Dear Editor:
Sent to people who prepared B.C.’s Climate Preparedness and Adaptation Strategy:
I’ve read your report by bureaucrats plying their trade and training protocols in air-conditioned offices. I recognize the tables carefully segmented to address various situations and concerns in mellow and mild language.
Your efforts are reactive and passive. The title tells all: adaptation means that all your tactics such as research, data collection, monitoring, forecasting, training — all reflect your powerlessness to stop death-inducing practices. You’re accepting and supporting the all-powerful role of corporate control by entities such as the fossil fuel industries in shaping government practices in B.C.
Resilience is held out as your only goal rather than taking the proactive steps of stopping fossil fuel subsidies and actions and pressing for major funding and training support to make the decades-overdue shift to renewable energy. When will we address drastic downsizing of contemporary patterns of consumption and entitlement?
I send this to you from Penticton, in extreme weather conditions with forecast temperatures of 37 and 38 C at present and air quality at 10+ Very High Risk.
I’m a prisoner in my own home.
How are we to accept and adapt to such an environment? We’re told to expect more of similar conditions for weeks to come as wildfires rage all around us and the province and no real rain expected.
Your tidy adaptation stance will simply guarantee our death a bit further into the future.
Merle Kindred, PhD
Penticton
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