By now, most of us have experienced a climate disaster, even if we didn’t identify it as such in the moment. A heat dome, an atmospheric river, an unending drought, a wildfire — these are climate disasters we’re all living through, season after season. Although not everyone who loses hours of sleep from unbearable heat or gets trapped by a washed-out highway sees themselves as a “disaster survivor,” increasingly, that’s what we are.
This is part of the premise of the Climate Disaster Project at UVic. Under the guidance of UVic professor Sean Holman, students from around the world interview climate disaster survivors, from those who have fled their homes in terror ahead of a fire to those who have wilted in extreme heat, compiling in the process a trove of compelling testimonies that can then be used for journalism, social science research, and more.
“More” now includes a stage play.
The play, Eyes of the Beast: Climate Disaster Survivor Stories is based on the verbatim testimonies of climate disaster survivors. The actors skillfully delivered the survivors’ own words in a woven story about three different B.C. disasters — the atmospheric river, the 2021 heat dome, and the ensuing fire that destroyed Lytton — but didn’t just tell the stories of the disasters themselves. Instead, they portrayed the survivors’ stories before and after the disasters: how they were or were not prepared, how they survived, what happened to them, and how they recovered, or hadn’t been able to recover.
It’s an innovative format for climate journalism, which is more comfortable in the realm of maps, charts, statistics and traditional narrative storytelling. By artfully recompiling survivors’ testimonies and weaving them together, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
I went to see the play last weekend, lured in part by my own association with the project; as an adjunct professor last year, I helped teach the UVic climate journalism course with the Climate Disaster Project at its core.
The play affected me in a way I hadn’t expected. I’ve written about climate disasters for years, and interviewed people just like these survivors. But seeing the combination of experiences — their differences and, often, similarities — reminded me of the universality of the experience of surviving a disaster. It also reminds us of the immediacy of the threat. We’ve known for a long time that climate change is “on its way,” but this play demonstrates the ways in which it’s already upon us, and capable of shattering lives.
Art like this is an important tool for communicating the stakes of all of this reporting and fact-checking and investigating that my colleagues here at Canada’s National Observer do every day. Whether it’s Rochelle Baker laying out the climate positions of the parties vying to form government in B.C., Max Fawcett opining on the viability of EVs, or John Woodside explaining the carbon tax’s unpopularity despite its utility in reducing emissions, just about everything we do here is about trying to avert the multiple catastrophes stemming from our rapidly warming planet. If a play like Eyes of the Beast does one thing, it’s showing us why that is work worth doing.
— Jimmy Thomson
TOP STORY
We’re living outside of our budget, and I’m not talking about finance. The world has a set amount of carbon we can release into the atmosphere without triggering tipping points we can’t come back from; that’s an unavoidable reality. Now an expert group is recommending that Canada establish for itself what exactly that budget is — in line with other major countries — so that we can plan to live within it. Think of it like your household budget, except the consequences are planetary in scale.
John Woodside reports.
Number of the week
348 — the number of kilometres of bike lanes that Montreal has added since 2016. The fast-growing system has its problems, but is vastly improved from decades past.
MORE CNO READS
🏠 The BC Conservatives are appealing to pocketbook concerns with a “Rustad Rebate,” but will it actually improve affordability? Max Fawcett argues the tax rebate on mortgages and rents will only drive housing costs up, defeating its own purpose — and meanwhile, the upstart party’s leader is threatening to undo the NDP’s market-oriented housing measures.
Max Fawcett writes.
🚲 If you think Montreal’s bike infrastructure needs work, you should have been there a generation ago. Freelancer Changiz Varzi takes us back in time to when the very notion of bike lanes was a progressive moonshot, and how activists worked to make them a reality. The story also delves into how they’ve become a popular climate measure, even when people don’t think of them as one.
Changiz Varzi reports.
🍎 Rebuilding efforts in Lytton have been slow-moving, and in the meantime, food insecurity has exploded. The fire that destroyed the town also severed the region’s food supply chain, and although governments at the provincial and federal levels have promised to establish a relief centre that will help people with basic needs, that, too, has stalled.
Matteo Cimellaro reports.