Two of the big storms hitting Canada in the last year were not just terrifying and incredibly damaging, they were a little spooky. It was as if nature was making its already unmistakable message of impending catastrophe even more specific.
The almost biblical flooding in Calgary – the home base for the oil companies aiming to quadruple the output from the tar sands – and the ice storm in Toronto both had these almost-sentient aspects to them. Lots of people (though apparently no one in government in Alberta) saw the irony of the Calgary flood and its connection to climate change and the oil patch.
And Toronto? It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic way to slow down Christmas shopping madness than to encase the country’s biggest shopping city in an inch of ice and turn comfortable urban dwellings into dark, freezing caves. Surely the message is clear enough: our blasé expectations that we can just keep shopping no matter the unintended consequences was challenged in dramatic fashion.
But how many people got the message? Or if they did, how many just paused momentarily before they opened their gifts by candlelight, wrapped in sleeping bags, and then mused about the Boxing Day sales?
The truth is that we are all woefully ill-equipped to deal with the multiple crises that are bearing down on us. (A friend of mine is so alarmed that during an evening of political small talk he periodically declared that we were facing “A tsunami!!” and then just went silent, no more able to cope with the reality than the rest of us.)