Globe Climate: Meet the Coast Salish woman protecting the North Pacific’s orca whales

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Good afternoon, and welcome to Globe Climate, a newsletter about climate change, environment and resources in Canada.

The icebergs started arriving early this year in Newfoundland’s famed Iceberg Alley. This is one of the biggest years for the 10,000-year-old ice behemoths since 2017, according to Captain Barry Rogers, the owner of Iceberg Quest Ocean Tours in Twillingate. Check out the photo gallery as iceberg season is under way.

Now, let’s catch you up on other news.

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Noteworthy reporting this week:

1. The Globe in Australia: Fire-prone Australia relies on mostly unpaid, local brigades to defend against disaster. Canada could look to them for lessons as climate change heats up
2. Analysis: After all the just-transition controversy, Ottawa hopes its sustainable jobs law will bring a fresh start. Meanwhile, the Alberta business council says Ottawa needs extensive regulatory changes to meet climate goals
3. Ontario’s Greenbelt: Bonnie Crombie leaves door open to developing Greenbelt, launches Ontario Liberal leadership bid
4. EVs: Freeland disputes PBO report saying Volkswagen support will cost $3-billion above original estimate
5. News from The Narwhal: Ontario is ignoring internal advice that supported Indigenous-led conservation

More on wildfires this week

A federal scientist with the Canadian Forest Service is pointing to the driest conditions since the Second World War as a key factor behind the largest wildfire in Nova Scotia in the past century. Early last week, winds and tinder-dry conditions also worsened wildfires in Western Canada, while firefighters made some progress in the eastern part of the country to control blazes that had caused evacuations. In British Columbia, the province’s second-largest single wildfire in recorded history is making experts nervous, not just because of the extreme temperatures inside of it, but from long-term carbon concerns.

• Explainer: Is Eastern Canada doomed to follow the West into harsher wildfire seasons? Matthew McClearn takes a look at what fire researchers say, and how climate will alter fire regimes.
• Business: The wildfires in Alberta, Quebec, Ontario and Nova Scotia are expected to contribute to higher home insurance prices across the country, as extreme weather events continue to hit insurers. This year’s unusually early and severe wildfire season is causing delays and complicating the closing of real estate deals, even for homes unaffected by flames.
• Tracking air quality: Here’s what Canada’s wildfire seasons and air quality looks like in maps. (Maps are updated daily.)

A deeper dive

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Matriarch-in-training and climate leader Kayah George helps strengthen connection with the orcas

“Orcas are matriarchal,” Kayah states proudly. “Much like our people, they have their own individual family systems, their own songs, dialects, culture and ways of being, living and interacting with the world that are passed down through generations. They always stay with the grandmother, who leads the pod. And that’s much like our people. My Ta7ah is the one who brings the family together. She’s the last of her siblings and one of the oldest in the nation. She holds the songs and teachings, and that’s the sacred duty of the Elders.”

Orcas have a massive capacity for memory, navigation, communication and data processing, evidenced by the size of their brain (the second-largest of all ocean mammals). They also have the most elaborated insular cortex in the world, which is involved in emotional reasoning, compassion, empathy, perception, motor control, self-awareness and interpersonal experience.

Kayah says that her people have known all of this for far longer than modern scientists, and that in her communities, their relationship with orcas goes back generations. Unfortunately, this relationship, and therefore thousands of years of cultural reciprocity and knowledge, was disrupted by settler colonialism in a region that is to this day still considered “unceded” or unrelinquished land.

“I see my own people as resilient – coming back from the edge of almost losing everything to becoming a strong nation again. If we have all those commonalities, I believe we have resilience in common as well. It gives me hope that maybe the orcas can survive what’s happening.”

See the full story as well as the beautiful photos and videos all done by freelancer Danielle Khan Da Silva.

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What else you missed

• BC Hydro set to start first hunt in 15 years for new electricity sources
• Protest derails planned celebration of 20-year ban on oil drilling near Chaco national park
• Britain puts coal plant on standby as warm temperatures ramp up demand
• Renewable transition still lagging in fuel and heating sectors, report finds
• Aviation industry split on whether 2050 net zero goal is achievable, survey suggests
• First trial in several U.S. climate change cases brought by youths begins in Montana
• Swiss climate bill approved in referendum as Alpine nation’s glaciers succumb to warming
• Nearly 100 die as India struggles with a sweltering heat wave in two most populous states

Opinion and analysis

Eric Reguly: Your next EV could be made from metals extracted from the seabed – a potential environmental disaster

Editorial board: The new reality of a country on fire

Editorial board: How Canada should prepare for the reality of a country on fire

Glenn McGillivray: A federal fleet of water bombers could help control forest fires

Green Investing

Opinion: You can kiss your pension and the economy goodbye, unless we fix climate change

The complacency of climate could start to tilt the calculus, writes political economist John Rapley. Despite the daily prices on stocks and bonds being affected by short-term considerations, but the long-term view provides a more sobering reality check.

“Who might such long-term investors be? Pension funds, for starters, along with insurance companies, since they set their premiums according to the likely scale of future payouts,” he says.

• University of Montreal to launch new ESG institute funded by Canadian executive, Scotiabank
• Investors in biggest climate pressure group don’t like to pressure
• Opinion: At Toyota, activist investors’ ESG, electric-vehicle agenda put the company at risk
• Duke Energy agrees to sell Commercial Renewables unit to Brookfield in deal valued about US$2.8-billion

Making waves

Each week The Globe will profile a Canadian making a difference. This week we’re highlighting the work of Charlotte Taylor doing climate justice research and writing.

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My name is Charlotte Taylor (she/her). I currently work and study at the University of British Columbia, located on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓ əm (Musqueam) people. I am a third-year undergraduate student pursuing a thematic, interdisciplinary study of climate change in media, and I work as the critically-engaged voices project lead at the UBC Climate Hub.

Through the critically-engaged voices project, I have developed educational resources and event-based programming which aims to centre Indigenous and critically-engaged climate justice advocates at COP27 (e.g., the COP27: critically-engaged voices series recorded by Indigenous youth communicator Isaka Huni Kui, the Beyond Doomism and Solutionism in Response to Climate Change panel, etc.) I also serve as co-editor-in-chief for the UBC Journal for Climate Justice, which aims to amplify interdisciplinary climate justice work and research and the intersections of art, activism and academics. Lastly, I have contributed to the Starfish Canada’s Community Spotlight Series.

As a climate justice researcher and writer, I am passionate about mobilizing transformative, decolonial systems change rooted in climate justice. I, therefore, encourage you to support Land Back and other land-based reconciliation efforts.

- Charlotte

Do you know an engaged individual? Someone who represents the real engines pursuing change in the country? Email us at GlobeClimate@globeandmail.com to tell us about them.

Photo of the week

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Guides and Explainers

• Want to learn to invest sustainably? We have a class for that: Green Investing 101 newsletter course for the climate-conscious investor. Not sure you need help? Take our quiz to challenge your knowledge.
• We’ve rounded up our reporters’ content to help you learn about what a carbon tax is and just generally how Canada will change because of climate change.
• We have ways to make your travelling more sustainable and if you like to read, here are books to help the environmentalist in you grow, as well as a downloadable e-book of Micro Skills - Little Steps to Big Change.

Catch up on Globe Climate

• The dangers of breathing wildfire smoke
• Canada’s data gap in tracking wildfire risks
• The Indigenous community fighting fire with fire
• How climate change is fuelling a new kind of ‘fire weather’

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