We’re going to talk about heat this week, and how to talk about it. How could we not, given the sweltering temperatures in Eastern Canada and around the world? But let’s pause first for a moment of gratitude. June 26 will be a kind of armistice day — the old growth battlegrounds of the “War in the Woods” in Clayoquot Sound will receive permanent protection.

The Ahousaht and Tla-o-qui-aht First Nations have landed an agreement with the province of B.C. to protect about 760 square kilometres of the world’s most stupendous ancient forest and other unique biomes, creating 10 new conservancies to protect the old growth. In the process, the nations forced a local revamp of B.C.’s heinous “Tree Farm Licence” system — the “TFLs” that reign across the province’s “crown lands,” effectively privatizing the living world into corporate satrapies.

The armistice has been a long time coming. The Tla-o-qui-aht Nation declared Meares Island a tribal park in the early 1980s — long before such inconveniences were taken seriously by provincial governments or Ottawa. If you’ve ever visited Tofino, Meares is the towering emerald island that fills your view from the harbour, a logging scar on Lone Cone mountain gradually healing, the only visible sign of its turbulent past. The province blithely granted logging companies cutting rights to 90 per cent of it.

When the loggers arrived by boat in November 1984, they were met by the country’s first logging blockade. Just shy of one hundred blockaders — First Nations and assorted allies from the nascent Friends of Clayoquot Sound. Moses Martin, then elected chief of the Tla-o-qui-aht, greeted the loggers, inviting them to shore for a meal. “You’re welcome to visit our park. But leave your saws in the boat.”

“This is not a tree farm,” Chief Martin told the bewildered crew. “This is Wah-nah-jus Hilth-hoo-iss. This is our garden, this is a tribal park.”

Carl and Joe Martin, nephews of Chief Moses Martin at a protector cabin built for blockaders. Photo by Leigh Hilbert.

The logging crew declined breakfast. The blockade continued for months. Judges fired off injunctions (court orders against Moses Martin “and anyone else”). Local tempers flared. And then, to the government’s shock and dismay, the courts issued a historic decision in 1985, siding with the Tla-o-qui-aht. You’ll have to forgive Justice Peter Seaton’s language but it bears repeating:

“The Indians have pressed their land claims in various ways for generations. The claims have not been dealt with and found invalid. They have not been dealt with at all,” he wrote. “Meanwhile, the logger continues his steady march, and the Indians see themselves retreating into a smaller and smaller area.”

That injunction technically remains in place to this day. And Meares Island was the first salvo. Blockaders rallied to defend other forests in Clayoquot Sound and across the country: Haida Gwaii, Temagami, Grassy Narrows, the lineage continues to Fairy Creek.

Fast forward to 1993 and blockades had expanded to defend all intact areas of Clayoquot Sound and over 800 people were arrested, including this newsletter scribbler and my late father (if you squint just right at those 1993 photos, you’ll see my old van, typically topped by a fierce Tzeporah Berman brandishing a bullhorn — the woman who would later marry me on a summer solstice, at a remote beach on Vargas Island followed by a feast of Joe Martin-fire-smoked salmon).

You shouldn’t take away an overly-sentimental picture of First Nations and greenies working in harmony. We, non-Indigenous tree-huggers, made dreadful mistakes both in protocol and in practice. In retrospect, it’s amazing some of them were not irreparable. Yet, despite the bungling, the symbiosis seems to have worked. Fast forward to today, and the Ahousaht Hawiih (hereditary chiefs) “celebrate this decision alongside partners and people around the world as a significant win for climate, biodiversity, reconciliation.”

And it's another generation of the Martin family standing up. “British Columbia is now beginning to help us protect the forest from BC/from itself!” Gisele Martin celebrated.

“After GENERATIONS of work from many Nuučaanuł / Nuu-chah-nulth families and individuals, some illicit colonial land designations are being reformed to better respect our Indigenous land visions and Tla-o-qui-aht Tribal Parks declarations.”

“ƛeekoo ƛeekoo to all our grandparents and leadership who worked towards upholding our existence.”

“Hold your governments accountable,” Martin urges. “The work is ongoing.”

Gisele Martin and her father Joe Martin in 2023. Photo from Gisele Martin/Facebook.

Silent Heat

With luck, the heat wave will have abated in Eastern Canada by the time you’re reading this. Much of the world has not been lucky at all.

South of the border, 150 million Americans were hit by temperatures above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and we have only touched the summer solstice. Zambia is roasting through its worst drought in 40 years, corn lies charcoal-black on the ground. Intense heat continues to scorch southern Europe, police say it’s the reason people keep disappearing in Greece. The daily high in New Delhi hasn’t dropped below 40 C for more than a month, local officials are warning about health risks from all the bat carcasses littering the ground.

It was 51.8 C earlier this week at the Grand Mosque in Mecca. And the death toll at this year’s hajj has exceeded 1,000 according to AFP’s count. The number will be higher by the time you’re reading this. All of them, people making the pilgrimage of their lives.

It’s become a cliché to call heat waves, “silent killers.” And so it falls to us to give voice to them and interpret what’s going on for the broader public.

These devastating weather events are not natural. “They are unnatural disasters” — that’s the top message advice from Potential Energy’s research with over 72,000 Americans.

Far too many people still conceive of heat waves as a natural change in the U.S. and Canada. Even though 7-in-10 Canadians attribute the increase in disasters to climate change, our understanding of climate change remains murky: only 6-in-10 say the cause is “mostly human,” and that percentage is actually declining.

Even fewer can name the primary cause. Public opinion research by the Canadian outfit, Re.Climate, corroborates the need to call it what it is: “a fossil fuel pollution problem.”

Without making that connection, most people simply don’t grasp that only systemic change, like transitioning off fossil fuels, can stop disasters from getting worse. Instead, Canadians tend to focus on things like recycling when asked in polls or focus groups.

But when heat waves, fires, drought or storms become top-of-mind, the public goes looking for information. And when the right message gets through, people do understand that fossil-fuelled climate change is already hurting the people and places we love, and the results show support for action rises between seven and 12 percentage points.

If you want a deeper dive into the research and how to talk about heat waves and other climate disasters, the organizations are hosting a free webinar for Canadians on Monday. You can register here.

If you do, you’re likely to see something like this, from Potential Energy’s Unnatural Disasters Communications Guide:

Invisible Heat

Heat is not only silent, it’s invisible, which presents its own communication challenges. The research shows that images are very impactful but not many of the ones often shared on social media or used by the mainstream.

Far too often, we see pictures of “fun in the sun” — people at the beach, eating ice cream, dousing in fountains or splash parks.

Just look at the juxtaposition between headline and photo on this — otherwise excellent — podcast from The Big Story:

Or the one chosen by a photo editor to accompany CBC’s story about the “oppressive” heat wave in Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada:

Instead, images should show real people (ideally with faces visible), indicate medical urgency and emotionally powerful impacts, as well as conveying impacts at scale, or the causes of climate change, at scale.

Those are key principles from research conducted by Climate Visuals, a project of Climate Outreach. There’s even a curated photo library, much of it free-to-use, especially for non-commercial purposes.

It’s surprisingly difficult to convey the situation accurately in a single image. It takes real photojournalism skills to capture both faces and scale in the midst of a disaster. But there’s no excuse for sunbathers lounging over deadly wet-bulb temperatures. And Re.Climate recommends using collages of two or three photos to cover all the principles of visual communication.

Attributing heat

You’ve probably heard this tentative refrain for many years — some version of we can’t link any specific event to climate change, but…

It’s always been an overly-cautious qualification. The point is to focus on what is certain: “as the ocean and the atmosphere are heating up, it’s supercharging our climate system,” says climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe. We’re “loading the dice,” she likes to say.

Anyway, the field of “attribution science” has progressed significantly. Scientists are now able to identify the fingerprint of climate change almost in real time by testing what actually happened during a specific event against climate models of our previous world without hotter temperatures.

Climate change doubled the likelihood of record-breaking fire weather in Canada last year, for example. That was the finding by World Weather Attribution, a consortium of scientists.

And, in general: “Every heatwave in the world is now stronger and more likely to happen because of human-caused climate change,” say Ben Clarke and Friederike Otto, two attribution scientists in their guide for journalists.

You can catch Friederike Otto and some of her colleagues explaining the details of attribution science in this video, filmed just last week by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

That’s enough talking about talking about heat for now. Let’s change gears…

Passing the Mic

You sure are a highly creative and empathetic bunch — in response to last weeks’ newsletter on grief, you sent in some incredibly insightful notes, along with poetry and even some first draft songwriting.

Janet wrote from Calgary adding to the list of recommendations on grief and radical action. “May I add Jess Serrante’s podcast with Joanna Macy called ‘We are the Great Turning’ for it takes us through her process of the Work that Reconnects.” (I’m pretty sure Janet was referring to this podcast, here, accompanied by this delightful shot of Macy and Serrante)

Photo from jessserrante.com

Rebecca from Ottawa sent along some of her own poetry. “I am a psychologist and about a decade or so ago I began noticing that what patients described as depression was amplified somehow by the zeitgeist, i.e. climate grief or melancholia, though I didn’t have a word for it at the time. It felt sane to me. I wrote a couple of poems to express a modicum of this phenomenon.” Here’s one:

The Great Grief

Washes over me

as a roller-wave, though

I try balancing on the curl

It rolls over me—

Each good-bye

a rehearsal

And what is my small grief

in this great ocean?

It rolls over me.

Rebecca also subscribes to the Climate Psychology Alliance North America newsletter. By no coincidence, the Alliance also got a plug this week from Britt Wray, the author of Generation Dread. “Activism isn’t *really* the cure for eco-anxiety and eco-grief,” Wray writes.

“There’s a danger lurking in that sentiment. It’s a shortcut — a too-quick move from pain to action — and it threatens to leave people far less resilient and capable of facing the ecological crisis than they ought to be.”

And Doug emailed from Agassiz, B.C.: “I am sure you are getting a lot of feedback… and many are likely saying what I am about to say: Denial is the first stage of managing grief, and is the one we seemed to be locked into societally/politically at the moment. This is what makes it so much harder for those of us that are in the Depression stage.”

Doug’s therapeutic interventions? Joining SCAN--Seniors for Climate Action Now, and… writing country music!

“I have the tune pretty much worked out, lol,” he writes. “There will have to be a series now, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance to follow…”

Here’s a snippet from an early draft of song #1, Denial:

I lived through a heat dome, and that was really bad!

And the atmospheric river floods made me really sad!

The changes that are happening make me really mad!

Why can’t the world just stay the same like when I was a lad?

They say that burning carbon is the source of all this mess

And if we don’t change, things will get worse, and it’s making me distressed!

I love my truck and ATVs, I cook with gas as well.

Is my burning fossil fuels really going to take us all to hell?

Who’s to blame for the state we’re in, I really want to know.

Our politicians? Or the banks? Or the economy as it grows?

The oil companies only want to keep things as they are

Keep burning gas and hoping we don’t buy an EV car.