Do We Have a Future?
Heads-up: This post is a bit of a bummer so stay away if you’re looking for something positive.
When I went to open the bedroom curtains this morning, I did not expect the outside to look like it was lit by a giant night lamp.
This is a photo I took in the apartment at 10 a.m.:
And here’s our backyard:
The photos don’t do it justice, so I measured the colour temperature of the outside with a white balance card:
It’s 3000K outside right now! A normal sunny day is typically around 5600K.
For those who might not be familiar with white balance or colour temperature, it’s basically a value that tells you how “white (think daylight)” “blue (think after sunset, or blue hour)” or “warm (think night lamp)” a light is, and it’s commonly used in video production and photography.
So Toronto—my city—is currently as yellow as your typical night light.
We currently have the worst air quality in the world:
It seems that Canada has been having really bad wildfires every year since 2023. I understand that Canada has always had wildfires, but for the 13 years I’m in Toronto, 2023 was the year when I first became aware of wildfires because they were bad enough to affect Toronto1 (and NYC).
Added to that is the record-breaking heatwaves that Ontario has been experiencing. I grew up in southern China, where the climate is much warmer and more humid than that in Toronto. I always remember summers being really hot there, and yet I’d never felt anything as hot and stifling as this past late June/early July in Toronto.
My wife and I would like to have a baby some time in the future, but stuff like this makes me question if there’s even a point. How long does humanity have? Will there still be a good future for the next generations? Will we be potentially raising a human into a future that only gets worse than ours?
Do we, as 30-year-olds, have a future?
At the same time, I’m also aware that I’m only 30 and have been living a relatively privileged life. I try to remind myself that there’re generations before me that definitely experienced global, political and/or environmental events that were much worse than having bad air quality for maybe just a few weeks in a year. I’m aware that there’re people in active war-torn regions right now; I’m aware that there’re cities and regions in developed countries like Canada that have been dealing with air pollution from wildfires on a regular basis for years; I’m aware that there are many cities in the world where the air quality is consistently bad—maybe what Toronto is experiencing is not that different than their norm.
To some, perhaps I’m overreacting—perhaps I am, but I do know one thing: For a city whose air quality never used to be regularly affected by wildfires and whose summers never used to have insane heatwaves, this is not normal and a really bad sign.
I hope that as the negative impacts of climate change start to affect the daily lives of more people in increasingly more places, more will finally take it seriously and take actions—big or small—to protect our planet: Vote in politicians with sensible environmental policies, spend your money at establishments that care about the environment, rely less on AI to do stuff you can easily do yourself etc.
In the meantime, I’m ordering some more filters for my air purifier while I attempt to take comfort in words that my colleagues, who are over a decade older than me, said to me: “Things will get better.”
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Is it bad that I only became aware of Canada’s wildfires because the smoke affected Toronto? Absolutely yes, it is bad. And I think this is a big issue when it comes to support for anything relating to sustainability and our planet—people don’t really care enough or at all until they’re directly affected. I’m trying to be better at this. That said, I still believe that the richest of the rich and their corporations have been doing the most damage to the environment, and that they’re also the ones who have the means to make the most meaningful impact on fighting climate change.↩