NCC: Land Lines – Reflections on our climate legacy

December 11, 2024 | by

At the age of 60 something, in fall of 2016 I moved, with great excitement, from suburban Ottawa to British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast — the swiya (traditional homeland) of the shíshálh Nation. As a nature lover my entire life, I was keen to be in a place where hiking trails through beautiful coastal temperate rain forests lay just outside my doors. I couldn’t wait to trade in the cold winters and hot steamy summers of Ottawa for the milder winters and balmy, sunny summers of BC’s lower Pacific coast.

Within weeks of arriving, I joined a local women’s hiking group. Every Monday and Wednesday at 1 pm, rain or shine, the group — of whom it turned out I was one of the youngest — set out for a 2 hour or so hike through local conservation areas in our community of Halfmoon Bay.  From these wonderful local women, many of whom have been hiking these trails for decades, I have had the privilege of learning about long established trails through nearby Coastal Douglas Fir and Hemlock forests. The conservation areas we thread through are underlaid with lush beds of ferns and more mosses, lichens and fungi than I had ever seen before moving here.

Songbirds chirp in springtime, Douglas squirrels skitter, and signs warning of coyotes, bears and bobcats abound, although our sightings of latter are rare. This may be related to the volume of our own chatter as we trade stories of our lives on our hikes.

When the first summer hit, the hiking group elders suggested we head for somewhat more remote trailheads, meaning a 20-minute drive or so up a logging road, versus a one kilometer walk from my back door.

We hiked up ridges along long-established trails through forests of 50 to 80-year-old cedars and firs interspersed with magnificent arbutuses and underlaid by tiny wildflowers. Then, all of a sudden, more often than not, the trail would continue through a clear cut. In some cases, the forest was logged a decade ago, with sticks of replanted firs emerging, and some cut as recently as the previous winter, with slash still littering the hillsides. 

Walking out of the cool, shaded tree cover, we were forced to navigate through a hot, dry sauna to continue our hike.  The light layers of summer clothing we were wearing for the forest suddenly seemed ridiculously too much, yet not enough to protect our skin from the sun’s intense burning rays. These trails no longer rise to the top of our list when choosing routes. 

But it took no more though than one encounter of a clearcut on a long-established hiking trail for the epiphany to hit me. Human activity is not just reducing habitat for native wildlife, it is baking the climate for all of us.

Of the eight years I have lived in BC, the drought-filled summers seem to have lengthened, raising forest fire alerts, baking marine life and leading to increasing tree falls when winter windstorms hit. For the first time in recent recorded history, southern coastal BC suffered through a heat dome in 2021. The following fall, an “atmospheric river” washed out one end of the only road into and out of our bucolic neighbourhood.

As a nature lover, if you’re as worried as I am about climate change, a group called Climate Legacy invite you to take a quiz on their website and learn more about what you can do.