Evidentia

There is something shrill, apocalyptic and futile about a lot of media coverage of climate change these days. I guess fear helps sell newspapers.

On the one hand, we are racing from one gloomy end-of-the-world prediction to another; climate change is presented as irreversible; it is almost too late to do anything; so why do anything at all, since we are all going to hell in a hand basket?

On the other hand, some people deny the existence of climate change.

Actually, climate change is nothing new. It is a leitmotiv underlying the most important human migrations.

The image* above, created from two different photographs by my daughter Iona Fournier-Tombs, shows beluga whales swimming past the skyline of Montreal, from the vantage point of the Lookout on Mount Royal. This image is not meant to suggest Montreal is some New Atlantis, a mythical city lying at the bottom of the ocean! Instead, it serves as a reminder that 13,000-10,000 years ago, what is now Montreal, and much of the Ottawa-St. Lawrence lowland as well as northern Vermont, lay under the Champlain Sea – a brackish sea 150 metres deep, with a surface area of 55,000 km², or about the size of Lakes Superior and Huron combined.

The Champlain Sea was hemmed in by the Frontenac Arch of eastern Ontario, the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, and the Appalachian Highlands of Quebec’s Eastern Townships. It was only a temporary sea. But it lasted for about 3,000 years – about the length of time between the fall of Troy, as recounted by Homer, and today. So by human standards, the Champlain Sea was long-lasting.

I like to picture my Algonquian ancestors, paddling in some early canoe around the barely exposed summit of Mount Royal (83 metres above sea level at the time, 233 metres today), among icebergs calved by the three-km. thick Laurentian ice sheet lying to the north, ready to snag a beluga whale. Of course, Proto-Algonquian, as a language, is believed to go back 2,500 or 3,000 years, so nobody can say whether there were any Proto-Algonquians paddling around in the Champlain Sea. But the whales were definitely there. The fossil of a 50-tonne bowhead whale was located just west of Ottawa, and Charlotte the “Vermont Whale”, a beluga, was unearthed between Burlington and Rutland along the eastern shores of Lake Champlain in 1849.

Eventually, the Laurentian ice sheet retreated and the basin under the Champlain Sea began to rise, due to post-glacial rebound (once glaciers retreat, land masses previously depressed by the ice begin to rise again).

Anyone paddling around the Champlain Sea would have said, “may this sea never cease to provide me with whale meat.” So much melt water from the Laurentian ice sheet poured in the sea that it eventually became a lake, then it drained out towards the ocean at Quebec City. This created new opportunities – post-glacial lakes, and soils in the St. Lawrence lowland that are particularly rich in clay and good for farming.

When I hear about climate change nowadays, I can’t think of any place that has experienced change as radical as the site of Montreal itself – lying crushed under three km. of ice, then at the bottom of a sea, then at the bottom of a freshwater lake, then on a verdant lowland plain.

In fact, climate change, even in the brief span of our own life time, is staring us in the face. It is measurable and we humans have definitely contributed to it. I doubt whether we are able to reverse a planetary process of such enormous scale.

Our species has been by turns opportunistic, adaptable, creative, exploitative and destructive, but we have always been hopeful that life will continue. How can we strike a better balance with nature, conserve energy and turn to renewable resources, instead of plundering and despoiling the planet? How should we prepare for environmental changes still to come?

In upcoming blogs, Evidentia will be addressing these questions.

* The photograph of the Montreal skyline was taken at the Lookout by David Iliff, for WikiMedia. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.