There are many factors that contribute to wildfires, and they can combine to bring tragic destruction. Unfortunately, one factor is human ignorance: a campfire unattended, or a cigarette flicked into grass. In 2017, a cigarette tossed from a car ignited a 60-hectare wildfire in Colorado. Lightning is another big source, and so is over a century of poor forest management, where policies that eschewed controlled burns allowed forests to thicken and underbrush to increase, leading to wildfires with endless fuel spreading over giant swaths of land. Climate change, increasingly, is making things worse, with fire seasons that are drier and last longer than ever before. Intense heatwaves dry out vegetation, creating tinderboxes for when that cigarette lands.

And yet, while we see burning conflagrations on the news—with flames, helicopters and charred forests—it can be hard to untie seasonal weather from long-term climate trends. The IPCC’s latest Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group II, was pretty clear though: “Climate change in western North America has contributed to more extreme fire weather.” And, according to a 2023 paper in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, these factors combined—with more fuels, and with forests getting drier—will “force British Columbians to confront the harsh reality of more frequent years of intense and prolonged wildfire activity.”

For some this reality can be even harsher. “It is well established that climate change is causing more extreme wildfires around the world, and that many of these fires directly affect Indigenous communities,” wrote authors Tara McGee and Amy Cardinal Christianson, in their 2021 book First Nations Wildfire Evacuations. Further, according to research published in 2022 in the journal FACETS, 60 per cent of Indigenous communities in Canada reside in remote and forested areas, and they are 30 per cent more likely to suffer and be displaced by wildfires.

So far, governments have been slow to take this statistic into account. For Kanaka Bar residents, forced to flee their homes as fires descended, worsening wildfires have brought life-changing implications. While many members lived on reserve, many others, like Michell, lived up the road in Lytton and saw their homes burned to ashes. After the Lytton inferno, some fled to Kanaka Bar, and when the fires then approached Kanaka Bar weeks later, they were forced to flee a second time.

It’s a reality very few can fully comprehend. Michell, for his part, described himself and other evacuees as “climate refugees.”

The day after Michell texted me, a light rain fell on the fires above Kanaka Bar. The evacuation was still in place, but the imminent danger had temporarily passed. Michell wanted to visit Kanaka Bar the following day. A contractor was going to dig a fire guard around the community (a circular path that helps prevent wildfires from jumping over) and he was going to meet with someone from the BC Wildfire Service, to ensure the machines avoided archaeological sites. As it turns out, out of around 90 residents, four had decided to stay behind, and Michell also wanted to check on them. He offered to bring me along.

The next morning, he picked me up in his grey Chevy Envoy SUV, and we drove from Hope up the Trans-Canada Highway through the Fraser Canyon, a narrow alley of rock and mountain that the Fraser River runs through. His new Shepherd Husky rescue dog, Prince Rickman (named after the late Alan Rickman, who played Professor Snape in the Harry Potter movies; his wife’s a huge fan), sat restlessly in the back seat. Michell wore a black ball cap and an orange T-shirt, with “Every Child Matters” printed on the front. His beard was grey and he wore metal-rimmed glasses, and when he spoke his eyes seemed to light up. Michell, who is a lawyer, had practised law before working in the clean energy sector; and in 2015, the father of six was elected Chief at Kanaka Bar. Michell was brilliant, thoughtful and passionate about his community, and on our hour-long drive he shared his expansive knowledge with me, from anthropology, climate change and Indigenous laws, to clean energy and colonial conflicts.

The day was warm and sunny, and at one point we pulled over on the shoulder of Highway 1, near the village of Yale. “I want you to see this,” he said, and we exited the SUV and walked over to some historical signs, Prince Rickman trotting behind us.

In 1858, when gold was discovered here, Michell explained, 30,000 mainly American miners descended on the area with fortune in their eyes. It was the Fraser River Gold Rush, and it became a tragedy. Without getting permission from the regional Indigenous community, the Nlaka’pamux, the miners began digging for gold (the Nlaka’pamux include the T’eqt’aqtn’mux, the traditional name for Kanaka Bar residents). Among several inciting incidents, the miners diverted creeks and rivers, and decimated fish habitat and spawning grounds, which were critical to the survival of the Nlaka’pamux. “They were destroying the land for future generations,” Michell told me, adding, “They weren’t asking—they were taking.” Skirmishes broke out and then escalated, and it turned into the Fraser Canyon War. The death toll was estimated to be in the dozens to hundreds, and included losses on both sides. A truce was eventually negotiated, and the miners extracted the gold and moved on. “These people came and then left,” Michell said, as we walked back to his SUV, “but we endured, we remained.”

It wasn’t long before we were surrounded by towering hills, interior Douglas firs and yellow grasses. We were now fully in the arid canyon, with Michell piloting his Chevy Envoy north along the Fraser River, which surged below us in the opposite direction. The air was dry and hazy and it smelled like campfire.

“There’s 14,000 people under evacuation orders as we speak,” Michell told me, referring to the people fleeing fires across BC. “Where are they going to sleep?” he asked. He was frustrated with the lack of a concerted plan to house the evacuees, like those from the Lytton fire, and now the Kanaka Bar evacuees, and he thought multiple levels of government were talking past one another. Knowing that the fires were coming each summer, and that they’re expected to worsen in the future, shouldn’t there be a clearer plan to house thousands that often go homeless? he asked me rhetorically. Too many people, he said, were living in hotels like him—grandmothers and grandfathers, parents and children, all far away from friends and community. There were fewer jobs to go back to. Frustrations were mounting.

We drove up the gravel road to Kanaka Bar, which was mostly devoid of people, and around us the signs of community defences were everywhere. Every hundred metres or so there was a purple fire hydrant, and connected to each hydrant were two thick white firehoses, with a web of these hoses and hydrants throughout the village. Then, attached to the firehoses, were a series of thin orange hoses that branched off and connected to sprinklers on the tops of many homes. It was an eerie sight, a portent of impending doom, but also a sign of pragmatic preparation. The sprinklers sprayed water over the homes to dampen them. This spray, in turn, protected the homes from the falling embers of advancing fires. The sprinklers, Michell told me, “keep the risk of ember storms away.”

For several years, well aware of the growing risks of spreading wildfires, Kanaka Bar community members prepared for the worst. They implemented an elaborate climate-monitoring system. Nearby streams were set up with gauges to monitor seasonal flow. They installed their own temperature monitors, and on June 29, 2021, the day before the Lytton fire, one reached 50.2°C. It’s a mind-boggling reading and is even higher than Canada’s hottest officially recorded temperature. They also installed air quality monitors to assess when smoke from approaching fires became too dangerous. The fear of fire was constant, and for the past several years the community had also mobilized to become more “FireSmart,” which is a nationwide framework to prepare for and mitigate the risks of wildfires.

For example, Kanaka Bar residents cut down trees that were too close together, so flames had a harder time leaping between them. Throughout the year, community members cleared the land of branches and other debris—the fuel that fires love—then burned it in a pile before any fire could. They also pruned the overstory to open it up. “This is what’s called ‘forest fire hazard reduction,’” Michell said. Their motto in this preparation phase was to “cut, prune and burn,” and they offered fire safety and chainsaw certificates, for those who wanted training. Finally, they built a new water reservoir, fed from a stream, which doubled their stored water and supplied the network of hoses, hydrants and sprinklers.

The world is, on average, 1.2°C warmer than preindustrial times, and some areas, like the Arctic, are warming much faster. We are already adapting to climate change, and, regardless of how much we reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we must continue to adapt to the current heat and wildfires, because emissions accumulating in the atmosphere mean temperatures will continue to rise until we reach net zero at least decades away. Furthermore, even if we reach net zero, studies suggest temperatures won’t soon decrease, but rather will flatline for centuries unless we use some form of carbon removal technologies. Echoing the paleoclimatologists in the previous chapter, Kirsten Zickfeld and colleagues’ highly cited 2013 article from the Journal of Climate put it this way: “It is very difficult to revert from a given level of warming on time scales relevant to human activities, even after complete elimination of emissions.”

This is why adapting to the rising heat and resulting impacts is so critical. Adaptation is a daunting thought but also a vital one, and it in no way lessens the urgency of mitigation, the reducing of emissions. It addresses head-on the plight of many who will deal with worsening impacts, particularly those most vulnerable, like small island nations exposed to rising seas or communities in the path of wildfires. In 2015, adaptation was a central tenet of the Paris Agreement, enshrined in Article 7 where countries were urged to improve their “adaptive capacity.”

In addition to worsening forest fires and hotter temperatures, we are also contending with rising seas, melting ice sheets, changes to the hydrological cycle, and warmer and more acidic oceans. And with these changes come direct impacts to people: from forced evacuations to vector-borne diseases and the loss of traditional ways of life. However imperfect, there are numerous ways being developed to try and adapt to these changes. They range from the relatively simple, like increasing the amount of urban shade from trees and providing better cooling for buildings, to the more complex, like fortifying coastal seawalls to protect against rising sea levels. Adaptation can include the breeding of drought-resistant crops, or growing natural barriers like coastal mangroves to defend against storm surges. It’s about the preparations needed to protect lives and livelihoods now, and about managing risks. Michell, who frequently gave presentations on climate change issues, put it aptly: “Human beings adapt to their environment; the environment doesn’t adapt to us.”

Adaptation also, crucially—and relevant to Kanaka Bar—involves planning for disasters like wildfires. This includes greater advance preparation through risk awareness, improved disaster communication protocols and plans for evacuations and housing.

“Key to everything,” Michell told me, “is giving enough lead time for the risk.” According to the BC government’s adaptation strategy, the BC heat dome, which led to the deaths of 619 people, was the “deadliest climate-related disaster on record in Canada,” and it rolled into a fire season that heightened the need, in retrospect, for more advanced and quicker detection of the risks to specific communities. In Lytton, many were caught off guard. As Michell described it to me, the risk probability of a fire rose before many were even aware, and the fact that the fire started nearby left little time to react. The people of Lytton had barely 10 minutes to grab their kids, pets and valuables and run to their cars.

Then, of course, there are the fraying lines of communication when the fires do hit. “We lost our cellphone service. We lost our fibre optic. We lost everything,” Michell said about Lytton. “So during the event, how can you communicate?” And in the event an evacuation occurs, there are also the displaced families, shifting between hotel rooms for months and even years. “We need to start doing something new,” he added.

Michell, who was steadfast about finding solutions, had no shortage of ideas. He believed volunteer burnout was huge, that volunteers could barely cope with the multiple demands, and that there needed to be more full-time staff, earlier in the season, to help co-ordinate the response for communities like his. He also thought there needed to be emergency centres on every reserve, with backup materials like food, blankets and lights—items people could take with them in the event of a disaster. There could also be other regionally located, fully staffed emergency centres, where responses would be better co-ordinated to local needs.

Finally, he thought there needed to be a better way to house families. A hotel is not a home. And the homes that burn down are not rebuilt for years. In a call we had the year after my visit to Kanaka Bar, Michell put it to me this way about the Lytton evacuees: “Go to the Coast Hotel in Chilliwack. They’re still there. Go to the Sandman in Abbotsford. They’re still there. Eleven months later, the Lytton evacuees are still sitting in hotel rooms.

“So are we evacuees or are we refugees?” he asked.

While visiting Kanaka Bar I ran into Christine Brown, who was the community’s emergency co-ordinator. It was her job to keep evacuees up to date with the latest developments. Were their homes safe? Was the fire getting worse? She told me that she tried to keep their fears at ease using videos. Security cameras were attached to many of the homes on the reserve, and she sent screenshots of these videos to people through Facebook, to show them that their house was still standing. “I have Kanaka community members who message me throughout the day, every day,” she said. “‘How is it looking, Christine?’”

She had worked in emergency response for almost 20 years, and had never seen a year this bad. “There are so many fires happening at once,” she said, and this put a stress on resources. There were fewer meetings because provincial staff were dealing with multiple fires. And the pandemic only added complexity.

Brown herself was also displaced. Her home was off Highway 12, just outside Lytton, and she was evacuated when that fire swept through. Then, when the fire jumped the Thompson River, it struck another property—a ranch up the road that her husband owned. The fire destroyed all her husband’s farming equipment and two sheds full of hay. After the evacuation, they stayed in a hotel room in Chilliwack, and then Abbotsford, before moving into her sister’s place at Kanaka Bar. When the George Road fire and the Mowhokam Creek fire closed in, they were forced to evacuate a second time. The constant moving was “exhausting,” she told me.

But she wanted me to know it wasn’t just her who was exhausted; it was everybody. “My brother lost his house. Our aunt lost her house. My daughter and my granddaughter lost their house,” she said, describing the toll of the Lytton fire. Many were now living in hotel rooms, she added, and “they’re having a really hard time talking about the future.” With two fires now threatening Kanaka Bar, she was steadfast in wanting to avoid the same outcome. “Knowing what the people in Lytton went through,” she said, “I’m going to do everything I can to save their houses.”

The vast majority of people had evacuated from Kanaka Bar, and it was essentially empty. However, the four people who didn’t leave wanted to try and save their own homes. I ran into Gary Samson, who was using a firehose to spray the ground near his house. He wanted to dampen the soil in the event the fire arrived. As water sprayed through the air, the sun’s light created a shimmering effect on the droplets. We stood high up on a terraced ledge, and I could see the green mountains on the other side of the valley. Samson told me he’d been visiting a friend in Lytton when the fire hit, and he’d run outside his friend’s home to douse the flames with a garden hose. The flames came right up to the house, he said, “then they said the [water] bombers were coming in, so they got us out of there.” Six weeks later, when the wind picked up and swept wildfires toward Kanaka Bar, Samson stayed put.

“My family was really scared and wanted me to go to Hope,” he said. To ease their fears, he posted photos to Facebook to show them he was okay. Some photos were of the cresting flames, though, and they had the opposite effect. His family told him the images looked like a volcano had exploded. “I’m not scared,” Samson told me, stating the community prepared for this for years—with sprinklers set up, and brush and detritus removed between the forest and community. In a worst-case scenario, he said, he had a pickup truck ready for a getaway.

By the time I visited, the winds had died down a bit, and the recent rain had stalled the menacing fire. “The rain really helped,” Samson said. He felt he was more help in the community than outside of it: checking his neighbours’ homes for them, watering the land to keep it moist and setting up sprinkler systems. Michell and other authorities knew he was there. To some, staying in the face of danger might seem unthinkable, but one can understand the reasoning and desire to help.

Perhaps, in some way, it spoke to a sentiment I kept hearing: that more needed to be done before, during and after the fires. There needed to be some hope that those in power were truly listening and willing to help, hope that their lives wouldn’t be completely overturned if the worst happened. As I’d learn, there is no shortage of ideas to improve the policies needed to address wildfire seasons, but they need to be better prioritized and implemented.

Wildfires are unpredictable. In a moment’s notice, the winds can shift and those once thought safe are in danger. It adds a layer of difficulty during emergency situations, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t much that can be done. Early planning is critical. In the wake of another overwhelming BC wildfire season, in 2017, a seminal government study informally called the Abbott–Chapman report, after its lead authors, was released. In a survey of British Columbians conducted for the report, more than half of the respondents stated that an important opportunity to help prevent and mitigate wildfires was through educating people in their homes and communities before disaster strikes.

I connected with Brenden Mercer, the decision support manager for the First Nations’ Emergency Services Society (FNESS), who described how fire education in remote Indigenous communities was improving but there was so much more to do. Mercer, originally from the southern BC town of Castlegar, and whose ancestry was from the Little Grand Rapids First Nation, in Manitoba, spent seven seasons fighting wildfires across the country, in BC, Ontario and Quebec. In 2014, at a fire near Tumbler Ridge, BC, he began to question if this was the career he wanted. “Every single day we had to run for our lives,” he said. There were a couple of cases, he described, when he needed to be evacuated by helicopter as walls of flame sped toward him. “It got to the point where I said, I can’t put myself through this stress anymore,” he told me. He went back to school in the fall of 2014 to finish a degree in natural resource management, and the summer after he landed a job with FNESS, as a forest fuel management and mitigation liaison. In retrospect, it was the right call. “I feel like I’m having a more proactive effect,” he said, by helping communities do more “preventative planning.”

Among many services, FNESS travels to Indigenous communities across BC to conduct firefighter training, home inspection workshops, school fire prevention and FireSmart workshops, and major disaster planning. “We have specialists that can help communities write emergency plans,” Mercer told me, adding, “They can help communities design evacuation routes, and come up with communication strategies during emergencies … In the short time that we’ve had the funding to provide those services, it’s already been a major, major success.”

In the summer of 2021, FNESS started a Rapid Wildfire Risk Assessment process. This brought employees to communities under evacuation orders to do rapid assessments. Was firewood stacked too close to homes? Were lawns cut? They would look for anything they could quickly do to increase the chance of a building’s survival. They did one of these rapid assessments for the Okanagan Indian Band, before a fire swept through, and ended up saving at least a dozen homes, Mercer said. At one home, the wildfire ignited debris that had been moved 15 metres away from the home, and it burned a crater into the ground. “But the house was standing,” Mercer said. “All that stuff was right up against the house a couple of hours before the fire got there.”

Preparation is important, and so too is the need for emergency communication, especially during evacuations. In these types of situations, a 2019 report on evacuations by University of British Columbia researchers found, messages should “connect with residents using the sources residents are using to look for information.” It’s no coincidence that Christine Brown contacted people through Facebook: it’s where many people go for information. But Brown was burned out, essentially a team of one, and she was co-ordinating with the entire community while also dealing with her own displacement. Dr. Ryan Reynolds, a co-author of the UBC report and a hazards research scientist, reiterated this point. “All of that responsibility falls on individual community managers,” he told me, and “depending on the size of the community, that might be one person who’s responsible for flooding, and fires, and earthquakes.” In other words, Brown.

The content of the messages also needs to be clear and consistent, but with overlapping jurisdictions, multiple mediums and rapidly changing dynamics, this isn’t always easy. This is especially true in Canada for First Nations communities, whose laws often fall under federal rather than provincial jurisdiction. To account for this complexity, Reynolds noted, communication best practices need to be worked out, and while there has been some improvement at the community and provincial levels, there needs to be more guidance at a national level.

In addition to issues of where messages are sent and coordinating communications, there can also be infrastructure hurdles. What happens, as was the case in Lytton, when a cell tower is lost? It’s tricky, again, due to the unpredictability of fire movement. But there are several things that can be done, like finding areas less likely to be hit by fire or zones less likely to bring damage. “What we need to see is that those systems are reinforced so that they are better able to handle the local emergency,” Reynolds said adding that there also needed to be backup emergency providers. “In some communities where they only have one provider,” he said, “once one of those is out, a huge portion of the community is affected.”

When the flames blaze through, though, and people are scattered, there are different infrastructure choices. Hotel rooms are fine in the interim, but they clearly are not long-term solutions, especially considering stories of people spending months and years in them. Each season we don’t know exactly what areas will be hit hardest, and where other, more permanent housing needs to be. This is in contrast, say, to hurricanes, which more frequently hit the same locations along certain pathways, or tsunamis, which inundate coastal areas where higher ground is the safest.

I chatted with Mercer from FNESS about this, and about some potential solutions. He mentioned how in China, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the government set up, in a matter of days, modular field hospitals consisting of pre-built rooms the size of shipping containers. “If you haven’t heard of it, there’s some great videos online,” he told me. And there were—fascinating clips of rooms that can be shipped on flatbed trucks and quickly assembled into buildings. Cities that often take in evacuees might have these set up on public land, as a better way to house people for periods that, experience now tells us, last longer than many anticipate. They could provide a greater sense of stability until something longer term is found. “That definitely has to be one of the solutions,” Mercer told me. “Especially with climate change, we’re getting bigger emergencies.”

After emergencies strike and people are displaced, when they return to their community is it necessarily true that, if a fire hit their home, they will find it incinerated to the ground? Are some building materials better than others? Michell, who described himself as an “eternal flame of optimism,” and was always looking for solutions, believed homes needed to be made of better, more fire-resistant materials. The last time we connected, he had just come back from Washington State, where he was looking at autoclaved aerated concrete, a concrete that is non-combustible and fire resistant up to 1200°C. “Why would we build a house out of two-by-sixes,” he asked me rhetorically, “when you can build it out of something that’s about 75 per cent cheaper and fireproof?” Indeed, after the disastrous 2017 fire season, the Abbott–Chapman report recommended a similar approach, though so far, it’s gone unheeded by the province. Building codes in certain areas should require “fireproof building materials,” the report read.

Michell drove us down closer to the Fraser River, to where the Kanaka Bar Indian Band originally resided (called T’eqt’aqtn). A summer breeze was blowing, and we were soon walking through a field with yellow grasses up to our waists. Michell pointed to different areas in the ground. “This whole field was a village,” he said. “Start looking at the circles—they’re everywhere.” The canyon was sweltering hot for generations, and to avoid the heat, Michell’s ancestors built homes below the ground where it was cooler. They’re called “pit houses,” dug several feet underground with earthen walls and wooden roofs. “Today they call them ‘passive homes,’” Michell noted wryly. I could see large circular indents in the field, now grown over with grasses and trees. There were well over a hundred of them, Michell said, and according to archaeological work completed there, some pit houses were thousands of years old. “There are pit houses from that mountain to that creek,” Michell added, sweeping his hand across the vista in front of us.

“We didn’t have a fridge, and we didn’t have a freezer, so we buried our things underground,” he told me. Adapting to landscapes, and indeed, shaping them, was something Michell believed governments could learn from Indigenous practices, especially when it comes to wildfires. For example, sometimes to fight fire you have to wield fire. “It’s called ‘cultural burning,’” he said, describing how Indigenous peoples across North America sparked fires to clear land, alter vegetation and burn brush and grasses to protect against bigger future fires. “If you burned in the spring,” he said, “you didn’t have to worry about it in the summer.”

Today, after a century of forest management practices that repressed fires, which led to a buildup of excess brush and timber, forests are now well-prepared stacks of kindling ready for when lightning strikes. While the effects were unintended, the policy was deliberate. In 1874, with the passing of the Bush Fire Act, BC became the first province to ban cultural burning. Policies like these limited the rich, productive burning practices many had used since time immemorial.

By burning forest understories, Indigenous peoples made it easier to hunt game. They cleared grasslands with fire to open up trails and, with an understanding of ecological processes, burned land that regrew thick crops of berries. They also understood that burning bushes and grassland around villages protected their families from periodic wildfires. This Indigenous fire knowledge was critical, and it’s only now becoming more recognized and accepted. Mercer, from FNESS, described to me the protective use of cultural burning, but also many other benefits. “If you’re applying traditional fire properly and keeping a low burn intensity, you promote the right grasses and the right growth and forage coming back,” he said. “It has a lot of applications beyond risk reduction because if you’re doing proper traditional burning, you’re burning for things like traditional foods, medicine, plants, things that are really valuable to communities.”

As mentioned, not only are 60 per cent of Indigenous communities in Canada in remote and forested areas, but they are 30 per cent more likely to suffer and be displaced by wildfires. In addition to other levels of support, this also necessitates an approach that empowers from within, and when it comes to utilizing cultural burning, this is exactly what many groups are doing. But there needs to be a federally supported, nationwide approach. A 2022 paper titled “The Right to Burn,” published in the journal FACETS, explained what that approach might initially look like. It called for a “National Indigenous Wildfire Stewardship” working group, with regional hubs, which could create networks, share knowledge, and support the use of a tool—cultural burning—that could once again improve the land and protect lives.

After visiting the old village site we headed back up to the reserve, leaving behind the silty Fraser River. On the way there, driving on the highway beside the river, we passed three red and yellow fire trucks parked on the shoulder. The sides of each truck had signs for its home community, indicating how far it had travelled—Burnaby, Quesnel, Roberts Creek—some over 400 kilometres away. Behind the trucks, in the distance, a plume of grey smoke wafted into the sky.

Wildfires have always occurred but conditions are clearly worsening. Yet despite newer approaches to wildfire prevention and acknowledgement of the growing danger, many Indigenous communities are still largely forced to react in real time rather than having the resources to prepare in advance. “We’re all facing catastrophe after catastrophe after catastrophe,” Michell said.

Michell, for his part, anticipated an event that would occur months after the evacuation of Kanaka Bar, which only emphasized his point. As we chatted outside his office, with Prince Rickman sauntering around us, he told me, “After a fire comes a flood.” He was explaining how wildfires destroy organic matter and burn soils, turning the ground into a hydrophobic “glossy sheen,” as he described it, that prevents the normal absorption of rain. “Every rain now,” he said, “is going to bring walls of water and debris.” His description would turn out to be remarkably prescient.

Michell eventually brought me on a tour of Kanaka Bar’s climate mitigations. We saw a huge run-of-river hydro project, which produced clean electricity as well as income, and an array of roof- and ground-mounted solar panels. He told me about strategies they created, like their Climate Change Assessment and Transition Plan. In one communal building, a Tesla battery pack was installed to provide backup power in case of an emergency, displacing the need for diesel generators. It was inspiring to see what they had done, regarding climate change as something to act on now, but also as a way to bring residents together. They built community gardens, growing carrots, garlic and zucchini, and residents conducted workshops to provide creative recipes for cooking the greens.

At the end of the day, as dusk set in, Michell drove me down an empty Highway 1 past the communities of Boothroyd, Spuzzum and Yale, and dropped me off at the Dairy Queen in Hope. Months later, I began to write this story.

That’s when the floods came.

On November 14, 2021, BC was hit with record-breaking rains from what experts called an “atmospheric river.” It was a concentrated cloud of water vapour that travelled from the tropics and dumped torrents of rain in a matter of days. Some communities saw 300 per cent more rain than normal. The rain caused mass flooding and triggered landslides that destroyed highways. Hundreds were trapped in cars between the towns of Agassiz and Hope. Seven thousand people were evacuated from Merritt. A state of emergency was declared and the Canadian military were called in to help. Officials described it as “the storm of the century.”

First Nations communities were especially hit. According to FNESS, 51 of them were identified as impacted by the flooding, and 10 were under either evacuation orders or alerts. The communities of Kanaka Bar and Lytton First Nation, reeling from the summer fires, were now pinned in by landslides. On the section of Highway 1 between Hope and Spences Bridge, where Lytton and Kanaka Bar sit, 18 sites were impacted, with four needing extensive repairs. Food and medication needed to be brought in by either rail or air. It took two months for the highway to fully open.

The historic heat dome, scalding wildfires, and now the atmospheric river and resulting floods. In a video Michell recorded after the floods, he lamented the fact that governments seemed blind to more proactive solutions. “Are we addicted to response mode?” he said. He stated that the culverts on Highway 1, which allow water to drain, were too small and too easily blocked, but previous calls to widen them had been ignored. “We need to start investing in resiliency,” Michell concluded. In a press release after the floods, the BC Assembly of First Nations reiterated this wake-up call, and the need for better emergency preparedness and response for Indigenous communities:

Over the past week, many First Nations have lost their homes, with little to no support from BC and Canada, while being forced to pay out of pocket to access temporary shelter and food supplies. This is totally unacceptable: time and time again First Nations have borne the brunt of climate change impacts and time and time again the federal and provincial governments have failed to assess and take seriously the risks.

As temperatures rise, the shock to our world’s climate system is worsening. Climate change is here, we are living through it now, and we will continue to. And to say that some are on the frontlines more than others is not a stock phrase but a stark reality.