’s freshwaters.

When quagga mussels were found in the Idaho Snake River last fall, the Idaho State Department of Agriculture had to block off over 25 kilometers of the river from the public and dump 116,000 liters of Natrix, a copper-based pesticide, in an effort to eradicate them. The whole procedure cost $3 million and ended up killing six to seven tonnes of fish. Whether or not they were actually able to rid themselves of the unwelcome molluscs remains an open question.

With the Idaho Snake River a mere 10 hour drive from B.C., and connecting to the province’s bodies of water, conservation groups are ringing their alarm bells. “The threat is closer than ever,” says James Littley, deputy administrator of the Okanagan Basin Water Board (OBWB), an organization that identifies and resolves critical water issues in the Okanagan Valley.

More funding to combat this problem is needed immediately. Yet each government agency that used to provide financial assistance to infestation prevention has slashed their contributions over the past few years, leaving very little to protect B.C. wildlife and ecosystems from this now-imminent threat. Without the necessary funding, B.C.’s freshwater ecosystems could face drastic changes, impacting aquatic life and water quality, and costing the province millions.

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Research by the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in the Hudson River showed that zebra and quagga mussels which invaded the waters in 1991 and 2008 respectively had caused environmental damage in a magnitude similar to acid rain. In both cases, phytoplankton populations decline. This can cause a ripple effect, lowering populations of other aquatic life, too.

In Michigan, the mussels were responsible for the deaths of thousands of migratory birds through a cascading food chain issue. These mussels accumulate toxins in their body up to 300,000 times greater than what’s in the surrounding water. As a result, the birds died from a particularly deadly type of botulism that worked its way up the food chain from the mussels to fish. When this happens, birds, including endangered species like loons, are unable to fly and often wash up dead on shores. Scavengers that may feed on them could also ingest the toxins and die. Even after the mussels die, their razor-sharp shells wash up on beaches, making it impossible for people to walk barefoot or go swimming.

Invasive mussels were found in the Great Lakes in the 1980s after ballast water was discharged into them from European ships, and they’ve spread through parts of Eastern Canada and the U.S. since then. Just last year, they were found in New Brunswick and Manitoba. While Manitoba has used a chlorine treatment to control growth in hydroelectric generating stations, New Brunswick is focusing on doing more boat and watercraft cleanings.

B.C. shouldn’t feel safe from this issue, and neither should other provinces and territories. In B.C., there are two lines of defence around mussel infestation: prevention and monitoring. Prevention is accomplished by careful inspections of any vessels coming into the province that are deemed to be high risk. In 2023, the province’s Invasive Mussel Defence

Program (IMDP) included six inspection stations and two roving inspection crews that checked watercrafts entering the province that could potentially be transporting the creatures. Many factors can contribute to a watercraft being high risk. For example, if a boat was in a state or province that has a known or suspected case of zebra or quagga mussels, or if it’s dirty or slimy, it is high risk. In these cases, the boat is thoroughly cleaned, drained, and dried at the inspection station, and then it’s quarantined for 30 days. While this program sees high compliance, the current inspection stations do not cover every border crossing, and they do not operate 24 hours per day.

The 2023 provincial watercraft inspection station report, released annually by B.C.’s Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship, stated that “155 watercraft were identified as high risk, 66 decontamination orders were issued, and 36 watercraft were issued quarantine periods to meet the required drying time.” The ministry estimated in 2023 that if these mussels were to invade the province’s water bodies, it would cost anywhere from $64 to $129 million annually to manage the impacts. And Littley says that number is grossly underestimated.

Despite this, funding from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) for invasive mussels prevention in the province dropped from $475,000 in 2022 to nothing in 2023/24. Fortis BC, a provincial utilities provider, dropped their funding from $250,000 per year from 2017-2021 to a $50,000 donation in December 2023, and nothing yet in 2024. And B.C. Hydro, which gave $1.25 million in 2020, also dropped their funding to $350,000. Reduced funding will likely mean significantly reduced protection for the province’s waterways.

None of these government agencies made someone available for an interview. In an email to This Magazine, the DFO cited that they have allocated $43.8 million over five years and $10.8 million ongoing for aquatic invasive species management. However, these funds are for aquatic invasive species management all across Canada and for every type of aquatic invasive species, not just invasive mussels. They also stated that the $475,000 in the 2022-23 fiscal year was “an additional one-time investment” and that the province is “fully responsible for decisions on how to direct this funding.”

As a response to the calls to action from many local conservation groups, the DFO announced in February that they will commit $8.75 million to the national Aquatic Invasive Species Prevention Fund over five years and up to $540,000 over three years from 2023 ($180,000 per year) to the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation (HCTF), a conservation-focused provincial nonprofit. But these are not new funds; they are merely re-announcements of previous funding.

Littley says that this amount of funding is insufficient and just another funding opportunity that conservation groups have to apply to. “It would take at least $4 million just to get back to where we were in 2019, just for invasive mussels defence,” says Littley. “So for the feds to come to the table with $180,000 is just a pittance compared to what’s needed.”

Further, this funding is intended for lake monitoring through water sampling in the province to check if invasive mussels are detected—it won’t help to prevent the mussels from entering the province in the first place. The monitoring efforts are done partly by the province through the IMDP as well as local conservation groups like the Columbia Shuswap Invasive Species Society (CSISS), a non-profit that prevents the spread of aquatic invasive species in the Columbia Shuswap region. The society has been doing monitoring work for almost a decade, reporting their findings to the province’s defence program, and also educating the public about the risks of invasive species.

According to Robyn Hooper, executive director of the CSISS, a focus on monitoring alone is not good enough. “When it comes to invasive mussels, yes, we can do monitoring, but that’s kind of a later step. Really, the most important facet of this is inspecting boats before they come into the province,” she says, adding that that’s where funding is needed most. “All it takes,” she says, “is one watercraft.”

B.C. is still an invasive mussels-free province, and it’s not too late to save the freshwater bodies and the species who live there. But in order for that to happen, different levels of government and local conservation groups need to coordinate to work efficiently at prevention. And the DFO needs to provide consistent and sufficient funding to the province’s defence program, which is its main preventative tool.

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Not everyone is relying on the government to come up with solutions in its own time. Alongside CSISS’s efforts, conservation groups like the OBWB have been advocating to senior levels of government to address gaps in invasive mussel prevention in B.C for over 10 years. They also run public outreach campaigns to educate the public on the risks.

Still, there is a gap in public understanding of the real threat of invasive mussels, and the threat is bigger than many of us realize. Unfortunately, Anna Warwick Sears, executive director at the OBWB, says that communication with the feds has been mostly one-sided. “It feels like they’ve completely given up on Western Canada,” she says, adding that she feels there’s a level of magical thinking in the federal government, and perhaps they think invasive mussels will simply decide not to visit the region.

“It’s a national issue,” says Hooper. “We have invasive mussels in the East and they’re spreading West, and so it’s not all about B.C. and protecting our water bodies. It’s the work of Canada to prevent the spread.”

The threat of invasive species can often be easily overlooked, especially when it’s a problem that’s not quite visible. But we need to understand their pervasive impact. Their presence means environmental devastation, huge economic costs, and underlying social impacts to recreation and tourism.

Though Canada is a large country, its lakes, rivers, and freshwater bodies are all connected. Their health is vital for the well-being of the surrounding ecosystems, and for life itself. As cases of invasive species and aquatic diseases are popping up across the country, there is a real need for well-funded prevention programs that can detect a potential threat and push it out before it wreaks havoc.

Our water depends on it.

Photo by Jonathan Kemper

Kevin Sidlar’s garden has been a refuge for the past two decades, if not quite a major source of sustenance. For much of his adult life, he’s grown annual flowers, peas, and tomatoes in his backyard.

In the early days of 2020, something shifted within Sidlar. He felt nervous about disease and the security of our food systems. Surveying his abilities to meet his own basic needs in a suddenly uncertain future, the Thunder Bay resident decided to get serious about growing his own food.

Sidlar was sure that increasing his self-sufficiency would settle his nerves about what he felt could be an impending societal collapse, and spending more time with the earth would improve his mental health in the short term. He grew up on a farm that had been in his family for 100 years, and he’d absorbed the rhythms and methods surrounding him. “Gardening teaches me responsibility. Also, I’ve got more fresh food in the house, that leaves me less reliant on the grocery store and frozen foods,” he says. An application developer for the region’s major phone and internet company by day, Sidlar delves deep into one or two hobbies at a time. In his 40s, his major avocations have included foraging for wild mushrooms, sailing, and drumming with a local band. Translating that energy to food production made sense.

For one thing, grocery stores didn’t carry some of Sidlar’s childhood favourites, like kohlrabi, perhaps because it’s impossible to machine harvest large quantities. Also, shade from nearby apartment buildings and trees limits the kinds of crops viable in population-dense urban areas, and Sidlar wanted to diversify the crops he was able to grow. He found a Facebook post advertising affordable rental garden plots located a few minutes’ drive from his home, just within city limits.

Adventure 38 was Jay Tarabocchia’s response to the growing needs of his urban neighbours. He and his father were only able to use a small portion of the 38 acres they lived on, and Tarabocchia had seen how much joy and contentment gardening had brought his father in his senior years. Having moved back to Thunder Bay from Ottawa to care for his dad in the family home of 50 years, Tarabocchia extended use of the land to would-be gardeners who lacked the space. “I thought, ‘Why don’t we do some kind of project to keep expanding on the gardening theme, keep him excited for life?’ So I started making more gardens.” It wasn’t long before he thought to share the space with others.

Nutrient-rich soil and unimpeded sunlight offered exciting opportunities at Sidlar’s rental plot—he could finally grow corn after innumerable failed backyard attempts. His first growing season was a learning experience, though, and he took note of how different the conditions were between his lakeside backyard and the farm plot, which is farther inland.

Lake Superior affects the weather in Thunder Bay, which means more moderate temperatures in town. Adventure 38 experiences a shorter, more intense season. The hotter summer days offer greater outputs, provided gardeners are able to time sowings appropriately. Crops requiring higher evening temperatures, like okra, corn, and peppers, do well there. Seed packages offer guidelines, but it’s only through trial and error that farmers learn when to plant which crops, and which plant relationships are mutually beneficial when interplanted. This long-term thinking with considerations for the rhythms of the seasons gives Sidlar a sense of profound satisfaction, and an afternoon spent in the dirt offers a quiet ease that can be hard to attain in late-stage capitalism’s dizzying circus.

The deep disconnect many of us have from food sources has deleterious effects on mental and physical health. Joining a community garden like Tarabocchia’s is one way to stitch our relationships with food, ourselves, and the earth back together.

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When food prices shot up enough that many fully employed people weren’t able to feed themselves or their families, it was time to go back to basics. Whether the unending, oppressive food scarcity is partially or entirely artificial, the only recourse many Canadians have is to seize the means of production.

Almost everyone has felt the mounting pressure from climbing food prices in the last two years. The Bank of Canada has, since 1991, tried to keep inflation to two percent yearly, yet grocery store prices have risen steadily since December 2021. The metric for prices is the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which uses a “basket” of foods most families consider staples to calculate the changing costs of a trip to the grocery store. As of August 2023 it contained hundreds of items spanning different cultural and dietary considerations: avocados, baby food, chicken, dried lentils. In 2022, the CPI for food had its largest year-over-year increase in 41 years at 11.4 percent. The metric for all items went up 6.8 percent, and that year saw an increase in average wages of only five percent. Following a 2022 poll, Statistics Canada estimated that 20 percent of Canadians would need to use a food bank in the next six months.

Primary causes for the jump in food prices include supply chain interruptions with COVID-19 outbreaks and facility closures, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and changing weather. With concurrent increases in housing and energy costs, most people have difficult choices to make. While harnessing solar or geothermal energy may be outside the budget for many, the average Canadian can take steps toward improving their food security.

Once thought of as a quaint hobby primarily enjoyed by retired folks, gardening has taken off and captured the hearts of people across demographics. Due to a surge in first-time home gardeners, stores in Canada’s cities were sold out of many gardening supplies in spring 2020, and similar purchasing frenzies occurred in 2021. As the vast majority of Canadians live in cities and lack the space, soil, and light sufficient to grow much food, community gardening solutions have proliferated to meet our changing needs.

A meta-analysis of community gardens in Canada and five other countries showed a 19 percent increase in use from 2018 through 2019. Following decreased interest at the onset of the pandemic, numbers surged again in 2021 and levelled off in 2022. The city of Edmonton created 350 ad-hoc community garden allotments in 2020, while Victoria reallocated resources at Beacon Hill Park to grow food for distribution, prioritizing socially vulnerable populations. Brampton responded to pandemic gardening needs by distributing gardening materials to home growers, who either consumed the food they grew or donated it to the community.

In Winnipeg, Wolseley Community Gardens (WCG) sprung up in 2021 as a response to some of this increased demand. They offer garden space mostly to those living in multi-family dwellings and apartment buildings. WCG co-chair Jade Raizenne says that they received 47 applications for 20 plots in 2021; 39 in 2022; and 37 in 2023. The group expanded the garden each year, so it now hosts 24 raised beds, a native pollinator garden, and an orchard of fruit trees. “Since we started, everyone I’ve talked to has mentioned how much they love coming here, and how good it is for their mental health. One man who doesn’t rent a plot, but walks through the orchards every day, said it’s often the high point of his day,” Raizenne says. At times of social unrest and anxiety, community gardens are resilient, offering respite and a relatively safe third space in cities.

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As globalization and capitalism accelerate, operators of large farms have found it increasingly challenging to make a living growing food. Rates of suicide among farmers have soared in the past decade, and many young adults coming of age in the aughts were unable to envision a financially feasible future farming. Large farms became more technologically advanced over the past 20 years, with the proliferation of drones, robotics, and sensing technologies. While these advances can drastically increase quantities of food being produced, the ecological costs may not be fully understood.

The opposite is true for less tech-dependent, older methods. Permaculture has been a buzzword for the last two decades, and merits consideration by anyone looking to optimize their land use. It’s a framework that works with the land, rather than imposing changes in an effort to yield species that may not do well in a given region. Colonizers famously brought invasive species with them wherever they went, and despite how charming some of these species can be, like bellflower, they can choke out native plants that offer more to ecosystems. Most invasive plants, though, can be replaced by a native species with a little research.

And in a growing number of gardens, ancient, Indigenous cultivation methods are in use despite settlers’ efforts to supplant them. Three Sisters is commonly practiced among gardeners and the symbiosis of beans, squash, and corn gives each crop advantages they lack when grown individually. Intertwining stalks and varying growth habits makes that triumvirate impossible to machine harvest, so we see how cultivation with respect for innate qualities of plants and the earth they grow in is inextricably linked with slow food practices.

Regardless of what type of food plants are grown where, it is clear that monoculture is the enemy of sustainability. When agents of industry realized that one species of orange and one variety of banana performed best, those varieties were grown on huge farms to the exclusion of all others. Today, the only banana commercially available is the Cavendish seedless, which is a clone. Because every tree on a plantation has the same DNA, if a novel fungus attacks, the entire crop can be wiped out. This already happened with the Cavendish’s predecessor, the Gros Michel, in the 1950s. Without genetic diversity allowing for adaptations to changing pathogens, farmers have had to continually increase pesticide use on bananas. In the past decade, some years saw seasons of near-total losses of navel oranges and russet potatoes. Late-stage capitalism and an unconscious preference for uniformity have brought food production systems to a point where staple crops are needlessly vulnerable in ways that biodiverse farms aren’t.

At community gardens the world over, including Adventure 38, gardeners are constantly learning through trial and error, and by exchanging ideas. There are innumerable choices that farmers make, consciously and not. Whether to use pesticides, fertilizers, and whether to use cost-effective synthetic products versus old-school organics like bone meal and composted manure are just a few of the variables to consider. People are experimenting with and reviving traditions that had almost been forgotten, like hugelkultur. This German practice creates large mounds of decaying logs, offering lower-effort raised beds than the more commonly seen flat rectangles, fabricated with lumber. The sloping sides increase available growing space, and soil quality improves as the wood decomposes. One person whose plot neighbours Sidlar’s uses two-litre plastic bottles, standing upright in small hills. They fill with rainwater, overflow runs downslope, and these reservoirs keep plants happy without having to get out a hose. Not having to irrigate cuts down on labour, allowing the grower to make fewer trips to tend to their farm.

As small farmers return to pre-tractor methods that may decrease yield, they find that some kinds of input become unnecessary. Fertilizer prices skyrocketed following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and ensuing sanctions, as Russia and Belarus are two of the world’s top exporters. But bringing kitchen scraps to a composter, learning more about how to revitalize soil, and narrowing the scope of a farm have allowed hobby farmers and intentional communities to approach self-sufficiency. Sourcing hyperlocal materials such as a neighbour’s livestock manure can decrease dependence on global supply chains while building connections with others.

The idea of gardening was deeply implanted in Sidlar’s family history, but those new to gardening can consult books, radio programs, and community members. For those who are able, gardeners and small farmers are always looking for labour, and trading effort for produce is one way to broaden the reach of community gardens. For folks whose time is consumed by work, community-supported agriculture (CSA) boxes of produce can connect them with local food systems. This gives farmers more money for input at the beginning of the season, and customers get high-quality, local food at an accessible location without having to brave the markets.

It’s more of a challenge, but self-grown food is popular in the city, too. At the Thunder Bay Conservatory, a grassroots organization has put on workshops teaching alternative gardening methods, like straw-bale planting. Not everyone can rent and transport themselves to a garden, or perform the manual labour required. Time, fuel, and physical ability considerations make community gardens inaccessible to many. Planting into the surface of straw bales brings the garden a few feet off the ground, making them accessible to some wheelchair users or folks with physical limitations. Methods like these show that almost everyone can learn how to grow their own food.

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While Canadians may be waiting a long while for agricultural trends to change, on a microscopic level, small farmers and gardeners can steer things in a more sustainable direction. Though quantities will always be smaller than what factory farms provide, the benefits to small-crop growth are immeasurable. Paying close attention to the relationships between plants and weather facilitates an attunement with natural rhythms. And being emotionally invested in food production prevents waste. “If I put my sweat into a tomato, I’m eating it before it goes bad,” Sidlar says.

CSA kohlrabi in Thunder Bay may cost more than the cheapest alternatives at big box stores. But it has more intact enzymes, a lower carbon cost, and promotes a future of resilient, biodiverse small-scale agriculture that won’t accelerate climate catastrophe or exploit disadvantaged farm labourers elsewhere. It’s probably a lot tastier, too.

Photo by Mooneydriver

In the middle of the 2023 fire season, A Critical Incident Stress Management counsellor came to our fire base. The season had been unprecedentedly busy, even with wildfires ramping up in recent years, and my crew in southern British Columbia had racked up more than 70 days on the fireline with no sign of it slowing down.

The counsellor’s visit was proactive. During a previous record-breaking year, I had witnessed the accumulating fatigue that led us to turn on one another. Pushed to our limits through months on end with little sleep, the social structure of the crew fractured, and infighting became common. But this year, my crew supervisor wanted to get ahead of the turmoil.

All 20 of us sit in a circle, and one by one we begin to air our grievances. One crew member speaks up. “I go home, and I just can’t listen to anyone. They tell me stories or things about their life and I just don’t care. I can’t help but trivialize everything they’re going through.” The rest of us nod our heads in agreement.

“I was at MEC and I just kept having power fantasies about beating the cashier to a pulp,” another crew member says. I feel a twinge of guilt. I’ve had similar intrusive thoughts, but I would have a hard time admitting it to a group.

“I don’t feel close to anyone in my life anymore,” I say when it’s my turn to speak. “I feel that all my friends, my family, are drifting away and I can’t stop it.” More nodding heads.

A second-year crew member raises his hand. “I just… I… miss my son.” He can’t say anything else. Tears come instead.

The counsellor speaks. “Listen, you guys are all living up here.” He raises his arm way above his head, and his wrist makes a shaky gesture. He’s referring to weeks with little sleep, the constant high-pressure thinking: contain the fire, avoid death. He’s referring to being away from our loved ones, to several months of moving from one objective to the next without any thought for ourselves or others. He’s referring to 19-year-old Devyn Gale, who died on the fireline near Revelstoke, B.C. just a few weeks before his visit. Again, we nod. I guess the counsellor is right—our normal is somewhere in the region around three feet above our heads.

“Now, when you leave the fireline and spend time at home, everyone else is down here.” His arm lowers to waist height. “Of course, being home is going to feel bad, it’s now an abnormal place for all of you.” The conclusion: being on the fireline is easy now. We have been in it long enough to adapt. It’s leaving it that’s hard.

The group counselling session helped us to recognize each other as members of a common struggle, reminding us to get through it together. However, as seasonal workers, we are laid off in October. Away from the support of our crewmates, in an environment that lives at waist height.

After a few weeks, some recover. They sleep long hours, rekindle relationships with their partners. Bodies worn out, the winter is spent recuperating. They travel, ski, and read. Some return from a chaotic summer and continue working or studying just as they had before. They do arborist work, massage therapy diplomas, forestry degrees. Life goes on.

Others do not fare so well. For many, off-season is a cruel time. It is lonely; the close ties with crewmates are severed. It is inexplicable; family and friends have a hard time understanding what we’ve been through. It is exhausting; previous months of herding fires and digging guards take a toll on the body. In an effort to reclaim, some spend their entire savings on gambling and compulsive drinking. However, usually the suffering is secret, silent. It lives under layers of despair, rotting in the decrepitude of hopelessness and isolation.

This was my fourth year on the job, and despite the struggle, I love it. I have worked in grease-stained industrial kitchens and on the icy ski slopes of New England; but to me, nothing compares to being a wildfire fighter. Nowhere else have I felt the camaraderie of carrying a fire hose with my squadmates until our legs give out, the meditative bliss of chainsaw bucking, or the satisfaction of successfully establishing a fire guard around a community. The job is challenging, thrilling, and communal, all in the astounding desolation of the Canadian wilderness.

After this season ended, I came to expect detachment and lingering fatigue. But this time something was different. Food tasteless, television and books uninteresting. I stumbled to my family doctor. The diagnosis: major depression.

It is one thing to be in such a sorry state for the five-month off-season. It is another to think that some of these burnt-out, emotionally comatose workers will return year after year without question. We are leaving. Across Canada, there are high rates of turnover and a chronic lack of retention.

One solution would be to improve mental health support during the off-season. For example, year-round access to insured therapy would be helpful. However, this would be a band-aid solution to an issue that stems from being overworked in the summer months, an issue that ultimately comes from working under an old model that is in need of revision.

The demands of the job have grown. Wildfire seasons have become more strenuous and crews are spending more days on deployment. As the nature of the job changes, the job itself must adapt to the growing destruction. Treating recovery during the season as a part of the job could be a good step. Earning paid time off after successive deployments would incentivize recovery instead of it being a financial cost to workers. And, at least in my home province of B.C., the ministry is adapting. Deployment length and rest periods have become more flexible. Pay has increased a bit. Washing ash and soot off our bodies is now considered on-the-clock work time. Gradually, things seem to be improving, one motion, one addendum at a time.

There is still more to be done. Depression should not be common among the workforce and burnout should not be an inevitable reality of the job. It may take more union clamouring and scheduling adjustments to make the job more sustainable.

It is unfortunate that my co-workers and I became wildfire fighters at a time when summers became more vicious, when the regulations of the job lagged behind the demands. That we are the ones caught in the gears of an intensity shift. I hope that those of us who are burnt-out, depressed, and isolated are catalysts for a change ahead, and not a sign of what’s to come.

As a marine biologist I see how the average person’s eyes glaze over when they are confronted with sobering facts and figures. I get it. It can seem so abstract, particularly when you live in an urban centre. I believe people are most inspired to take action when they love blue spaces. As climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe writes in her book Saving Us: “We need to bring our hearts to the table, not just our heads.”

Before industrial times, First Peoples and settlers had deep connections to the global ocean. Ordinary people kept track of the tides, weather, and seasons, because those dictated when you could travel downriver by canoe or cross a bay on sea ice. Water also provided food. The availability of fish, shellfish, marine mammals and seabirds was determined by migration patterns, mating seasons, and the health of marine life, so you can be sure people were paying attention.

But as fishing technology advanced, intense commercial fisheries developed, leading to the depletion of marine life.And our deep and expansive blue spaces were exploited as places to hide things that are unsightly and unwanted on the land. Once garbage and waste have been dumped into the ocean, chemicals dissipate, debris sinks, and entire ecosystems lose the ability to thrive. It all happens out of sight and out of mind.

Water is present in some form, wherever you are in the world. Fresh water is connected through surface rivers and tributaries, underground in the permafrost and in the water table flowing towards the ocean. Its journey doesn’t end there; it circulates through powerful currents, all over the planet, evaporating at the surface once it reaches the equator. Leaving the heavy salt behind, water then dances in the atmosphere with the clouds and wind, coming back to earth eventually as snow, sleet, rain, or fog. It seeps through the soil nourishing our plants, flowing over rocks and picking up minerals before beginning the cycle once more.Water is a beautiful thing, so how do we reconnect with it?

Start small, by getting familiar with a single blue space. Take the time to sit near water, say at an urban stream, then watch it move, and notice the life within and around it. Let this become part of your routine, just like doing groceries or watching your favourite TV show.

My retired father spends lots of time by the sea. He notices when there are whales around, when the capelin are rolling, and if a shell becomes more abundant. He asks me to explain what’s happening biologically, because the more he observes, the more he cares.

Pay attention and you will notice when things start falling out of balance. Then you might find yourself picking up that bit of garbage on the riverbank. If you notice that the source of the garbage is a municipal garbage bin that needs more frequent emptying, you may call the town council. Small individual actions to prevent waste from entering the ecosystem of that blue space, are tangible and come quite naturally as you build a relationship with water bodies.

Keep focusing on how you can make changes in keeping with your growing care for our water systems. That might look like consuming less and responsibly: choosing shampoo bars over liquid shampoo in a bottle or using a refillable water bottle or silicone food saver bag, to reduce plastic waste.

As former U.S. First Lady and environmentalist Lady Bird Johnson noted in 1967, “The environment is where we all meet, where we all have a mutual interest; it is the one thing all of us share. It is not only a mirror of ourselves, but a focusing lens on what we can become.”

The next step is take your newfound love of water public. Our actions can inspire others to consume with the global ocean in mind. Sharing responsible companies’ posts on social media works, as does old-fashioned conversation. I use a natural clay deodorant that comes in a glass pot that the company invites consumers to return so they can reuse them. It smells great, so when people ask me about it I tell them about the brand and their environmental programs.

Working with fishers and undergraduate students on conservation projects, I drop it into conversation that I never go in the field without picking up marine debris. Small acts of love for the ocean can be contagious. Once on a field trip with a fisher we did an impromptu inventory of the debris along the shoreline: tangled nets, plastic gasoline jugs, beer cans … and so the list goes on. We found plastic lobster tags discarded 20 years ago and still intact, as if they’d been tossed overboard just yesterday. The fisher couldn’t believe this tangible example of how plastic doesn’t biodegrade and how litter just accumulates, slowly leaching its chemicals and eventually micro and nano plastics. He vowed not to contribute to this garbage problem.

Another way to show your love: participate in a community science program that recruits and trains the public to help collect data that feeds scientific research programs. If there isn’t one in your area there are lots of online apps and platforms that individuals or groups can contribute to; organizations such as eOceans, and the Marine Debris Tracker app can point you towards community-based science projects. The data you collect will be used to help advise governments who have the power to make decisions around blue spaces and their resources.

To continually renew your sense of wonder, you could join a snorkelling or cold-plunge group, or learn to surf. You’ll soon find you’ve signed up for more than just a hobby. For example, it should come as no surprise that surfers are among the most passionate and active ocean activists out there: Coral Gardeners was started by a 16-year-old French-Polynesian surfer to restore reef communities all over the world; Surf Riders lobbied for a plastic-bag ban and blocked offshore drilling in California; and Surfers Against Sewage has cleaned up coastlines all around the UK. You’re in a serious relationship with the global ocean now, so join forces with like-minded water lovers!

Last thing: as you physically get into the water, let it hold you up, let it move you with its waves. Feel its temperature. Feel its wildness. Then thank it for making our planet habitable and being so easy to love. In the words of American marine biologist Sylvia Earle:

“Stick your face in the blue heart of the planet.”

Photo by North Island College

Seaweed, a traditional food for many coastal First Nations in B.C., is experiencing a renaissance, thanks to its untapped carbon sequestration potential. In recent years, multiple First Nations have partnered with private companies like Cascadia Seaweed to lead this growing industry. But unlike other coastal First Nations in B.C., the Kwiakah First Nation—a small band of 21 registered members located near Phillips Arm and Frederick Arm—has not signed production agreements with seaweed companies. That’s because conserving kelp forests, instead of making a profit from farming them, is the main factor driving the Kwiakah members’ work.

“I don’t think, if we don’t do the kelp thing right … that our coast can survive another industrial onslaught,” cautions the band’s administrator and economic development officer, Frank Voelker, describing decades of gold mining, logging, and fish farming.

The Kwiakah Nation is unique in that it does not receive as much federal funding as some other nations since it does not have a residential reservation, Voelker explains. “Over the decades, the band members just adjusted to that and became self-reliant,” he says, adding that the nation turned a “huge disadvantage” into a positive.

As a result, not only are the Kwiakah in a stronger position to say no to companies that promise jobs at the expense of the environment, but they can learn how to become better kelp farmers through smaller-scale initiatives, rather than jumping headfirst into uncertain new ventures under the pressure to generate jobs.

RESISTING PRESSURES TO SCALE UP

The Kwiakah are currently repurposing an old fish farm into a kelp farm—including establishing pre-processing facilities, where kelp would be dried before transport—and a research centre.

Despite having a good research relationship with industrial actor Cascadia Seaweed, the Kwiakah Nation has not rushed to sign any production agreements; its traditional territory in the Phillips and Frederick Arm region has long experienced serious, irreparable environmental damage from B.C.’s extraction industry.

As mentioned, one reason kelp farming has been of great interest in B.C. in recent years is due to the ability of kelp forests to sequester and store carbon. The carbon stored in coastal ecosystems is called “blue carbon” and is often touted as a way to mitigate the impacts of climate change.

But because of the Earth’s changing climate and rising ocean temperatures, carbon-sequestering species like kelp are dwindling in number without human intervention.

Given the potential of blue carbon, communities might be tempted to grow kelp in many B.C. inlets, but undertaking any such activity on a large scale has to be approached with caution, Voelker says.

This is why the Kwiakah are working closely with sister tribes within the Laich-Kwil-Tach First Nation and speaking with elders to understand traditional methods of cultivation, including learning how much kelp has historically grown in the region and working to match those quantities, not exceed them.

KELP CULTIVATION VS. KELP FARMING

Kelp farming isn’t the only way to reap the environmental benefits of kelp and generate income.

One promising solution is for the Kwiakah to participate in seaweed cultivation for its own sake, which will enrich the marine ecosystem and absorb carbon dioxide, and for which the community can be compensated through a carbon scheme.

“That would be my dream scenario,” Voelker muses, “purely carbon sequestration and [the community] getting paid for it.”

As I open the bag of mycelium, a pleasant creamy smell wafts through the air. I break off a piece and feel the smooth pores between my fingers. It’s like grazing the soft hand of a long-lost grandparent.

Around 1.1 billion years ago, the animal and fungi kingdoms split from plants and continued evolving together. Only later did animals and fungi separate on the genealogical tree of life, making fungi more closely related to humans than plants. Fast forward a few hundred million years to me, sitting in my garden-suite kitchen across from a bucket of oyster mushroom mycelium.

Mycelium is the root-like structure of a mushroom, a white thread-like mass made up of tiny branches called hyphae. It lives underground or on surfaces such as rotting trees, spreading metres or even kilometres to transfer nutrients, break down dead plants, and connect with other fungi. Mushrooms—the fruits of healthy mycelial networks—sprout when the conditions are just right.

After seeing the red and white toadstools in front of my apartment last autumn, I was enthralled. What started out as a fascination with mushrooms, quickly turned into a full-blown obsession with mycelium. When I learned about mycoremediation—the use of mycelium to rehabilitate polluted ecosystems—I was in awe. The more I read about its potential, and the science of biomimicry, the more I was certain that fungi had something to teach me.

I stare at the white stringy mass that is my fungal relative, longing to know it. To understand it. In the same way I longed to understand the culture my parents came from, the city I was born in, and the place my cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles still live—a sad derivative of a country that no longer exists.

Yugoslavia was a socialist federation of six republics and two autonomous provinces, made up of various ethnic groups that coexisted in a single state from the end of World War II until its breakup in the nineties. My parents are of different ethnic groups, and while that was not uncommon in Yugoslavia, it became undesirable when the country was falling apart. Ethnonationalism made it so that you had to choose sides. In Serbia, the country where a malignant dictator was waging carnage in neighbouring Bosnia and Croatia at the time, it was suffocating for ethnic Croats, Bosniaks, Albanians, and other minority groups in the country. It’s a big part of why we left.

As previous conflicts in the Balkans have prompted mass emigration, so did this one. In the last decade of the 20th century, over 100,000 people from the former Yugoslavia came to Canada, including my family.

Being from the geographic battleground of empires for centuries has taken a toll on the collective psyche of Balkan people. And our quests for self-determination haven’t always been smooth sailing either—the carving up of nation-states in the breakup of Yugoslavia thirty years ago being only our most recent collective catastrophe. Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hemon describes the cultural phenomenon of katastrofa or catastrophe, whereby the story of a family is the story of the bad that happened to it. If the epigenetic consequences of trauma are what scientists think they are, Hemon says, “katastrofa is inscribed in our cells.”

Of course, this was the big katastrofa for my family. Or at least what I pieced together from my parents’ stories over the years. Painful ones about the loss and betrayal of longtime friends, some family, and a society they helped build. Getting them to share these stories was like pulling teeth. Silence, fragmented memories, and non-answers were more readily available.

My parents were always adamant that nationalism and deteriorating social conditions were the reasons why we left, carefully making sure not to position themselves as victims. This was also the reason why joining a diaspora community was out of the question. In Canada, each ethnic group formed their own enclaves, based around places of worship usually. Nationalist narratives, especially among immigrant and refugee Serb and Croat groups, were commonplace, and to my parents, virulent.

These often revisionist narratives meant my identity as a first-generation person of mixed Yugoslav background fit nowhere, and was seldom understood.

Lots of people grow up in immigrant families where questions of identity are complicated. But to be from the former Yugoslavia, to be Balkan, is to not have a firm grasp on where to even begin in making sense of who you are. And alienation from the very people that can help you do it. It comes with an inherent fragmentation of identity, with various intersections, complexities, and trauma in the mix.

As I stuff my bucket with a mixture of damp wood chips and mycelium, I imagine it as a sentient being that can hear me: “Have you also inherited the trauma of your ancestors?” I ask. “The trauma of a changing climate? The trauma of fearing being eaten by rodents all the time? What would our common single-cell primogenitor make of our respective destinies?”

I first discovered biomimicry in adrienne maree brown’s writings on mycelium in her book, Emergent Strategy. To become a functional fruiting body, mycelium has to expand and connect with other fungal and root networks. It does this through individual cells called hyphae. brown draws on mycelial hyphae as inspiration for a social-justice framework based on the idea that effecting societal change requires establishing a select few meaningful connections, rather than fostering a critical mass.

I think back to a small gathering a few weeks back, when I met with a group of new friends I’d made, all Balkan diaspora women who were independently working through issues of identity using art, research, and film.

I stop stuffing the bucket for a second. As the mycelium grows, it seeks out compatible hyphae in a process called homing, maintaining nutrient pathways to grow and spread across forests.

It occurs to me that these women and I were forming a kind of human mycelial network. No wonder I had such trouble with working out my own questions of identity—I had been doing it alone. Cultural identity is formed by communities, not by one individual. What if each of us expanding our own understanding, filling in the gaps, and healing wounds, could create something better?

When you grow mushrooms, you have to do it in a sterile environment that mimics the humidity, air flow, and temperature of the ideal outdoor conditions. Some mushrooms like it hot, some like it cold, most like it humid.

To best simulate and control this, DIY mycelium experts recommend drilling holes in a bucket, and stuffing it with mycelium and woodchips. This provides something for the mycelium to eat and makes it easy to harvest the mushrooms once they grow. After I close the lid on the bucket, I shove it into the broom closet, excited at the thought of the pink coral bunches that will soon flourish.

I already had fungi on my mind while sipping homemade brandy on that particularly damp February evening when I met Ljudmila Petrovic and Iva Jankovic at Sara Graorac’s house. We’d all been sitting in her retro living room, flipping through books on traditional woven rug patterns and swapping stories.

Iva is passionate about empowering local communities through co-ops, helping people access economies of scale. She and I share this very specific feeling, a longing to not only connect with the place that shaped us from afar, but also to fix some of its problems.

For a while, she’s been trying to connect her work in Canada with the Balkans, to see if new cooperative models can help change the depressing realities of post-socialist privatization, unemployment, and brain drain in the region. She has also made podcasts, art, and films about Serbian society and diaspora connections. She told me once that she felt the need to piece together the fragments of history. To close the loop.

While Iva enthusiastically tells us about her attempts to connect musically to the Balkans by learning to play the accordion, my gaze falls to the person who introduced all of us in the first place, Ljudmila.

In order for the mycelium to grow, individual hyphae must undergo fusion. Merlin Sheldrake, ecologist and author, defines this process as homing and the connection as “the linking stitch.” It’s the essence of any mycelium. Ljudmila is like our linking stitch. She connected each of us in a homing of her own, inaugurating us into the group chat that now serves as our main site of communion.

I met Ljudmila last fall when I was reporting on nationalism in the Balkans. Her Master’s thesis was a pioneering study on how multigenerational trauma in the Balkan diaspora fragments identity among millennial women and on the power of narrative in healing those wounds. When we first met over beers at a local Vancouver watering hole, I studied her across the table as she spoke with such conviction about things I had, until then, relegated to the realm of internal musings. We bonded over the quirks of our grandparents and how no one got our names right on the first try. And of course, inat, or the Balkan cultural phenomenon loosely translated into English as spite.

Reading her thesis was confronting. It was as though someone was revealing secrets about my life to me. For the first time, I saw data on how trauma affects immigrant parent-child relationships in my cultural context and the role silence plays in fragmenting identity. I then realized that my career motivations as a journalist were prompted by the desire to create better narratives, more honest ones, borne of resilience and with the ultimate goal of something better coming out the other side.

Ljudmila spends her time helping others heal trauma through therapy. It’s easy for me to imagine her as a guide for the wounded: her care is evident and so is her steadfast nature. She has dedicated her life to the mental-health profession despite naysayers in her family and a cultural stigma around the field. That’s inat in action. A similar embodied resilience strengthens mycelium as it battles something that is almost guaranteed as it grows: contamination.

About a week into my DIY mycological adventure, I notice something green forming on the mycelium. I am confronted by the bane of every mushroom cultivator’s existence: mold.

I panic. Google. Inspect the bucket closely. I wrack my brain over what I might have done wrong: was the water not hot enough when I sterilised the wood chips? Was the bucket too damp?

Luckily, after a frantic phone call with the guy who sold me the mycelium, who assured me that oyster mushrooms are resilient and would filter out contaminants, I feel some relief in knowing what has to be done. I scrape off some of the green fuzz and pop the bucket back into the supply closet.

Then I get sick.

I get so sick that I head straight to the urgent-care centre. By then, I feel steel wool in my throat. Tired, feverish, and dead certain I have a fungal throat infection, I wait for the doctor, feeling defeated. I think about how stupid it was to put my face so close to the mold. Wonder why I tolerated contaminated fungi in the first place. Why did I not think to put on a mask? Sitting in the cold examination room wearing nothing but a polyester hospital gown, I wait for a throat swab.

I was already feeling sick before visiting Sara. She had hosted our gathering of minds the previous month, before I embarked on my mycological adventure. As I walked up the front steps of Sara’s house—one of those beautiful old Vancouver houses with wood siding—I was excited.

Some of Sara’s art deals with Balkan plant medicine. As we stood in her kitchen, she showed me small vials filled with the distilled oil of a common Balkan folk remedy, kantarion, or St. John’s Wort. Lining the shelves above us were large Dali-esque glass bottles holding herbs, homemade brandy, and other oils used in traditional healing.

As I sat in her beautifully decorated living room, surrounded by colourful rugs and books on Yugoslav folklore, I expected Sara to tell me, with all the hubris of an artist, about the power of art in reshaping identity.

Instead, I was met with a quiet intimacy. Her practice is very personal and private, she said. It was important for her to rediscover specifically Balkan folk remedies and use them in a process of healing not just herself, but others too.

“I feel called to it,” she’d said simply, when we asked her why.

All of us have experienced this calling in some form. Sometimes it’s a faint whisper, and at other times it’s as clear as day and impossible to ignore. Navigating the complexities of being in the Balkan diaspora can be exhausting. It makes sense that most people would relegate these nuances to the back seat of who they are and simply assimilate into the dominant culture. After all, the road to assimilation for us is shorter than for other immigrants. Most of us are white-skinned, so shedding the Other within us, our peripheral East-meets-West collectivist culture, foreign unpronounceable names, and distinct position in the history of European conquest can seem like a good deal in exchange for privilege. But it isn’t. For the empaths among us, it may seem like the struggles of more marginalized groups should be where we focus our efforts. But the truth is, if we want to help others we must first heal ourselves.

After a few days of rest, and no call from the laboratory, I recover from what was likely the common cold.

But just to be sure, I exile my mycelium to the back yard, not wanting it in the house out of fear that the mold could become airborne and poison me. As the unpredictable Vancouver spring temperatures hover around zero, I worry that the mycelium might die. The thought of that is too gut wrenchingly sad to ignore.

So, I lug the bucket back into the house, grumbling, wrap it in a plastic bag and put it back in the storage closet. It doesn’t even cross my mind that the mycelium might have a fighting chance. That it could still fruit in the right conditions, if given the time.

One friend who hadn’t made it to the dinner was Dora Cepic. Her work intrigued me the most because her motivations seemed similar to my own. Our media were different, so I went to her studio to get a sense of what creating a new narrative through art entailed.

As Dora sat across from me I couldn’t help but notice the tools poking out of the stacked bins behind her. The aesthetic chaos of an art studio seemed to exist in contrast to the artist herself. Dora, refined and stylish, looked at me inquisitively. Her beige silk blouse illuminated the golden streaks in her hair, giving her a divine glow as the afternoon sun spilled in through the window. She told me about her stop-motion film—a “moving collage” of a female figure wrangling a vessel that keeps escaping her.

In constructing these tiny sculptures and doilies, Dora draws on memories, dreams, and stories rooted in her family’s Balkan background. These micro props form delicate mise-en-scenes that depict the protagonist, half-ghost, half-woman, trying to collect the knowledge that floats away in perpetuity.

“I’m very deliberately trying to construct an identity and sense of space in my own diasporic way,” she said.

Dora likened the process of making this film to searching for a sense of self in a country that feels foreign to her even though she grew up in it. The painful irony, Dora said, is that when she’s in the Balkans, she is very much “the Canadian.” This is the uncomfortable in-between; the hyphenated existence that I imagine most immigrants live. The late Bosnian-Norwegian writer Bekim Sejranovic defined the Balkan version of this existence in one of his books, an epic about fleeing a small town in a country that no longer exists in search of a home that never quite fits; from nowhere to nowhere.

It is that intangible nowhere that formed all five of us, and the place we are all trying to make sense of by making art, forming economic partnerships, doing research, and growing mushrooms.

Fungi have survived all five major extinction events on earth. Despite devastating species loss, they are resilient to calamity and some even flourish in it. In the aftermath of Hiroshima, the first thing reported to grow was a matsutake mushroom and edible morels grow in forests scorched by wildfires in the Pacific Northwest. Fungi are incredibly good at sucking up nutrients where there seemingly are none. Mushrooms can even grow on old diapers and cigarette butts, and now, scientists are using mycelium to clean up oil spills in the Amazon. This type of mycoremediation takes biomimicry to another level: utilizing fungi to clean up the world.

I like to believe our Balkan mycelial network is part of this grand experiment—we can look to the fungal world to solve the modern problems created by humans. In our case, we’re forging honest narratives about what it means to be in the diaspora. Confronting the nationalism and xenophobia that got us here. Filtering out centuries of hate and intolerance through connection. Nourishing one another with ideas. Decontaminating.

I come home from work one afternoon, emotionally spent and questioning if any of my crazy mycelial ideas have any real meaning. Lying on the couch, staring into space, I realize I haven’t checked on the mycelium since I dragged it out of the cold almost a week prior. I saunter over to the kitchen, where the black garbage bag sits, and I begin to untie it. I feel bumps on the sides of the bucket.

My eyes well with tears as I pull off the bag. Bright pink clusters of fused hyphae greet me, poking through almost every hole. Despite the mold, the mycelium had healed itself enough to finally begin fruiting.

Every Canadian knows the caribou. The animal can be found on the back of the quarter, millions of which are circulated every year. Yet, the iconic species is on the brink of extinction, and, according to ecologists and activists, not much is being done to stop that.

Across Canada, caribou are declining as a result of forestry, oil and gas activities, mining, and road-building. And it’s not just the caribou that we’re losing. Because they have such specific habitat conditions, woodland caribou are considered an “umbrella species,” which means their well-being provides important insight into the well-being of their environment. Protecting the caribou means protecting the habitat of other species, and their health is therefore an indicator for the health of their forests as a whole.

While the species’ numbers have been dwindling throughout the country, the debate surrounding the caribou has been growing increasingly heated in Quebec. Over the last few months, the declining situation of caribou in the province has resulted in growing backlash against a lack of action, criticism of industry lobbies, and lawsuits against the provincial government. On December 9, 2021, the Ministère des Forêts, de la Faune et des Parcs (MFFP) released its latest inventory numbers for herds in the Gaspésie, Manicouagan, and Charlevoix regions of Quebec. At the time of the report, there were only 17 forest caribou left in Charlevoix, only one of which was a fawn. Just 14 years ago, that number was over 80. And in Gaspésie, where the last native herd in southern Quebec is found, only 32 to 36 mountain caribou remain. Both forest and mountain caribou are subtypes of woodland caribou, the only type of caribou found in Quebec.

Caribou need old-growth forests to survive. Human development, especially forestry activity such as commercial logging, has fractured and destroyed much of its habitat. In Charlevoix, for example, as much as 89 percent of the caribou’s habitat has been disturbed. These younger forests attract moose that eat new plant growth, which, in turn, brings in predators such as wolves. While the moose is a wolf’s natural prey, a caribou is an easier catch. This is further facilitated by the creation of logging roads and hiking trails, which allow predators to move more freely across the caribou’s habitat.

“The scientific community agrees that, ultimately, the cause of the decline of the majority of the forest and woodland caribou populations is the management of our forests,” explains Marianne Caouette, project manager of Protected Areas and Biodiversity at Nature Québec. “It’s really the harvesting of wood that removes old growth from the forests and will create environments that are favourable to predators, such as wolves or coyotes.”

After delaying the unveiling of its strategy against the decline of the woodland caribou in 2019, François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government once again pushed the plan’s release date from 2021 to 2023, and in the meantime created an independent commission. The MFFP stated in a press release that the commission will be headed by Nancy Gélinas, dean of the faculty of forestry, geography, and geomatics at Université Laval and a researcher in forest economics, rather than any ecologists or conservation experts.

In a press conference held on March 17, 2022, Gélinas stated that the goal of the commission is not to look at the reasons of the caribou’s decline, but “to add the layer of socio-economic impacts.” She says she believes that Quebec must make a choice that considers the protection of the caribou and the consequences that such protection would have on the regions outside of metropolitan areas, the industry, and the treasury.

Marie-Hélène Ouellet D’Amours, an environmental and sustainable development advisor for the Conseil régional de l’environnement du Bas-Saint-Laurent (CREBSL), considers the questions that comprise the independent commission’s consultation biased toward minimizing economic impacts. Currently, she believes, the ministry considers the environment, society, and the economy as separate entities that talk to each other. “The realistic way of looking at it would be to see the environment as supporting society and the economy,” she says. “There is a kind of conceptualization of things that is different from a real understanding of sustainable development, and I think that’s where the problem is.”

In the meantime, the government is capturing and confining both the Charlevoix and Gaspésie herds, a relatively new practice in Quebec. The capture of the Charlevoix herd has already been completed, and its members will be held in captivity indefinitely, making it the second herd in Quebec after that of Val d’Or to be held in captivity, which has been enclosed since 2020. The capture of the Gaspésie herd has been postponed to next year, but the plan involves enclosing its pregnant females and releasing them a few months after they have given birth to their fawns. Predators who approach the animals can be trapped and killed.

According to the ministry, the enclosure is a temporary solution that needs to be implemented to stop the decline of these isolated populations until the government’s caribou strategy is adopted in 2023. Many environmentalists, however, argue that the government is merely buying time. “It’s like putting them on life support,” says Caouette.

Ouellet D’Amours believes that culling predators and caribou enclosures would not have been necessary if the government had acted earlier. “It’s a measure that is being taken to make up for decades of inaction.” And it’s not without risk. When caribou are put in enclosures, explains Steeve Côté, a professor of biology and ecologist at the Université Laval, they don’t learn how to survive in the wild. Côté says animals born in these facilities won’t be used to finding proper habitat for themselves. They’ll also be naive toward predators, he adds, as they won’t have encountered any while in captivity. Côté explains that predator control and enclosures will only be effective if the caribou’s habitat is protected and restored while they’re in pens. Otherwise, they’ll simply be re-entering a dangerous environment that is still conducive to predators.

For Louis Lesage, Director of the office of Nionwentsïo of the Huron-Wendat Nation in Wendake, Quebec, the decision is emblematic of the government’s lack of consultation with Indigenous communities regarding caribou protection. “The government, without consulting us, without asking for our opinion, pulled this solution out of a magic hat and unilaterally put our caribou in pens,” says Lesage. The office has been collaborating with the MFFP for the last seven years on re-establishing the local caribou population, but it hasn’t always been easy.

Indigenous communities across Turtle Island have strong ties to the caribou. In Wendake, before their populations began dwindling, caribou were used for food, clothing, and artisanal production. “Caribou were essential to Huron-Wendat arts and culture,” says Lesage. Their leather, for instance, was used to make coats, and their hooves were used to create wall pockets, a speciality of the Huron-Wendat that involved decorating the hoof and using it as a support for different objects.

Yet Indigenous Peoples have largely been left out of the conservation process. In an opinion piece in the Narwhal, Adrienne Jérôme, Chief of the Lac Simon First Nation, and Christy Ferguson, executive director of Greenpeace Canada, criticize the provincial government’s response: “Not only the lack of action for caribou recovery, but the lack of real dialogue or meaningful efforts to listen to Indigenous perspectives is in itself a form of environmental racism. Through the inaction and inertia of the Government of Quebec, the ancestral rights of Indigenous Peoples have been and are still widely violated.”

Some Innu communities have also begun taking legal action against the Quebec government, stating that the government has failed to adequately consult with Indigenous Peoples regarding caribou protection. The Essipit and Mashteuiatsh First Nations filed a motion with the Quebec Superior Court on February 24, 2022, writing in a statement that they “demand respect for [their] Aboriginal rights and immediate measures to protect the caribou and its habitat, based on Innu and scientific knowledge.” The following week, the Canadian Press reported that Innu Council of Pessamit’s Chief, Jean-Marie Vollant, said that he’s willing to follow suit to enforce action.

According to Lesage, “collaboration is never a given [for the government]. You have to want it deeply and you have to convince the government that we have to help each other to act in the same direction, and then we end up convincing the government that by joining our efforts we will succeed in certain cases.”

The province can look to British Columbia, where a caribou herd bordering on extinction tripled its numbers in less than a decade, thanks to the work of the Saulteau and West Moberly First Nations. While their community-led effort included putting caribou in enclosures and culling wolves, it most importantly also involved protecting the herd’s habitat. In 2020, the federal government and British Columbia agreed to protect and restore 8,100 square kilometres of natural caribou habitat in the area, halting a planned resource extraction project.

The Huron-Wendat Nation worked on the creation of the Ya’nienhonhndeh protected area for over a decade and finally reached a partnership with the provincial government in 2021. The Legault government agreed to protect 300 square kilometers last June, and up to 750 square kilometers over the span of the pilot project. Ya’nienhonhndeh means “the place where medicinal plants are gathered” in the Wendat language. The protected area will not only help with caribou conservation efforts, but will also protect rare plants, chimney swifts, and other species at risk on the territory. Ya’nienhonhndeh will be one of the rare protected old-growth forests in the province.

The MFFP confirms that habitat loss is a major driver of caribou decline, and states that forestry practices are being adapted by following interim measures aimed at restoring caribou habitat. Yet, in February 2022, the ministry announced a plan to cut trees in an area bordering the caribou’s habitat in Gaspésie as part of a management plan for the recovery of wood affected by the spruce budworm. “It raises real questions about how the ministry thinks about protected species. There’s a mentality that needs to evolve,” says Ouellet D’Amours.

That same month, it was announced that 83 protected area projects in southern Quebec were rejected, amounting to 20,000 square kilometres of land. All of the rejected projects were in territories where the government allows commercial logging. “The forestry industry and the short-term profits it creates are often prioritized over protecting biodiversity in Quebec,” says Caouette. “We’ve seen this in the last few months [with the creation of protected areas]. The industry has a strong lobby in southern Quebec that will ultimately slow down or be an obstacle to the creation of any protected areas in that region.”

In March 2021, an investigative report by CBC/Radio-Canada unveiled just how intensely the MFFP is under the forestry industry’s influence. To attain its goal of preserving 17 percent of its territory in 2020, the government created 34 new protected areas in Northern Quebec, where forests don’t have much commercial value and commercial logging is mainly outlawed. Forestry projects in the southern parts of the province, where the Charlevoix and Gaspésie herds are located, keep being approved. An anonymous source working for the MFFP interviewed by CBC/Radio-Canada claimed that many rejected protected areas in southern Quebec were originally greenlit by officials, but caused concern for the industry.

A shift is needed. Quebec’s economy is still reliant on the forestry industry: it made up 1.6 percent of Quebec’s total GDP in 2019, and thousands of Quebecers are employed as loggers, technicians, field supervisors, and more. “We need to think of the economic development of the regions outside of metropolitan areas in a different way. This is the question that we’re asking ourselves, and that we must ask ourselves as a society,” says Ouellet D’Amours.

For environmentalists like Côté, the outlook for meaningful action by the government is grim. “There’s no reason why the government would [act] now when they haven’t for the last 20 years, even though they knew about [the decline of the caribou]. Everybody knows about it in this country. There’s no desire to do anything,” he says.

In order to make a difference, Ouellet D’Amours believes in the power of citizen action: “Write to your MP, go to public consultations, and stay informed.” She senses that the tides are turning: “People are more and more informed about what’s happening, and are more responsive to our messaging. That gives me hope.”

Illustration by Brintha Koneshachandra

Dear Mom,

The other day, I was making us breakfast and I reached into the fridge to grab the container of yogurt to eat with our puri. Now, you would think, having done essentially this every weekend of my entire life, I would not screech, “Ugh! Mom, where is the yogurt?! Why do you have to put the daar in the yogurt container?!” But here we are.

I shouted at you, irritated, yet knowing that I do the exact same thing. I save every yogurt and take-out container; I even have favourites.

If I ever need a container, I’d know exactly where to look. The dishwasher. “Dishwasher guilt” is nothing new. For a variety of psychological and economic reasons, refugees and immigrants tend to resist using this appliance. The idea of saving water and electricity is an important aspect. I turn the tap off when I am brushing my teeth. I turn the shower off when I am conditioning my hair. By this logic, the dishwasher is simply a nuisance. It is often used as additional storage—a glorified dishrack, the perfect place for mountains of reusable containers. There is even a common joke that not using the dishwasher for its intended purpose is the quintessential sign of one’s immigrant roots.

And as you can guess, Mom, when I moved out, I too did not use the dishwasher.

When I moved out, I didn’t downsize. I wear clothes from over 10 years ago. I love receiving hand-me-downs from my bhabi, even at 34 years old. Sometimes, even my close friend offers up clothing that she is ready to part with. I love thrifting. There is no shame in sharing.

And you, Mother, taught me that. I wore many hand-me-downs. But you made it my own. You put hairspray in my hair, lent me your pretty earrings, and told me I looked great. Your friends, with daughters quite a few years older than me, would give you bags of their unwanted clothes. Sure, I didn’t particularly love wearing clothing three sizes too big for me to school, but I certainly did make the most of it. In Grade 3, did you know my best friend and I wore those giant jackets together at recess and lunch? Her arm through the left, my arm through the right, holding each other in the middle. We would zip it right up and walk around scaring people: “We are the two-headed monster!” It really provided endless fun.

And, when I need to repair a beloved clothing item to prolong its longevity, Nani always has my back. Again, I know just where to look. The deep blue, circular Royal Dansk Danish Butter Cookie tin. Yup, this is where you store the “sewing kit.” Nothing goes to waste.

There were never a lot of strict rules in our house, were there? But one was always implied, right? Don’t waste. Thanks, Mom.

Just like the chai you sip (and remove the single teabag to reuse throughout the day), our past is steeped in conservation. Maybe these practices support the stereotype that South Asian people are cheap. What most do not realize is how deeply these habits are ingrained in our history of imperialism, instability, and corruption. It is really no surprise that protecting our resources has been passed down through generations. From being forcibly expelled from your homeland with nothing, to living as a single mother—whether it is about scarcity or logic, this is how we live.

Looking back, our culture and communities have been practicing sustainability for centuries, perhaps respecting and appreciating the abundance of what we had, not the lack of it.

So, I am writing this letter to thank you, Mom, for teaching me about sustainability, long before it was cool.

With love and gratitude,

Saffina Jinnah

Illustration by Julia Galotta

I’m a young woman, who can, to my knowledge, get pregnant and has long-held dreams of being a mother. When I was a child, I spent my days dutifully caring for my dolls—who were named Baby and Popstar. When I turned 13, I started babysitting the two toddlers who lived next door. When I moved to Ottawa to study, I volunteered at Planned Parenthood, spending my off-time supporting pregnant folks who were looking to explore their options. In other words: I’ve spent my life to date surrounded by themes of reproduction, children, and family planning. But, these days, when I think about being a mother myself in the future, existential anxiety creeps into me—a paralyzing fear of having children in a world in rapid ecological decline.

I am 22 years old. I want to have a child sometime in the next decade. But what will the world be like when my prospective child is growing up?

The planet is in trouble. We know this. Sea levels are continuing to rise, Arctic sea ice is in decline, and the earth just keeps heating up. In 2016, the late Stephen Hawking famously predicted that humans have 1,000 years left on earth. It feels like everything is falling apart around us.

A thousand years is a long time, but I think most conscientious, climate change-believing people, myself included, are less concerned about the number, and more concerned about the symptoms of earthly decline and what it means for the human species. Will my child’s world be plagued with wildfires, floods, and rapidly declining air quality? Will their favourite animals be extinct, and will rural landscapes be covered by skyscrapers and freeways? As the 1,000 year-mark draws closer, what will the symptoms of a climate apocalypse be, and how will this burden weigh on my child?

The crux of pre-parental climate anxiety is extreme uncertainty. Will my child wind up in the care of a spaceship operated by Jeff Bezos to transport eight billion humans to Mars? Or, more realistically, will they be able to afford the likely seven-figure price tag for the Apocalypse Express to escape this dying planet?

The dread of earthly decline is quite terrifying, and this kind of anxiety is hard to prepare for. I’ve had panic attacks over school, family, relationships—all of which can be soothed or reasoned with. But climate anxiety is different. I can talk myself out of alarmism, but the general concern over a dying planet is actually quite rational.

Let’s look at my parents’ generation—was ecological decline even a thought? Probably not. The dominant thinking was clear: so long as you weren’t out of wedlock and had the means to care for a child, you were all set. Granted, abortion access was limited, heterosexuality was compulsory, and the risk of disownment and/or ostracization in the case of having children out of wedlock was actually quite substantial. But still, this is the second terror of climate anxiety— there are really no elders to empathize with you. It’s a first-of-its-kind anxiety. Perhaps if you speak to the Cold War generation, you could get a little bit of insight into apocalyptic anxiety more generally, but the idea of the world dying beneath our feet is a novel prospect.

Cue the resentment. Why did I have to be born in the ’90s, the last generation for which climate wasn’t at the forefront of our tiny little childhood brains? And why does my prospective child have to be born in the 2020s or 2030s, when climate terror is probably going to be seared into their brain in utero? Feeling resentful about this timely predicament is something I’ve come to realize is quite normal. I’ve spoken to my 20-something girlfriends and it’s not unique. If we had been able to have children just one generation earlier, it seems like we could be mothers in blissful ignorance.

So here I am: ability to reproduce, likely. Typical childbearing age, check. Full confidence that my child will have a safe and sustainable environment to grow up in? No. I’m working through it. Alarmist thinking is common with climate anxiety. I don’t think anyone should feel guilty for having a child in 2022. In fact, I think new, unjaded, and change-focused humans are the most likely antidote to climate change. Also, if I’m being honest, these past two years of the COVID-19 pandemic have made me even more certain that despite great loss, communal mourning, and pain, humans can make it through. We just need to be on the same page (which is a big feat, I know).

I also can’t ignore the bittersweet side to this climate anxiety: it’s made me infinitely more empathetic to my fellow humans, and to the earth I walk on. I’m grateful for things I don’t think earlier generations even noticed: the air I breathe, the water I drink, and so on. I also use this anxiety to fuel much of my everyday work toward climate justice. I don’t think I would be as interested in living sustainably and building community as I would be without climate anxieties. Climate anxiety and subsequent climate activism have, in many ways, helped me to unlearn the hyper-individualism that capitalism taught me. I can only hope that this belief in community and radical empathy is also passed on to my child and their generation.

So, it’s not all bad, but it can be pretty bad. But let’s be clear—if I didn’t want to work through it, I think that’s okay, too. If I didn’t want kids, then the childfree life would be for me. But that’s not me. I want kids, but I want kids in a world that isn’t doomed. So, until my child is brought into this world, I will be spending my time working toward creating a world where they will be safe and be able to thrive.