Like Art Green, I remember cold, snowy and windy winters, when 10-foot snowdrifts were common and local sloughs were covered in ice and summers were warm.
Yet in all my 72 years living in Agassiz, I have never seen such extreme hot days as in this summer.
Climate change is not only affecting farms but also fish, with even poorer water conditions.
For more than a decade, sport fishing in the Agassiz-Harrison area has become spotty to poor, with declining numbers of fish of all species.
Climate change is made worse by cultural attitudes, like economists who think nature is an externality outside their equations. Yet global warming is not an externality, nor is pollution of oceans, lakes and rivers, nor is declining aquifers due to overuse.
The danger for human societies is that the response from nature to global warming may be non-linear and unpredictable. Human societies could be faced with ever-degraded environments, leading to ecological ruin, economic decline and tyrannical social constraints.
I have seen the future, and it is now!
– Richard Probert, Agassiz
