In British Columbia, Canada, we’re facing an Extreme heat Emergency this summer. Last year (2021), 619 people died during the heat dome in British Columbia.
Here are some guidelines for keeping cool: a long and a short version:
Stay Cool quick-and-easy suggestions
Stay Cool Draft 24 May 15, 2022
And here is an extract from the final chapter of my forthcoming book: Creeksong: One Woman Sings the Climate Blues.
… when a woman knows she is to be hanged in a fortnight,
it concentrates her mind wonderfully.
After Samuel Johnson
June 2022
Back at Chris’s place, the dwarf maple has releafed with ruby brilliance. Tiny solar lights flicker. We planted flowers. Oscar’s recovered. He’s eating again and talking in that curious way cats reserve for humans.
But climatically, things are not well. The weather here is crazy. The coldest Spring on record. Too cold to sit outside – in mid-May! The wettest summer on record is now predicted. And today, a derecho event, a long-lived, fast-moving thunderstorm, caused widespread wind damage in Ontario. Like a tornado. Climate change again!
My being trembles with despair.
What can I do? What can one person do in our climate crisis? What can a woman do in her eightieth year? Am I too old to make a difference? Do I even know how to make a difference?
When I was a young activist, we chanted Think global, act local. On principle, we agitated to prevent climate change’s negative impacts. Now I am reduced to adaptation. Does that matter? Will my small contribution be enough?
While Chris lights his red candle and finds something for dinner, I explain about my life in the Before Time.
“In my working life, I imagined myself as a bridge and a weaver. I combined community development and technical solutions. Trying to make public housing safer for women. Or applying ecological design principles to parks and playgrounds while still making them fun for kids and restful for older people. I had a full life. I wove together the technical and the social. I loved the interplay, the spaces in-between. But that work ended six years ago. I’ve faced some big challenges since then. Not the least rebuilding my cognitive abilities and my confidence.”
As I talk, I’m surfing on my phone, aware that despair, my evil twin, is stalking me. Weather forecasters predict the return of the extreme heat emergency that struck British Columbia a year ago. Anthropogenic climate change. We brought this on ourselves!
I stop to breathe. My friends say I sound stressed. Yep. The Earth is dying and I feel guilty.
Then Chris delivers the nachos. Thank God! He plunks down beside me and I try to explain what’s in my heart.
“Oh, Chris, that bloody heat dome. Poor, vulnerable, old people bore the brunt of it last year. It’s always that way: climate change hits the poor hardest. In less than a week, nearly 700 people died, most from heat stroke and heat exhaustion: nearly a 200% increase.”
I try to explain: “A few simple things might have saved all those people. How could anyone let this happen? We know better. And the problem wasn’t the heat. People were just ignorant about how to manage it. I didn’t struggle much. I had one bad night, similar to the hundreds I’d had in Australia. I used the old Aussie trick. I put a large beach towel on my bed. Then I soaked a towel, wrung it out, aimed my fan at the bed, and lay down with the wet towel on top of me. I slept for several hours.
So, basically, Chris, ignorance killed many lonely, isolated older people. They lived alone in rental apartments in older buildings without air conditioning. The unlucky ones lived on upper floors with poorly insulated roofs. Some also suffered from anxiety and depression.”
“So, what happened with our emergency services?”
“Swamped! Swamped by emergency calls. The emergency services collapsed. Totally! They sent taxis to collect sick people. The fire inspector told me about one desperate family who pushed their grandfather in a wheelbarrow to the local fire station. He died of heat stroke en route.”
I turn back to my phone. I must do something.
The City of Vancouver has two clever ideas: (1) turn apartment lobbies and lounges into temporary cool rooms for older or vulnerable tenants, and (2) install sprinklers and portable misting outside building entrances. Excellent! I’ll start with the cool room idea. I live in an un-airconditioned 1947 concrete building. Perfect! I bet my neighbors won’t schlepp four blocks to our only cooling center. Anyway, the City advises we should not go out to seek relief during a heat alert.
“Do you think they’d go there, anyway – to the cooling center?”
“You know, Chris. I don’t think they’d go. Older people can be funny old birds. I bet some will feel hesitant about showing up at a cooling center even if they knew what and where they were.
What should I expect? What should I wear? Do I need special permission to get in? How long can I stay? Do I have to pay? Do they have bathrooms there? Will I be safe with so many strangers around? Can I sleep there? What about my purse, my medicines, my dentures, my walker, my cane? Can I bring my cat?”
Later, back home, I work out that the secret is for us to stay home and help each other, and care for each other. Soon I’m dreaming in technicolor: a cool room for our 65 tenants with a misting spray outside the front door. Chris and I measure the spacious lobby: 370 square feet. I send the floor plan to the fire inspector, a spirited young woman. She visits and gives the cool room an enthusiastic thumbs up. Her senior officers love the idea, too. A dozen chairs will be fine. She’ll make a sign to post with the occupancy level. We have a large industrial fan and deck chairs on our rooftop. No problems with fire exits because we have five ground-floor exits. And to cool us down more, we can stand under a patio misting system outside our front door.
I’m dreaming in surround-sound now, imagining a bunch of us old folks sitting around, chatting, laughing supporting each other, and sharing. Sharing, well pretty much anything: cold drinks, pizza, games… I’ve a spare TV set. Chris can bring his music system and his cooler. We are sitting together, sharing our fears about what’s happening with our erratic weather. We have music. The room sparkles with laughter. We wander in and out of the misting spray.
I email the property manager. He refuses. Point blank. He spoke to his insurer. Homeless people could wander in and hurt us, he says. Tenants congregating in our lobby could be trampled to death by neighbors racing to the main door to escape a fire. A gathering of hot bodies could become a COVID super-spreader event among my most vulnerable neighbors. What if someone dies seeking refuge in our cool room?
I lean back in my chair and sigh. I promised, so I keep trying. I craft simple “stay cool” guidelines for tenants. Like putting ice on your pulse points, setting up a cross-breeze, or freezing a damp towel. If one person who reads them escapes a lonely, terrifying death, I’ll feel vindicated. I email a few pages of tips to the property manager, who quickly replies:
I want to be clear that we are not authorizing you to share your draft notice with our tenants on our behalf and we don’t intend on consulting you further regarding our notice. Please be advised that this company will not be taking a leadership role in any public health measures or recommendations for our tenants, as doing so would be highly inappropriate and irresponsible on our part. We are not public health officials nor do we profess to have any expertise in the area. We are property managers.
What to do? I light my red candle.
Then I have an uncomfortable conversation with myself. Where am I coming from? Where does my hesitancy originate? Why do I fear that my climate change activism is not good enough? I remember my long career as a community planner. The bottom of the totem pole, the weak side of the planning profession, the distaff side: woman’s work, the laundry. Who cares about writing a few guidelines or encouraging a dozen overheated tenants to sit in a cool room for a few hours? That is not real work! Not real activism.
Blessedly, Rumi’s wise words interrupt my orgy of self-abnegation:
This talk is like stamping new coins. They pile up,
while the real work is being done outside
by someone digging in the ground.
Of course, the real work of climate change is not talk. It’s action, however humble. Hopeful action. It’s about care, about digging in the ground of our lives: community. Sure, I face limits. And I must set my sights high. I must regain my hope. Right here, right now, I must show up. I am a climate activist so I must turn my back on fear and embrace active hope.
And when I look inside my heart, hope is exactly what I find.
I email Diane at my activist church. Of course, those gentle people agree to distribute my “stay cool” guidelines to a congregation overflowing with older folk. Next stop: Angela at the Red Cross. Their “Friendly Calls” program will distribute them to isolated people. And Susan at the West End Seniors Network. They will publish my guidelines in their next newsletter. Only three phone calls! I can go much deeper, much further… The editor of an activist weekly is eager to talk cool rooms.
Before I can catch my breath, CBC radio takes up the issue. I astonish myself by doing two radio interviews about the cool room idea. Vancouver Coastal Health and Fraser Health issue a bulletin to landlords and strata managers asking them to relax regulations to permit cool rooms in lobbies.
Summer heat and health advice to landlords and stratas
My Aussie friends chime in sympathetically, explaining how to stay cool in a hot place. Soon LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are buzzing about cool rooms and “stay cool” guidelines.
Maybe we will save lives, after all. I know I am meant to focus my energies on caring. And I know one thing: to make a difference in our climate crises, we must understand what caring feels like.
I leave my desk and walk over to my living room window. A vertical curtain of raindrops shimmers. I open the window and breathe in the damp air. Below me, my city sleeps. I breathe in, breathe with, hope. Hope breathes me.
Yes, Mother, I am in here. In your service. Yes!