It’s Sunday but I’m dry at least (though without my poached eggs for brekkie)
Ok, ok already…
You may be tired of my skepticism around the raging wokeness of the global warming now climate changing activists, but just maybe now is the time for us to consider something I have been recommending for a while.
Accept that climate will change and mainly because of the sun and related cosmic forces and devote our attention to preparing and adapting to new realities. It’s the more ethical thing to do…
As you may already know, last weekend we in B.C. were hit with a major rainfall. It wasn’t just the amount of rain that fell but the speed at which it came down. I was in Vancouver (for a CFL game, Symphony Concert, Imagine Piscasso exhibition, some good sushi, etc.) when it started and after receiving some weather and travel advisories decided to leave the city early – in fact I skipped church at Richmond Pres which was not something I would normally do if I am in Vancouver on a Sunday morning. However doing so gave me an extra seventy-five minutes of travel time. As the drive unfolded it was obvious that rain had been copious during the night – at Bridal Falls, the singular beautiful Bridal Veil falls had been joined by five additionally amazing falls cascading down the mountain. Shortly thereafter there was a section of the road already becoming covered in tree limbs, mud and flowing water. Later along the Hope-Princeton Highway, the Similkameen River, which had been very low but clear on the Friday morning trip to the coast, was now roiling with muddy and debris-filled water. Upon arriving in Penticton, the news started reporting the number of roads that now were closed behind us (we had beat it all by about one hour)!
But that isn’t the point of this chapter. Instead I want to point out that the problems should not have been unexpected. For example:
The return of Lake Sumas (the lake that was drained in the 1920’s to expand the availability of good agricultural land that now produces dairy products, poultry + eggs, vegetable produce and even some flowers) is primarily due to the fact that the dykes built after the horrific floods of the late forties have not been maintained – even when government-commissioned studies warned that serious deficiencies existed.
And whenever there are forest fires it is common knowledge that soils will be easily and quickly eroded taking burned and other dead trees with them should excess moisture become available (this happens regularly after a heavy snow winter and an extra warm spring).
IF governments had been serious about their rantings concerning climate change perhaps instead of rushing off, with hundreds in tow, to every COP they had been investing the monies in preventative maintenance, much of the Abbotsford/Chilliwack region might still be dry and the accompanying roads to the interior would at least be open to Hope (and now all the way via the aforementioned Hope-Princeton to the Okanagan and beyond).
IF there was a serious intent about believing that things might becoming a bit more precarious in our environment then it should have been obvious that building bridges and roads and railways in mountainous terrain would require extra alternative routings of potential rivers (arising in flood moments from mere creeks in normal times) much the same as runaway lanes are built on mountain highways for the use of vehicles whose brakes fail when on a downslope grade.
These are just two things I can think of at the moment that suggest to me that like the Covid-19 mismanagement, we continue to suffer under political leadership that is not leadership at all but paltry reactive decision-guessers. Just like the news reporter questioning the MP’s about a colleague instead of asking questions about how Parliament is cooperating to try to get a handle on the problem, we seem to have allowed ourselves to be satisfied in elections with voting for the person that promises to spend the most of our money, instead of asking who might actually do the heavy lifting and get us prepared to a new order…
The GREAT RE-SET? It ought not to be worrying about carbon dioxide, it ought to be about getting our country really prepared for weather issues of serious magnitude that have been promised for several decades and seem to be returning…
Continue to enjoy your autumn…and by the way, monarch butterflies have significantly increased in their return to California – the rants around their sudden demise haven’t been re-tuned to praise their return however (strange how some people go silent at the very time it would be helpful if they would tell the truth). And I won’t say anything at the moment, but the protesters who stole equipment and damaged access routes for workers on a legitimate, Aboriginal-approved pipeline need to be dealt with – more on this later (perhaps my slowness is simply an effort to match the slowness with which governments and police have responded)!!
g.w.