… or maybe not, lest we be forced to recognise that our actions have effects.

What’s usually so lovely about bad weather, especially for television, is that it has all the visual action of war — lots of filmable disaster, plenty of casualties, vistas of damage, cartloads of close-ups of human pain — without the politics to worry about. So by the night Charley, the “worst” hurricane “on the west coast of Florida in at least a century,” according to my home-town paper, was blasting in, the full first perhaps 15 minutes or so of the network news had become all-hurricane all-the-time. On the other hand, a simple Google search (“did not match any documents”) tells me that for all the media coverage of the powerful storm and its wake of devastation, the one obvious, if controversial, connection no media person in America seems to have made was to global warming — or rather to predictions that our overheating-planet is going to have ever more “extreme weather” episodes. A linkage like that, after all, would make such a mess of the perfect media event.

And speaking of connections poorly (or not at all) made, rises in oil prices that would once have passed for nightmare energy scenarios have, like so many Creatures from the Black Lagoon, been swimming to the surface of the business pages and generally stopping there. On the network news, the latest oil price rises tend to be given later in the half-hour in the dry, scorecard manner of the Dow Jones figures. Last week the price of a barrel of crude surged over $46 a barrel. Maybe soon we’ll hit a previously unimaginable $50 a barrel, despite Saudi pumping promises, but no point in sounding apocalyptic or, say, making a few connections between the ongoing turmoil in the Middle East, American energy use, the Bush administration, the perfect storm in Florida, the sales of SUVS, lowered fuel efficiency standards, and our poor, fragile planet. After all, why be globally apocalyptic when being south-Florida apocalyptic will more than do the trick.

Here in British Columbia, yet another hot dry summer (just like last year) has led to another year of rampant wildfires across the province. And a similar disconnect between causes and effects exists. It falls to well-known environmentalist David Suzuki, safely outside the Canadian political mainstream, to draw the obvious connection:

Last year, the 2,500 wildfires that occurred in British Columbia destroyed more than 330 homes and forced more than 45,000 people to move, the biggest evacuation in the province’s history. The total cost for last year’s fires has been estimated at $700-million. This year, we’ve already blown our annual budget for fighting forest fires, and the fire season is far from over.

… In the long term, slowing climate change is essential to reducing wildfires. By burning fossil fuels and producing more carbon dioxide than the planet can handle, we have caused global warming.

This warming has altered the traditional range of insects such as the mountain pine beetle. Usually, cold winters kill beetles and keep them in check, but now temperatures are too high to control their spread. Pine beetle infections kill trees, which then provide an abundance of fuel for fires. The mountain pine beetle has killed nine million hectares of trees — an area five times the size of Vancouver Island and worth $7-billion. This is enough timber to supply the entire U.S. housing market for two years.

Climate change not only makes winters warmer, it also causes hotter and drier summers — ensuring optimal conditions for future summertime blazes. The only way to live in balance with nature is to recognize our total dependence on her for clean air, water, food and energy, and to protect the diversity of living things that makes these essential elements available to us. Nature is often seen, mistakenly, as something “out there,” far away from our urban areas. But nature is part of everything we do — and we are biological beings who are part of it. Our urban planners would be wise to consider this as they develop cities in British Columbia.

Our Premier opposes ratification of the Kyoto Accord on the grounds that “the only climate that’s going to be affected is the economic climate in Canada”. Short-term economic interests uber alles. But where’s the economic benefit to the province burning down around us?