And what the NWT can possibly do about it. The massive wildfire evacuation I’m currently a part of is a financial nightmare. More than half of Canadians are less than one unexpected $200 expense away from insolvency. Many if not most of >30,000 evacuees faced worse than that on their very first day. Our return to our communities will…

Displacement can be a minor inconvenience or a death sentence. I’m incredibly, almost unbelievably lucky. Right now, I’m a climate refugee, but all signs point to that being a temporary condition. At least this time. It makes me far more fortunate than millions of other people around the world in the same boat (or, for far too many climate migrants…

Don’t blink or you’ll miss the moment I become invisible. It can be startling to see yourself become a statistic. I’ve been writing and speaking about the climate crisis for decades. I know that the world is on track towards 1.2 billion people being displaced by climate disasters by the year 2050, by far the greatest mass migration in human…

It’s a good thing we’re not equipped to feel the grief all at once. All the trees have been reduced to charred cores of trunks with occasional twigs like burned matches. They stick up from a vast expanse of blackened ground, heaped with ash, where stubborn embers still creep and smoke still billows up to form a thick cloying miasma. It’s like fog I…

Thanks, climate deniers! As I write these words, Canada’s Northwest Territories has declared a state of emergency. A 163,000 hectare wildfire is burning out of control less than 16 km Northwest of me here in the capital city of Yellowknife, thirteen kilometres closer than it was just yesterday. A different fire is approaching…

Landlords blame a landlord’s double homicide of his tenants on the Landlord Tenant Board. Aaron, 28, was an electrician. His fiancee Carissa, 27, was an educational assistant. The couple lived together in a basement apartment in Hamilton Ontario. They approached their landlord, who lived upstairs, with a health and safety concern about mould in their rental unit. No one knows exactly what was said…

Conditions are perfect to send this year’s tropical storms off the charts Tropical storms get the majority of their power from sea surface temperatures. As a storm travels over the surface of the sea, it picks up ever more heat to fuel its intensity from the surface waters. …

A glimpse into the UCP “fix” for health care. As Alberta Canada’s provincial election nears its close, an insider in the ruling UCP party contacted me off the record about the party’s plans for health care after the election is over (and assuming they win). I am unable to verify with certainty, and can share no details about this…

And other lost causes. When I visit social media, I never know exactly what I’ll see, but I know what to expect. When I’m lucky, a rare glimmer of something distracting or heartwarming sometimes slips into the mix, but a cavalcade of horrors is always reliably on tap. My mood of the moment often…