The wildfire ravaging Jasper is a monster of our own making

We don’t yet know the extent of the damage in Jasper, a mountain hamlet in the Rocky Mountains west of Edmonton. But based on photos and videos that have trickled out that damage is closer to unimaginable than it is severe. One clip shot from a truck driving through the village shows almost nothing but rubble and ash. There are burned out buildings and burned out cars, burned out hotels and burned out homes. Everything everywhere looks enveloped in lifeless grey.

Perhaps more than anything else, it is that visual that stuns. Smaller and less crowded than Banff, Jasper has always felt something like a secret kingdom, a magical world of imagined colours that appears, as if from a fairy tale, as the Prairies give way to the mountains in the Canadian West. Few who are lucky enough to visit the town, to walk the mountain paths that surround it, or to stare out at its cerulean lakes, come away less than stunned. It’s the kind of place that can change your conception of what a colour can be. It makes “blue” seem inadequate. It creates new depths of green.

To see that vivid world made monochrome by wildlfire is almost too much to bear. It is heartrending. It is shocking. But perhaps worst of all, it is no surprise.

It is impossible to say with certainty whether any one wildfire was caused by climate change. But we do know, unequivocally, that climate change is making wildfires more common, more intense and more destructive. As long as we continue to burn fossil fuels unabated, not just in this country but around the world, the number of wildfires in Canada will continue to increase. They will grow bigger and more severe. They will consume more towns, more nature, more treasures. They will create entire summers of fire, a new fifth season in this country, of ash and hot smoke, of wrecked homes and wrecked lives.

Pierre Martel, from Parks Canada, told reporters Thursday that firefighters were dealing with “a monster” in Jasper. But it is, at least to some extent, a monster of our own making. It would be negligent not to acknowledge that now. To ignore the role climate change is playing in Canadian wildfire season, as it happens, is to doom us to fires — like the one  that consumed Jasper this week, the one that ravaged Fort McMurray in 2016 or the one that flattened Lytton, B.C., in 2021 — forever more.

In the video that spread so widely Thursday, the truck slows at one point in front of a smoking shell of rubble. What’s left of the building is no more than a few feet high, a mess of incinerated debris. “There’s mom and dad’s house,” a man’s voice can be heard. Then the truck speeds up and drives away.

It is a reminder of the human-scale tragedy that wildfires bring. Every house destroyed in Jasper is a person’s home. It’s hard to imagine the pain, the shock and the fear of being forced to flee and having to wonder, from a cot in a community centre or two twin beds in a overcrowded motel, whether everything you left behind is gone.

Climate change is real. Climate change is devastating. The only question now is how much more of our unparalleled country, how many more homes and communities, how much nature and beauty, we are willing to lose before we start treating it that way.

Correction - July 26, 2024

This article was edited from a previous version that misstated the year in which Fort McMurray was ravaged by wildfire as 2011. In fact,  it was in May 2016.