May 01, 2025

Letter to the Editor: May 4 to 10 this year is Emergency Preparedness Week

LETTER TO THE EDITOR — May 4 to 10 this year is Emergency Preparedness Week. In the welter of special 'Weeks' in a year, this one is easy to miss. It doesn’t have the warm ring of 'Maple Syrup Week' or 'Be Kind to Your Gerbil Week.'

But it’s an important week anyway, and a week that will be more important as climate change increasingly claws its way across each calendar. The evidence supporting this claim is overwhelming and it is relentless.

So here’s our new reality. Adverse weather events will become more common and more severe, here and globally.

The weatherperson and Saint Swithin, the patron saint of weather, can’t be blamed. We are to blame. We who are filling our atmosphere with insidious filth. We did it. Not 'we' the hapless individual or family or village or neighborhood, but 'we' the political and economic systems that allow — or even encourage — some of our corporations and politicians to hurt the rest of us for the sake of another short-term dollar or vote.

So even before we have reason to stop blaming ourselves and stop doing the wrong things, we are still stuck with the horrid certainty that we will have more and much worse floods, storms, heat waves, droughts.

Are we ready for it? Have our governments and our civic organizations done what they can do to soften the blows that will fall? Have we told them to take on this task? Have we revived our sense of caring for each other that we will need as we fall or survive at a time when the very air around us is becoming as much enemy as friend?

These are questions worth asking during Emergency Preparedness Week. They are worth answering every week thereafter, even as we tell our politicians to turn off the foul faucets that carry this travesty toward us in the first place.

John Butler,
Port Law, Grey Highlands

 

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