At an annual general meeting in Lethbridge for the largest irrigation district in Canada, it’s standing room only.
These AGMs for the St. Mary River Irrigation District, located in southern Alberta, are normally sleepy affairs. But this year is different as the province is staring down challenging drought conditions.
What’s expected today is big news for the 200-odd people filing into the room, some wearing jackets bearing the names of their respective operations.
Semi-arid southern Alberta, which relies heavily on irrigation, is expected to be hit with particular challenges — and new data from Environment and Climate Change Canada paints a striking picture of Canada’s Prairies.
Its always scary to see the impacts of climate change on an individual basis.
No one here, especially those reading these articles, were around then. All we can do it mitigate and reduce future impact.
Part of that is understanding that shits gonna get expensive for us. BUT if people collectively push against the government and complain about things like high food prices (when driven by actual food scarcities, not ‘inflation’ and corporate greed), the response will be to offload problems to another generation by stealing water from elsewhere, increased use of fossil fuels, or some other short term stop gap.
We as a society will not get the same life our parents and grandparents had. Full stop. If we try to, we will fuck things up even more for the next generation. It sucks, but I don’t see another way around it. It can still be a good life, but we need to change a whole lot to get there.