Taking the Heat
On this Canada Day there are two images of life here:
People in Litton, British Columbia, trying to cope with the highest temperature ever recorded in the country and one the hottest places in the world - 49.6 degrees Centigrade and 121 degrees Fahrenheit. Why is this happening in a mountainous region where on a previous visit, I saw snow in the middle of summer on the heights of some of the nearby mountains?
Because - as Scientist Eric Holthaus writes in The Guardian,
“Climate change is not just warming the surface of the planet, it’s warming Earth’s entire troposphere – the lowest layer of the atmosphere where all our weather occurs. That’s particularly true in mountainous areas, where temperatures are rising even faster than elsewhere. When snow and ice recedes or even disappears from mountains, the bare soil beneath can warm unimpeded. A 2015 study found that mountainous areas above 2,000 meters (6,500ft) are warming about 75% faster than places at lower elevations.”
And the other image:
Churches are burning. It’s no accident that they are Roman Catholic Churches near First Nations Reserves. Another story this morning reveals even more unmarked graves of residential schools. The searches are only beginning and the lack of response of one of the perpetrator churches is mounting. It is an answer but not the best one. Mourning will not give way to dancing while The Indian Act is still in place. It prohibited not only dancing but any recognition that the sacred practice of anyone outside the settlers’ cultures was suspect. The result was cultural genocide.
I spent yesterday reading “21 Things you Didn’t know about the Indian Act”. You can watch this video (you can move ahead from the introduction a bit),
This one from TVO is also good - and shorter.
