Beautiful BC is really the only accurate motto for this province. Where else in Canada, or in the world, is natural beauty so pervasive that it is blamed for dampening the social and cultural life of the place? When you wake up to the sight of towering mountains with fresh air in your nostrils and walk through thick blankets of moss on the trees that surround you on the way to work, it is soooo easy to get smug about living here. One might even go so far as to write-off just about everywhere else as barren, drab and uninhabitable.
Then, one fine August day, the smoke descends.
As Susan Swan, a councillor in the village of Clinton tweeted last week, these wildfires are not a BC interior problem, they’re a BC problem. There’s no denying this when people living on Bowen Island are questioning whether or not to take their kids outside.
If this were an anomaly, we could just choke through the summer and look forward to the next one, but the provincial officer of health, Dr. Perry Kendall, told CBC we are likely to see this kind of thing more frequently. Not to worry though, the majority of people won’t suffer any long term consequences: Because this air quality is probably comparable to what people live with on a daily basis in Beijing.
We are oddly adaptable, us humans, which means that in all likelihood we’ll get used to this. If we do, we’ll have to give up the smug thing and start working on a new tag-line to define ourselves by.
