To no one’s surprise, there’s been an awfully wide range of responses to what caused the catastrophic Fort McMurray wildfires.
Some blame climate change. Others peg it on the El Niño and forest management techniques. Still more suggest that now’s simply not the time to be having such a conversation.
But the one thing that appears to unite all sides is “our” alleged complicity in it as North American consumers.
For instance, the National Post’s Jen Gerson argued in a May 5 piece: “We are all responsible for climate change. Fort McMurray simply produces some of the products we all consume.”
On the same day, Elizabeth Kolbert — author of The Sixth Extinction and Field Notes from a Catastrophe — wrote in the New Yorker: “We are all consumers of oil, not to mention coal and natural gas, which means that we’ve all contributed to the latest inferno. We need to own up to our responsibility and then we need to do something about it.”
Such rhetoric is technically correct. There’s no question that if everyone on earth lived an average North American lifestyle, we’d need four planets to sustain the population.