I think about “climate injustice” a lot, but I rarely am able to experience it at any concrete way. Sometimes climate injustice feels like just far away definition, some sad yet unsurprising news when vulnerable communities devastated by extreme weather or food shortages caused by climate change.

I’ve had pretty opposite examples of climate injustice this summer. The first was in July, when I spent a week in Haiti working on some community projects with a small non-profit.

I went to Haiti not necessarily under the rationale that I would be helping people (although I was), but I went as a learning experience. I went with a small organization called To Love a Child, who I found through my Mom's involvement with them. Weeks before the trip, I was so anxious that I could barely sleep. Why was I deliberately going to a very impoverished country, with plenty of tropical diseases, "rustic" amenities at best, to supposedly help people I had never met before? In a country plagued with political and natural resource problems, stemming from a colonized and oppressive history, how could I be sure that I was actually contributing to a real solution, instead of just being a well-off white girl imposing her values and culture on others? How could I really know that what I was doing was meaningful?

I found myself in a beautiful little village.

My profession is teaching environmental science and coordinating sustainability projects; in my free time I work with Climate Justice Montreal to put on events and workshops educating and mobilizing people about climate change. It's easy to get discouraged, and it's easy sometimes to drown in the perpetually bad news. But here, in the village, things seemed calm. People seemed genuinely content; they had a strong connection to their faith and community. Kids shared things with each other without being told, adults watched out for kids that weren't their own. Since many people were unemployed, they had time to sit around and talk and laugh with each other. Instead of all being on our individual cell phones or laptops, there was nothing to do in the evening but play games with the local kids and chat. Chickens strutted through my bedroom and settled on my pillow. There were no distractions; everyone was present, doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing. I guess I was expecting everything to be depressed or depressing, but I didn't find that at all.

Instead, I felt sad for the people back home – normal people, maybe like you and sometimes me, working 60 hour weeks, uncomfortable when the wifi's down, feeling completely empty the second they finally notice the crushing loneliness that surrounds them.

I expected to be struck by the destitution of the situation, but I found its issues more nuanced. At first in the village, I noticed the garbage, since it's the most obvious. There's no garbage removal services or any real alternative to littering or burning it, and plastic is forever. Then I noticed the lack of freshwater. People bathed in the river and if lucky they had a latrine; if they wanted water they would have to carry it on their head in buckets long distances up the mountains. Okay, garbage, freshwater, these are problems. Also the heat - it was the dry season, and it was scorching the crops. The ground was hilly, often eroded and infertile. People lived on small plots around the mountains and survived off of subsistence farming. There wasn't a grocery store, or a corner store to buy food in town - it required a vehicle, which many people in the village didn't have. That would require money, and how could people afford such an expense? Most people lived in simple wooden huts with tin roofs, and their whole family lived in a space the size of my bedroom back home.

Pollution, scarcity of water, infertility of the soil, drought, food insecurity, lack of medical care. No running water or electricity. Families often couldn't afford to send their children to primary or secondary school; most of the people in the village were illiterate.

Despite its serenity, this is a vulnerable place. As hard as it was for me to imagine how people currently manage to acquire the basics necessary for daily survival, it suddenly hit me - this is climate injustice. Before my trip, I had been curious to ask Haitians their view on climate change. But I found myself unable to bring it up when I was there, even with the people my age that I befriended. I didn’t know how to bring it up. “So...by the way, how do you feel about the world getting hotter, which will inevitably make conditions a whole lot tougher around here?”  I had a hard time imagining the studies I had read back home about how the temperatures in tropical regions would drastically increase in the next few decades. It just didn’t seem real. It was nearly impossible to comprehend how things might get significantly worse for the people here who already struggled for daily necessities. As we sang Hallelujah in the makeshift wooden church, wide-eyed little girls in their Sunday best turned around to stare at us, and I blinked away my tears. It was so incredibly unfair.

I expected to be culture shocked when I got back from Haiti. Actually, I had prepared myself for a week of feeling terribly sad about what I had just witnessed. I felt really strange on the way back home- like I had just glimpsed a completely different, unbelievable world, yet I knew that I would be unable to articulate to everyone back home what it was really like. But, like most humans, I adjusted pretty fast. I made it back to my apartment, snuggled into my own bed, and life went back normal.

After a few weeks, it was like I hadn’t gone at all.

I was surprised by just how absolutely massive the boat was – there were three bars, two theatres, four hot tubs, two pools, a spa, a gym, and a whole bunch of free restaurants. My bed was magically remade when I entered my room in the evening, with a little chocolate resting on my pillow. Sometimes it felt like being at summer camp, with evening activities led by an animator brimming with fake enthusiasm. When each activity came to a close, the next logical way to pass time was to go back to the buffet. Eating copious amounts of food was a serious, continual event on the cruise, and it felt like being handed the keys to a candy store.

When our boat docked in Juneau, I had some time to walk around town by myself. The coastal towns in Alaska are small, packed with tourist shops and tour companies – grizzly viewing, whale watching, ziplines, train rides. Most of the salespeople and tour guides were seasonal workers from out of state. On my walk, I passed  bright jewellery stores and tacky souvenir shops. Most of the windows displayed Native-inspired potholders, key chains, tshirts, postcards, every possible cheesy thing. I was looking for something more authentic, a shop with stuff made by local people that were paid fairly for their work. Something more respectful of the culture than cheap make your own moccasin kits and “Alaskan Native friend” dolls with fur trim and big pretty eyes.

Uninterested, I kept walking through the crowed, rainy streets. I passed a small community center nestled in the shops. And as I glanced in the window, I saw a packed room of mostly Indigenous folks eating dinner. I noticed the emergency soup kitchen sign in the window. I paused to look around at the town – the village was flooded literally thousands of mostly white, overfed tourists, seeking a souvenir of a frontier fantasy or curio of Native Alaska, and here were a room full of people presumably actually from the area, invisibly eating at a soup kitchen. When the tourist season ends soon, the wealthy shopkeepers will close their doors, the guides will fly back home, and the boats in harbour won’t dump hordes of visitors into the town.
I’m pretty sure the soup kitchen will still be open.

The next day, the cruise ship was heading up through Glacier National Park, so we were asked to be extra careful not to let litter blow overboard. I contained my inner sarcasm, something about how out of all of the steps we could take to preserve the pristine Arctic, maybe could we please not litter? I felt a surreal disconnect of being on a boat whose sole purpose is to help people over-consume in the name of pleasure, watching melting glaciers calve off into the ocean as hundreds of people stare out windows with their cameras. Literally perpetuating and documenting our demise.
Wait, let me take a selfie.

I thought to back to the month before, the conversations I had in French with the Haitians I met during my trip. It seemed like it would be kind of funny to the trade situations of one of the rich women on the boat with one of the women I met in the village. It would be hilarious... if it wasn’t so absurd that it’s even possible that two humans living on the same planet can have such diametrically opposite realities.

To be on a monstrous cruise boat, the epitome of consumption, grazing our way to a National Park to watch climate change melt the glaciers into the sea – isn’t this the American Dream?

I hesitate to say that most of the tourists on the boat are immune to climate change impacts, but we’re definitely insulated. And this is climate injustice.

Last year, I struggled with balancing my multiple part-time jobs, a relationship, my climate justice volunteer work, and spending time with friends, family, a needy cat. I've gotten much better at it these past few months, and although most of the time things seem under control, sometimes I still feel like I'm pulled in too many directions, and I'm not sure where the source of this energy is coming from. Over the summer, I bought this beautiful poster by the Beehive Collective that says "For the long haul", which I framed and put on my wall as a reminder to pace myself. I can't save everything by tomorrow, I can't save everything in a year, and I'm not even entirely sure I can save anything ever.

I've been incredibly lucky in my life to have so much privilege and purpose for living. But I find it hard to have an endless source of positive energy. Sometimes it feels so difficult to feel optimistic, to wake up every and keep fighting, to care so deeply for people and places that I will inevitably lose. Sometimes it feels that I am putting so much of myself into people or projects that I love, and they end up breaking my heart.

Some days I find myself angry - angry about oppression, angry about racism, sexism, homophobia that I see around me almost every day, and what's perhaps increasingly more frustrating is not the overt oppression that most of us would readily recognize, but the millions of small ways that we keep the hetero-normative, white patriarchy systems in place, the systems that are built to keep things the way they are. I become frustrated with my ability to explain these issues to people who haven't been exposed to them before, especially in French. I become frustrated with being frustrated itself, since I feel that being an angry activist is alienating to others, isn't a good way to engage people, and also it just feels shitty to be angry and offended all of the time.

Where can I find the strength?

For some people, that strength comes from community or a partner or family, and certainly some of my strength comes from that as well.

But I think for me, a lot of that strength comes from the land. From standing quietly in the forest when it's snowing, with hardly any sound except the beating of my own heart. From discovering a track or a flower. From catching a glimpse of a deer running away from me, which reminds me that all of my actions have repercussions. From watching the bees in my hive bring in pollen, dancing for their sisters to show them the way. From the pride and awe in observing a seed that I planted grow into a carrot that I plucked from the earth to feed myself.

Those moments have always seemed so heavy with meaning, but I find them so far away in the city. I live downtown: instead of owls and coyotes calling to me from autumn open windows, I fall asleep to sirens and snow plow trucks and drunk people screaming outside my window. My attempts at indoor gardening end in my cat knocking dirt all over the table. I walk to work enviously looking up at the mountain, torn between escaping and making a living at my sustainability job.

Maybe all of this writing means that I just need to escape to the cottage again, that I need to spend more quiet time outside. I'm insanely lucky to have grown up with acres and acres to safely explore, and weekends at my cottage for sure at times is the only thing that keeps me sane. When I leave the land on Sunday evenings to head back to the city, I make my feet leave, get in the car, but my heart stays.

In some twisted way, the only way to save the land I love is by leaving it. For now, all of my work and friends and community are in the city. To fight the pipeline that threatens my riverbank, to fight climate change which threatens my forest, to learn the skills to fight well and fight forever, I need to be here.

When I get back to the mountains, it takes some time to quiet my mind. But soon, my thoughts slow, I notice more around me, it's easier to stay still. I feel reconnected, and I know that I can keep going.

And sometimes, if I'm being honest, sometimes when I'm at the riverbank all alone, I whisper, "Thank you. It's all for you."

Two years ago, I got a motion sensor camera that attaches to a tree and takes photos of animals that walk by. It's the best! It's so fun to check on the camera at my cottage every few weeks and see what has been in the area.
I move it around from time to time, trying to find the most active areas. I've seen tons of deer, turkeys, some coyotes, foxes, ducks, an otter, a mink, a fisher, and beavers. Especially this past fall, there were so many apples thanks to the extra beehives I have. The deer love those apples.
I'm still waiting to get a bear or (way less likely) a cougar!

My bees survived the winter, luckily! I had wrapped them in sheets of thick styrofoam and geotextile and made sure they were full of honey and pollen so they had enough food for the winter. I guess it paid off, since both hives were fairly strong as spring emerged.

I started with two hives, and I had named them based on their collective temperament - Rose is the one on the left since it's a stronger colony and also a bit more aggressive. Daphne is on the right since the queen is less productive, so there are less bees, and they're more docile. Rose was the only one that produced enough honey last year for me to harvest (Daphne was a little slow getting off the ground), so I was expecting that it would continue to be pretty productive this year. When I say "productive", I mean that the queen lays a lot of eggs, so there are more worker bees, which means more worker bees make more honey.

If I was keeping hives to make money or to have all of the honey I could possibly use, I would replace my less productive hive with a new queen so that I could harvest honey from both hives. But my nerdy biology goal is to raise bees that are adapted to my area, by splitting the strong hives as they grow and letting them make their own queen instead of continuously buying queens from a breeder, as most people do. It's a bit more risky to let the bees make their own queen, since then it needs to mate with males in the area (instead of coming inseminated already, as is when you buy them from a breeder), and it can get killed when it leaves the hive for this mating mission.

So over the weekend, I built a third hive. I'm not very mechanically minded so this actually took me a few hours to hammer all of the pieces together and paint them. Once it was all set up and the linseed oil I used was dry (I use linseed oil because it's less toxic than paint), I transferred a few frames from the strong hive into the new hive. Usually people put four or five frames from the old hive into the new hive, and those frames need to include honey (to give the new colony extra food if they need it), capped brood and eggs (developing worker bees so the population is continually replenished), adult worker bees, and a new queen cell. By chance, I found that the bees had been growing a new queen in a queen cell for their strong hive, which is a sign that they would have swarmed. Swarming is when the hive is too full or small for everyone, so the queen and a cluster of worker bees take off to start a new home, leaving more room for the new queen and rest of the workers.

Once I put five frames from the Rose hive into the new hive (still trying to figure out a name for the new one), I added empty frames to make sure the hive was full, then I closed the lid. This is my first time splitting a colony, so I kind of saw it as an experiment - we'll see if it works!

A few weeks ago, some of us working on the Line 9 pipeline issue in Montreal headed down to Portland, Maine. Line 9 currently goes from Sarnia to a refinery in the east end of Montreal, and currently flows east to west. In November, Enbridge applied to the National Energy Board to increase the barrels per day capacity and to reverse the flow from west to east to accommodate oil from the tar sands. Although the initial plan to also reverse the Montreal Portland Pipeline from Montreal to Portland was defeated in 2008, it has resurfaced recently.

The problem with this heavy crude (or diluted bitumen) is that it's so viscous that they have to add toxic chemicals to get it to flow through the pipes. Besides the fact that the tar sands will basically undo any changes Canadians do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, this diluted bitumen is especially gross when it leaks since the oil sinks in the water and the chemicals (known carcinogens) evaporate in the air and can be smelled from miles away. How do we know this will happen? It's already happened with a massive spill in Michigan and more recently, Arkansas, where the pipeline was very similar to the existing line from Montreal to Maine.


On our way back from Portland to Montreal, we decided to follow the pipeline route (which you can see here). And what we found shocked me.

But first, we stopped at the Cape Elizabeth lighthouse, just a few miles outside Portland.

After watching the huge waves for a while, we started our 7 hour trip back to Montreal. I was told that I wouldn't believe our first stop - the "tank farm" where energy companies store oil in huge silos before transporting it to the Portland Pier 2. We had trouble finding Hill Street where Portland Montreal Pipeline's tank farm is located, but when we did, I couldn't believe it was real.

There were tanks full of oil - right in a residential area in South Portland. The whole neighbourhood reeked of gasoline, like there was an open can of gas in front of me.
 
I couldn't believe that seemingly normal looking houses were yards away from giant oil tanks.
I think I went white when I saw a kids' playground right on the other side of the fence.

How could South Portland stand for this? It might help that Portland Montreal Pipeline Limited bought the town a library.

Thoroughly shaken, we drove northwards up through Raymond to get lunch. We stopped at a super cute and delicious deli that...the pipeline almost literally ran right through.

We continued on through Casco, Waterford, and Bethel which passed municipal resolutions against tar sands oil flowing through the pipeline in their towns. And also where 1,900 litres of oil spilled from the pipeline in 1990.
The road crossed into New Hampshire, where we drove past the Shelburne Pumping Station, just yards away from the Androscoggin River. It's an important river for fishing and tourism in the area that provides drinking water to people, and the pipeline crosses under the water twice.

We passed Randolf, New Hampire, which is the first place that the Portland Montreal PipeLine company showed up for a public meeting in November.

Not far past the pumping station, we passed areas in Vermont that have previously had oil spills due to corrosion or natural forces. Close to the spillage areas, the pipeline crosses the Connecticut River, the largest and longest river in New England.

One of our last stops was the Highwater Pumping Station right on the border of Quebec and Vermont. It's on the Quebec side, so it's strange that some of the signs are only in English. The BB gun holes in the nearby signs were a little disconcerting too.

On the way back to Montreal, we passed the pipeline crossing through the town of Sutton, just a few miles from my family's cottage.

My trip ended at the cottage, where my dad was busy making maple syrup. The next morning, I headed down to the river, where we've seen otters, mink, and beavers.

I have spent so many happy days by this river, mesmerized by the splendour of nature around me. There are oil spills around the country every other day, and it breaks my heart to think of the pipeline taking this place too.