Raining

Raining.  The whole day cool and grey, welcome blessed rain soaking the parched ground.  After the heat and dry, cool and wet.  Made channa curry tonight....made me think back to days long ago, living in a little bush cabin, cooking our dried garbanzos with spices and our home-canned tomatoes, gathering 'wild ginger' root (Asarum caudatum) to use in place of the store-bought ginger we didn't have.  Washed down with home-made green tomato chutney.  Nice to be home, quiet, in the house.  A moment's solitude.  Tonight I used store-bought ginger from my local natural food store, and a garam masala that I bought rather than mixed myself.  And I made a wonderful eggplant curry with little Indian eggplants I bought down in "Little India" in Millwoods, the Indo-Canadian community at the southeast corner of Edmonton.  I was trying to replicate something I've recently had at an Indian restaurant buffet....first time I've seen these little egg-shaped eggplants for sale....so I had to try some.  I had to interpolate between my friend Sigrid Shepard's recipe, one I found on the web, and my memory of the dish I'd eaten; none of the recipes did quite what I wanted.  However I worked it out, the result was delicious, and will serve for tomorrow's lunch as well.
Glad as I am the rains have come, this unnaturally early year still speaks strongly to global climate change.  Apparently this year is on the way to being the warmest on record.  I've read that in fact this is the 11th month in a row that is a record warm year planet wide.  No surprise that the boreal forest around Fort McMurray has burned- more than 450,000hectares to date.  Yesterday, before it began to rain, the wind shifted and the smoke was so thick it was as nearly as bad as I experienced 10 m from a major forest fire near Tsiigehtchic in August of 1999.  And that fire was 12 km from where I was.  This- hundreds.  Air quality went from three to 7 to 10 (top of the scale) in a few hours here in Edmonton.  Then the forcast rain began to fall.  We've had no rain of consequence til now in more than a month.  The soil surface yesterday was dry as powder walking in the ravine.  Dust bowl days come again.
Tipping points.  My ex used to call the current time period the Ob-scene (coming after the Holocene, completely recent, the time after the ice left in the Pleistocene).  It is now fashionable to call this the Anthropocene.  I dragged my feet a bit on the new term....but the more I think about accelerating species extinctions, ocean acidification, being poised to loose the whole suite of Arctic fauna, an entire ecosystem, with the probable complete loss of permanent sea ice.....much more than the iconic Polar bear....3/4 of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia suffering substantial coral bleaching.....and I think, hmm.  Yes this kind of faunal overturn, changes in ocean chemistry, temperature shifts....yes they do seem to rival big dramatic changes in Earth History, in the paleaontological record.
And I've read that this year is already 1.5 °C above the long term mean of the 20th century....Paris sets us to try to limit change to that level over the next 65 years.....a strong El Niño, yes.  But something beyond.  Anthropogenic, yes.  So the Anthropocene is here. And we are all complicit, caught in a way of life that requires gulping energy to subsidize everything about our current globally connected urbanized lives.  Whether we drive a hybrid or put solar panels on our roof, or poo-poo the whole thing and use our wealth to maintain our current comforts,  we are all complicit.  And having caught this iconic tiger by the toe....how then do we, can we, let go?  Where do we fit all of our other values against this one BIG problem?  Future discounting is so characteristic of our species, and so tempting....putting off the problem for the grandchildren to cope with, or at least until tomorrow, or next year, or....
I live in what passes for a heritage house in Edmonton, 95 years old, made of beautiful clear timber from BC's lower mainland.  I honour my house, and the lives of the trees it took to make it.  I honour its history.  But where then do I fit energy efficiency?  Because of the cold weather today, I have the (gas powered) heat on, in late May....the walls are insulated with sawdust; there are some voids at the top of the walls, as the sawdust has settled with time.  Should I be ripping up my walls to insulate more heavily?  I work at home, so the commute doesn't consume energy (I walk across the hall), but I do travel for work, conferences, research....and put 5 to 10,000 km per year on vehicles for that purpose, and several lengthy air flights.  I also do not ride my bike for errands all through the winter, but use my car....so we are all complicit.
As the day slowly darkens into night, I wonder what will happen with the Alberta economy in the wake of both an oil price down-turn and the destruction of infrastructure and homes in the vicinity of Fort McMurray?  Sobering choices.  At least the rain may the fires and check their explosive growth.  For now. And there were several other large fires in Northern Alberta, and elsewhere, this unnaturally early spring which have sparked (so to speak) more evacuations. 

Environmental Change and Variation in the Yukon

Photo:
Willows yellow from drying or disease along Frances River
I just got back from the southern Yukon where I went to do research on observations of environmental change by Kaska Elders. The weather was alternating between being very hot (up to 30C) and rainy, though there had been little rain early in the season, and a light snow pack the winter before. During a trip up the Liard and Frances River by boat with one elder my collaborator Linda and a Japanese anthropologist and I helped the elder put out a small forest fire that was burning in the moss at a camping site along the river. Berries seemed to be a couple of weeks ahead of normal in terms of ripening, but crops seemed poor, perhaps because of poor weather when the flowers were pollinated. People speculated that perhaps the bears were bolder because the berries were poor. I found a correlation like that in nuisance bear reports down on the Skeena River in the Terrace area in the 1980's. Just as I was getting ready for a trip down the Alaska Highway to the Toad River area to speak with some Elders there, a young Kaska friend told me there were two fire balls down the Cassiar highway. The next days the smoke was quite perceptable far to the east of the area the fire had ignited. I began to hear that the highway was closed south out of Watson Lake....not encouraging, as I needed to go that was to go down to the Skeena River to do some follow-up on last year's research on tumplines. Rumours began to circulate that the community of Lower Post would be evacuated...I returned with some anxiety to Watson Lake through the smoke plume, and when I arrived, massive smoke clouds filled the sky to the south, rising like a thunderhead at the west end, right down where the Stewart-Cassiar runs. At the barricade I was told they would likely convoy traffic through first thing the following day....there was some rain in the night, and indeed I was able to get through. At that point about 10 km of the highway passed through the smoking fire. Its estimated size then was about 3000hectares. Last I heard it was up to 15,000. The fire sparked my thinking about disturbance frequency, and whether the fire frequency may be changing....given that the boreal forest renews itself through episodic conflagration, it was hard to tell if this fire was unusual, or within the normal range of fire occurrence. Last year there was a large fire north of the Yukon border along the Cantung or Nahanni Range road....and when I was there in 2004 there were large fires at Contact Creek and at Swan Lake on the Alaska highway...this was one of the questions we asked the Elders about. When I got down to the Skeena River, the weather was so dry there were virtually no mosquitos....unheard of...and river levels were at a near record low. Sockeye salmon escapement is at about 1/3 normal for the second year running, and this reduction is not attributable to salmon farm sea lice as no fish farming is permitted off the north coast of BC. So--likely collapse of food chains in the mid Pacific due to global warming is the cause. Allen Gottesfeld, who works for the Gitxsan Watershed Authority pointed out this disturbing fact to me....commercial salmon fishing is now virtually extinct in Prince Rupert, formerly a city of canneries, and food fish for Tsimshian and Gitxsan are running low, prompting shifts to less preferred species (coho and spring/king salmon instead of the diminishing sockeye).