FLAME ON

I always like to recount Suzuki's story about smog. How when shooting an episode of The Nature of Things he and his crew went and sat at a Toronto hospital and then interviewed parents as they drove up to emergency with their kids suffering respiratory distress. He talked to them about smog. Explained that it isn't a natural disaster, a fact of life, something we are forced to live with, but something we have to go out every day and make manufacture. And when its getting bad we, so curiously, seem to choose more of the same once again. He wondered if they realized they were the cause, not some foreign agent. The ultimate question being: would they limit their driving or stop driving altogether or just get a far more efficient vehicle to save their child's life or just give them fewer extreme bouts of emergency room-worthy asthma?

I'd like David to perform his smog routine with wildfires. Simultaneous with blazes across the Northwest Territories and British Columbia, we all just watched a conflagration take an entire village in Maui. I'd love to see him in his white curls standing on a highway beside a row of stopped cars and trucks, with flames licking up trees and telephone poles, embers filling the sky like a hellish orange blizzard. He would knock on a driver's window. They would open just a crack and he would shove in a CBC microphone:

DS: Whether you believe that the ultimate cause of wildfires is anthropogenic climate change (induced by burning fossil fuels) or that most wildfires are anthropogenic (and disproportionately enabled or caused by automobiles, with the conditions for those fires, of course, made worse by climate change), when do you stop driving? After your house burns to the ground? When the whole town goes up in smoke? Never, because you weren't the one responsible (or, at least, no one will ever connect the dots between your behaviour and any specific event)?

Driver: I don't know. Why do you ask?

DS: Well, I ask because it seems like motorists are a very significant source of the problem. And you're here in your SUV in the middle of it.

Driver: Seems to me that if anyone is to blame it would be the big oil and gas companies, no?

DS: That is the popular assessment. But oil and gas companies aren't burning this stuff. Are they? And government subsidies aren't making it combust, either. Right? Nor are the bankers who also get the blame.

Driver: So that's your 'guns don't kill people...' argument?

DS: Sure. And, look, I found you and your neighbours here, fleeing the scene, smoking tailpipes and all.

Driver: I guess that makes you the ambulance chasing reporter?

DS: In a sense. But I'm not here catching dramatic scenes for a tabloid. I'm more like an investigator or a forensic anthropologist. I'm trying to figure out what happened and why. I'm concerned with what's motivating folks to sustain this costly, needless, archaic, North America-only habit. So what do you think keeps you in your car?

Driver: I think— I don't know. I think I have other concerns, other more pressing things, less abstract things, directly impacting my day-to-day. Ya know?

DS: Right. And isn't that always the case? I mean, isn't that how we got here? 'It's so much bigger than me.' 'It doesn't seem like my responsibility.' 'I can't change or even impact this thing.' 'Shouldn't government be regulating things to keep us safe?' And two billion people say so in unison while stuck in the twice-daily rush hour traffic they chose to co-author and perform with their fellow motorists.

Driver: Maybe. I also support Canada's Oil Sands.

DS: Anyone who wants to support the Tar Sands is welcome to do so. You could work up there; you could dig a hole in your backyard and fill it with bitumen; build a tar sandbox for your kids; use Alberta black in place of kitty litter; keep half a ton in your pick-up or under your bed; give away kegs of it to everyone you know at Christmas and birthdays... Sure, rather than giving your disposable income to Doctors Without Borders or UNICEF, you could gift it to British Petroleum or Shell. Go nuts. My question is: why burn it? You can own a gun but do you need to spray bullets from your patio twice daily during the week and all day on the weekends?

Driver: Well, it's my right.

DS: Is it?

Driver: Yes.

DS: Seems more like a privilege.

Driver: No.

DS: Okay. But it is in the same way it's your right to blast your stereo; piss in the swimming pool; share secondhand cigarette smoke with your toddler and your co-workers; or pass on the flu or meningitis to your grandmother... Certainly. None of that is technically illegal. Doing so just contributes, in your own small and special way, to degrading everyone else's experience. And it does so while doing nothing for you that couldn't be done in a far better way.

Driver: It's my right.

DS: Sure. And it just advertises to the world that you're a uncaring shithead.

Driver: Well, it has been lovely chatting with you.

She rolls up her window and pulls forward, revealing her 'I love Alta beef' bumper sticker. The next car pulls up. David smiles and leans toward the driver with is mic (whose fuzzy wind sheath has, unbeknownst to him, caught a smouldering ember and is about to transform is mic into a torch.) The window rolls down just a crack.

DS: How are you enjoying this hellscape of your own making?

Driver: What?

DS: You're a shithead.

The evacuee rolls up their window, raises a clenched fist to the window and slowly reveals a middle finger.

*Whoosh* (The microphone becomes a ball of flames.)

—Aaaand scene.