That’s the distressing message we got from longtime environmental activist David Suzuki last week.
For decades, Suzuki has been a voice of at once urgency and optimism in the fight against climate change, pushing individuals and governments to do more, to act faster, to slow the production of greenhouse gases that pose an existential threat to our planet, before it’s too late.
Suzuki committed his life to educating people about the natural world because he believed that an informed public would make decisions to protect it; that if we understood what was at stake, we would redesign how we live so that our economic and political systems were no longer destroying the planet.
But after a half-century of climate activism, Suzuki admitted defeat last week.
“It’s too late,” he said in an interview with iPolitics. Too late to adapt or mitigate. Too late to make the changes needed to slow or stop climate change. Too late to prevent the planet from warming to dangerous levels. One can imagine that Suzuki, of all people, would not come to this conclusion flippantly.
The work ahead of us now, he said, is hunkering down.
“The units of survival are going to be local communities, so I’m urging local communities to get together,” he said, calling on communities to begin organizing the grassroots emergency response systems that will be needed when governments are unable “to respond on the scale or speed that is needed for these emergencies.”
This may seem alarmist to some. But two days after Suzuki’s statements, flash floods in Texas swallowed thousands of homes and killed at least 100 people. The death toll is still rising.
As the waters recede, many are raising questions about why people were not better warned about the severity of the the flooding to come. One of the problems, it has been revealed, is that the affected region, which is prone to flooding, does not have a proper flood warning system in place.
Others are wondering whether U.S. president Donald Trump’s recent staffing cuts to the National Weather Service may have undermined the government’s emergency response in face of the flash flooding.
The question of adequate emergency preparedness is not limited to Texas. Similar questions are being asked about Saskatchewan’s emergency response to the wildfires that forced hundreds from their homes this spring.
It’s devastating to consider that the question of what can be done to prevent climate change has become moot, according to Suzuki; devastating that the window in which holding ourselves responsible and accountable in the protection of this planet seems to have passed; devastating that all that’s left to do, when a roaring river sweeps away an entire summer camp, killing at least 27 of its participants, is to make plans for how better to warn people the next time this happens.
We are lucky in the Pontiac. Aside from spring flooding, semi-regular droughts, and the occasional mild tornado or rain storm, we have been more or less safe from the climate disasters that are crashing down on every other corner of this planet.
We would be wise to follow Suzuki’s advice, and hunker down. Without a natural disaster barking at our door quite yet, we may have just enough time to do so.
Sophie Kuijper Dickson
