Days are getting shorter now, and mornings colder. As I write this, the temperature is still warm in the afternoon, the air clear, with just the hint of Fall. The leaves on the trees in the West End are beginning to turn. The linden on Nelson Street outside our balcony always starts early, with the leaves of a few branches turning yellow and then gold, while the others still remain obstinately green. It’s a rhythm that I’ve become used to. As Fall deepens, and more leaves turn and begin to scatter, we’ll fly off to Singapore. But for now we can still hike in the mountains. In the last few weeks I’ve joined a weekly hiking group on the British Columbia Mountaineering Club (BCMC) Trail up Grouse Mountain, parallel to, but gentler and quieter than the better-known Grouse Grind. We climb over 700m in elevation in an hour and a half, then sit in the lodge at Grouse Mountain and have coffee for an hour before getting the gondola down. The hike isn’t beautiful in terms of views, but it is a well-maintained trail, rising through a lush second growth forest of hemlock, cedar, and Douglas fir. There are encouraging signs letting you know how far you have come and have to go, and, towards the top, a small memorial to two hikers, and then, for the first time, a welcome flat fifty metres of sandy road, before the very last section of the climb. I and my companions learn to pace ourselves. My particular struggle is to acknowledge my 63-year-old body and its silent limitations. If I don’t watch myself, I climb too quickly, unaware of age. The legs and the lungs still cope, but the heart begins to beat faster. I’ve a high level of cardiovascular fitness for my age, but I’m still cautious. If my heart rate is too high I’ll pause, drink water, look around. At the top of the trail I emerge strangely energised. The climb is strenuous enough, perhaps, to release endorphins, but not long enough to really cause fatigue.

In all this contact with nature, though, there’s a shadow that I didn’t feel before, when I first went hiking on the North Shore as a graduate student in the late 80s and early 90s. I look at the leaves in the West End, on the maples and the horse chestnuts in particular, and notice that they have a rim of red or brown. This isn’t caused by a change of season, but by drought. I look down at the reservoir above the Cleveland Dam from Grouse and I see a white bathtub rim of rock where the water level has fallen: the reservoir, in September, is well below full capacity. For a week earlier in the month, the winds changed and brought smoke from forest fires into the city. We’d wake to an eerie, orange light, and find the mountains shrouded in a grey-brown haze. Everywhere there was a smell of burning. After a week, rain finally came, and the winds changed. Blue skies returned. This year has been relatively cool and fire-free in the Lower Mainland, yet each summer there’s always a sense of anxiety. As that graduate student living in Point Grey in the early 90s, I’d read a two-week weather forecast in the morning newspaper for sunny days with glee. Now, a long line of golden suns on my weather app makes me uneasy. Climate change is already here, marked by the skeletons of dead cedar trees in the city parks, and yet we carry on as if nothing had changed.

Given this anxiety, it seemed appropriate to attend the recent screening of Nathan Grossman’s documentary film, Climate in Therapy, at the Pacific Cinematheque. The movie brings together seven scientists working on climate-related issues for a weekend of group therapy at an apparently intentionally shabby hotel in Secaucus, New Jersey. The shortness of the movie made it difficult to understand the trajectory or the effectiveness of the group therapy process. Watching the movie, my partner and I felt that the therapist, Richard Beck, wasn’t particularly effective: he moved too quickly with questions and activities that the group were not ready for, and he seemed to miss the subtext of what he was being told at times. And yet he did what was required, getting the group working together and then retreating from overt intervention to allow the group to take on its own dynamic and begin to solve its own problems. The group members dug deeper, from initial uncertainty, to exchanging truths about the way in which academia worked – the difficulties faced by women of colour, and scientists from the Global South – and then into emotions, which often focused on feelings of helplessness in the face of climate change. The sharing of experiences created in the circle offered, as it so often does in groups I’ve facilitated or participated in, feelings of solidarity and hope. 

The movie itself also had a therapeutic function for its audience. It was shown as part of the Cinematheque’s Frames of Mind series of films focusing on mental health, and was followed by speaker from Doctors for Planetary Health–West Coast and the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment. Many of the attendees were from these organisations, too and, as often at the Cinematheque, it was an older crowd: in our early sixties, we may even have been younger that the average age. Yet it was also sobering to hear statistics, and to reflect in particular on how we might modify our lifestyles to mitigate climate change. In many ways my partner and I do quite well: we recycle and compost, as all Vancouver households do, and we go further by consciously recycling soft plastics, which don’t have a place in the city-contracted recycling. We darn and mend clothes where possible, and we use our car infrequently, perhaps once or twice a week to get to the North Shore, most recently for those hiking trips. For everyday mobility, shopping, visits to the gym or to the university, we cycle. I don’t eat red meat and so we have a largely fish and plant-based diet, although I do have a weakness for dairy products. And yet the elephant in the room is the flying we do each year: one round-trip to Singapore, and one transatlantic trip to the UK every two years. It’s sobering that these infrequent flights put a huge amount of carbon into the atmosphere: using the ICA Carbon Admissions Calculator this is about 2000 KG of carbon emissions a year. Assessing my lifestyle with the Global Footprint Network’s calculator, I’m using three times what I should to be sustainable, while living a lifestyle that doesn’t seem, in Canada or Singapore at least, by any means excessive. 

                  In a global perspective, too, we seem not to be doing too well. US President Donald Trump’s recent address to the United Nations dwelled on a baseless conviction that climate change was the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” Other, more rational actors, seem also to be indulging in magical thinking. Just before the provincial election in British Columbia last year, the governing New Democratic Party abandoned its commitment to the carbon charge, an effective way of managing carbon emissions originally introduced by a centre-right provincial government. But if things are at their worst now, I do always think of Karl Polanyi, and the notion of a double movement, of some kind of correction of course brought about by a crisis in the current order when it’s still not too late. Many comments on the film talked of the importance of hope, but not a blind hope, and this brought to my mind a quotation that I think I’ve shared before. I take it out of context, certainly, and more as an aid to action than a definitive invocation, but it’s still an important touchstone:  the notion popularized by Antonio Gramsci of the pessimism of the intellect, but the optimism of the will.