Courtney Howard is an emergency physician in Yellowknife and the vice-chair of the Global Climate and Health Alliance. Nicole Redvers is an associate professor at Western University. Sarah Cook is a family physician in Yellowknife whose family has been evacuated to Alberta, where she is helping co-ordinate care for pregnant evacuees.
Too many Canadians are unaware of the Peoples who have made this place their home for millennia. With high rates of health inequities, a significant absence of affordable food and housing, and an underresourced health system with a lack of widespread available cultural supports, Indigenous Peoples in the North have been forced to be creative on their own.
But we believe that this light also has wisdom to offer to people in Southern Canada who are considering how to build a healthy future. This summer of smoke must be considered an SOS from Mother Nature: a moment where we stop, re-evaluate our practices and plan how we will keep her – and each other – safer and healthier.
Feelings of irritability are common in response to wildfire events, and can be accompanied by eco-anxiety, ecological grief, eco-anger and sometimes guilt as people become aware of the impact that climate change will have for them. It is normal to need to process these emotions – to grieve the future we thought we had. The next step is to replace uncertainty and fear with a plan for our collective health response. Action feels better than anxiety.