I sincerely hope that campaigners are able to make these wildfires into the “critical juncture” we’re all waiting for. But doing so will require taking an approach that makes one thing clear: human social structures exist within complex ecological systems. We can’t solve systemic problems in silos, or with a reductive focus on individual facets of the much bigger, more fearsome, beast.

We are often told by the political class in Ottawa that more aggressive decarbonization is magical thinking. The reality, of course, is that imagining capitalism can continue on its current path with nothing more than an engine swap is magical thinking. And it’s a fantasy based on the quantitative results of modelling rooted in the assumption that nothing can fundamentally change.

We are now living in a dangerously warmed climate. That means two things: first, that climate adaptation—infrastructure and policy decisions focused on mitigating the harm that our warming climate is causing—is not some far-off question. We need to be preparing for the next unprecedented heat wave, flood or fire as though it were coming this summer—because it very well might be.

Ultimately, what it would take for this to be a radical campaign in BC is a shift in framing: are we simply trying to incrementally improve worker wellbeing and, maybe, cut a few tonnes of carbon emissions? Or are we trying to take a step towards transforming our ecologically unsustainable class society by moving away from the capitalist growth imperative?

The coincident timing of sawmill closures and the BC government’s plans to improve the sustainability of the province’s logging sector suggests that the industry isn’t just responding to market conditions; it’s sacrificing workers and communities as a political threat designed to scare Premier David Eby out of implementing any meaningful new regulations.

The Beaver Lake Cree nation’s battle over Treaty rights and industrial overdevelopment is one of the core stories featured in Toronto publisher Between the Lines’ The End of This World: Climate Justice in So-Called Canada. According to the authors, it illustrates both where the climate justice movement needs to go and, at least partially, how we get there.

Rachel Carson gave us a vivid and compelling description of the barren world that the agrochemical industry was creating. But hidden within that was a clear analysis of why it was happening: the inherent drive to accumulation within capitalism and the willingness of corporations and capitalists to use every tool available to them, including the state itself, to create markets and grow profit.

Canada’s efforts to be the last country producing oil have led to a strategic alliance with a transnational energy industry interested only in ensuring it can keep producing fossil fuels ad infinitum. Which means that despite the country’s stated commitments on climate change, Canada is wielding its power to ensure that the world fails to limit warming to less than two degrees.

Earlier this month, a pair of young activists with a group called Just Stop Oil threw soup on a Van Gogh painting at a gallery in London. As Nick Gottlieb writes, we need to be taking actions that confront and challenge power structures in direct ways, and it is important these activists put it all on the line in an attempt to do just that.

The fossil fuel industry’s decades long campaign to discredit climate science and block climate action hasn’t come to an end, it’s just reached a new phase. The industry, with its army of public relations firms, is painting itself as an ally in the fight against climate change. Governments like Canada’s are helping them do it, gaslighting us at every opportunity.