Writing My Way Out of the Fires

Illustration by Mary Sanche for May/June 2025 Canadian Geographic

This is me, on my couch. Or rather this is how Mary Sanche pictured how I’d look, and feel on my couch during the long winter of 2023 after the wildfire evacuations that summer – combined with other life-altering events – unmoored me. I’ve never met Mary. I don’t know if they knew anything more about me than the personal essay I’d written for Canadian Geographic about the mental health impacts of climate change. But this illustration rendered for that article resonates deeply.

I have a long and storied relationship with bears, living here as I do in black bear country, off-grid, just outside of Yellowknife on Chief Drygeese Territory, Northwest Territories. When I opened up the May/June issue of Canadian Geographic and saw my article and this illustration for the first time, I was drawn to the bear’s face and claws. While this is a grizzly, I did not feel menace (grizzly claws are always extended). Notice how my couch is situated in the forest, there are no walls between us. We are both living inside the fiery devastation of climate change.

I marvel at the synergy between artists. I thanked Mary, a senior graphic designer at the Royal Tyrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alberta, with an email and we both expressed how this assignment came at a much-needed time. Being asked to write about eco-grief, or climate anxiety, or however you want to name it, while suffering a severe bout of it was both daunting and cathartic. My research eventually brought me to a place of greater understanding that lifted the cognitive dissonance I was experiencing. I regained my centre.

The article is out in print now. I’ll share a link here when Canadian Geographic eventually publishes it online. For now, here is an excerpt:

The Great Turning: Another Reckoning is Coming with Climate Change. How do we deal with our mental health – and ultimately find hope?

I’m walking up a ridge of bedrock outside my house, talking to my brother 1,800 kilometres south in Calgary, when it hits me like a hurricane. The fears, the confusion, the existential dread that have been building in me for decades unleash in an emotional maelstrom. 

“I’m worried they won’t be able to breathe… What if there’s no water?” I sob while lichens, desiccated from two years of drought, crunch into airy puffs at my feet and I choke on smoke that has consumed the southern Northwest Territories in a hotbed of wildfire emergencies.

“Oh, don’t think like that!” my brother says. “Think happy thoughts.”

 I love my only sibling deeply. Yet in July 2023 — a month before three encroaching wildfires force my family, the city of Yellowknife and surrounding Dene communities to evacuate — I need a safe place to talk about the darkness creeping into my head and heart. The birth of five grandchildren, with a sixth on the way, has sharpened my focus on the precarity of their futures inside an escalating climate crisis. The first babies were born into the confines of a global pandemic; their siblings arrived under sickened, orange-black skies from May to September. 

 The accumulation of carbon dioxide throughout almost three centuries of industrialism, extraction, colonialism, consumerism and capitalist greed has landed on my northern doorstep. I stare down the belly of that fiery beast as it tries to block my way into the subarctic taiga I have come to know and love. Temperatures near the Arctic Circle break 37.4 C. Ice on Great Slave Lake, the deepest in North America, melts early, while to the south the Hay River turns bone dry and waterfalls slow to trickles.

 For several years, the buzz of once-legendary swarms of mosquitoes and black flies have been replaced with eerie silence. In June, I stand on the quiet shores of the lake in front of my house and contemplate a life without loons. 

 This is my summer of awakening. My tipping point. The challenge becomes how to “be well” in this new climate-disrupted place (that is only going to get hotter) so I can serve it and the younger generations set to inherit the joys and sorrows yet to come.

 I’m scared and angry but ready for a fight, a reckoning. Big Oil has exhausted me. So, I face off with myself — a lonely, no-holds-barred psychological wrestle with grief.

The 2023 Summer of Smoke, during the world’s hottest year on record before 2024, saw more than 200 communities evacuated across Canada, 19 in the Northwest Territories. In one study on evacuations here, mental health emerged as the biggest challenge. People had “primary anxiety and depression” from the evacuation, “but there’s also the secondary consequences where you’re losing your income, or your kids aren’t in school for a month, or you’re losing your insurance or you’re separated from your friends and family,” says Yellowknife student researcher Kira Young. Many people talked of persistent post-traumatic stress and eco-anxiety after evacuation.

 I fully expected talk of climate change and action would be everywhere when we returned. There was initial talk of harrowing drives through smoke and flames down our only highway south to Alberta and what people did once they reached safety. But on the broader implications of the planetary health crisis: crickets. 

 There never seemed to be the right space or time to raise the issue of climate threats in social conversation, let alone discuss how they made me feel. I didn’t want to infect others with my bone-deep melancholy. “Did you know that six out of nine planetary boundaries needed to sustain life on Earth have already been breached, and oceans are perilously close to becoming the seventh?” is what I wanted to say. “Pass the salad,” is what came out. 

 People were struggling to get back to Business As Usual, because that’s what we do. That’s what we’ve always done. That’s why we’re in this hot mess.

 Business As Usual didn’t make sense. Science was saying we had already surpassed the Paris Agreement’s recommended limit of a 1.5 C global temperature increase past pre-industrial levels and are on course for a catastrophic increase of about 2.7 C by 2100 — quadruple that for the polar regions. Yet everything else in my life implored me to Buy! Travel! Consume! Keep dishing out those greenhouse gases!

 The western world’s growth imperative is the wrong playbook. In 1972, The Limits to Growth used early computer models to show if worldwide economic growth continued without regard for environmental costs, “we would reach and then overshoot the carrying capacity of the Earth at some point in the next one hundred years.” As predicted, we are starting to see those cracks with rising levels of poverty, pollution, water scarcity, food insecurity, forced displacement… the list goes on. 

 My life feels out of alignment because the systems supporting my life are misaligned. I isolate myself from social functions because the “not talking about it” feels like a betrayal to the urgent, COVID-level-degree of international crisis management I think we all should be lobbying for and coordinating.  

 Keep in mind, I’m doing none of that. From my deflated vantage point on the couch, weighted by a heaviness that feels like Mother Nature and all the innocents caught in armed crossfires everywhere are bearing down on my chest, I worry something is very wrong with me.