When the Sky Changed Colour

Toronto looked familiar.

The CN Tower still stood above the skyline. Ferries crossed Lake Ontario as they always had. Cyclists followed the Martin Goodman Trail, and visitors wandered along Queens Quay carrying coffee cups and cameras.

Yet something invisible had altered the city.

The horizon disappeared behind an amber veil. Buildings that normally seemed close enough to touch faded into smoke. Even the sunlight appeared uncertain, as though it no longer wished to reach the ground.

The city itself had not changed.

The air had.

Within hours, conversations across Toronto shifted. We checked the air quality index before stepping outside. Parents wondered whether children should remain indoors. Masks quietly reappeared.

The smoke arrived in our lungs.

But it had entered our words long before that.

Without noticing, we began speaking of forests as fuel, landscapes as resources, and the natural world as something existing beyond the edges of our cities—as though what happened hundreds of kilometres away had little to do with the lives we were living beside Lake Ontario.

The smoke exposed more than our atmosphere.

It exposed our imagination.

When We Called the Earth Mother

Long before satellites observed forests from space, before climate reports calculated emissions, and before economists measured the value of natural resources, many civilizations imagined the Earth very differently.

They imagined her as a mother.

The Greeks spoke of Gaia.

Many Indigenous nations across North America understood the land not as property but as a relationship—one sustained through reciprocity, gratitude, and responsibility. Although traditions differed from nation to nation, many shared a conviction that human beings belonged to the land rather than standing above it.

Even today, traces of that older imagination remain hidden inside our language.

We still say Mother Nature.

Almost no one says Father Nature.

The expression has survived because it expresses something that statistics cannot.

A mother nourishes before she provides.

She gives before she is measured.

For centuries, forests were places where communities hunted, gathered, buried their loved ones, prayed, celebrated, and learned how to live together.

Only later did they become inventories as well.

When the Language Changed

Ideas rarely transform the world overnight.

They quietly transform the words through which people understand it.

Francis Bacon argued that knowledge should serve human progress. Science, observation, and experiment could improve human life by revealing nature's laws. His famous conviction that knowledge is power became one of the defining ambitions of modern civilization.

Soon afterward, René Descartes reinforced another powerful distinction.

Human beings increasingly came to imagine themselves as thinking subjects confronting an external world that could be measured, analyzed, organized, and controlled.

Neither Bacon nor Descartes wished for forests to burn.

Their contributions to science helped shape a world of extraordinary medical, technological, and scientific achievements.

Yet every intellectual revolution leaves behind more than discoveries.

It leaves behind habits of imagination.

Gradually, forests increasingly came to be seen as timber.

Rivers became hydroelectric potential.

Mountains became mineral reserves.

Land became real estate.

The shift was subtle.

Before nature became something to exploit, it first became something described differently.

The smoke entered our words before it entered our lungs.

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Remembering the Mother Again

Over recent decades, another conversation has emerged.

Many environmental thinkers—and particularly writers associated with ecofeminism—have suggested that our environmental crisis cannot be understood only through science or technology.

It is also a crisis of imagination.

These thinkers argue that once nature is viewed primarily as an object to be dominated, extracted from, and controlled, exploitation becomes easier to justify. Their work invites us to reconsider older ways of imagining our relationship with the Earth—not through sentimentality, but through responsibility.

Whether one embraces every argument of ecofeminism is beside the point.

Its central question deserves our attention.

If language helped create one relationship with nature, can language help restore another?

Perhaps calling the Earth our mother was never merely a metaphor.

Perhaps it was a reminder.

Ontario Has Always Lived with Fire

Wildfire is not new to Ontario.

In 1911, the Great Porcupine Fire swept across northeastern Ontario, destroying thriving mining communities and claiming dozens of lives.

Five years later, the Great Matheson Fire of 1916 broke out, one of the deadliest wildfires in Canadian history. Entire communities disappeared. More than two hundred people lost their lives as powerful winds drove flames through drought-stricken forests. Families escaped into rivers and lakes while the fire passed overhead.

Then, in 1922, another catastrophic wildfire devastated communities, including Haileybury, reducing much of the town to ashes within hours.

These tragedies remind us that fire has always been part of Ontario's history.

What has changed is not the existence of fire itself.

It is the scale of its consequences, the length of wildfire seasons, and the extraordinary distances smoke now travels before reaching millions of people living far from the flames.

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The Smoke Above Toronto

Standing beside Lake Ontario this week, it was difficult to believe that the smoke surrounding Toronto had begun its journey hundreds of kilometres away.

The skyline reminded us of something modern cities often encourage us to forget.

No city breathes alone.

The air above Toronto is connected to forests in the north.

The rivers that sustain us begin far beyond the places we call home.

The future of our cities is inseparable from the future of the landscapes surrounding them.

The smoke crossed every boundary we imagined existed.

Municipal boundaries.

Provincial boundaries.

Even the invisible boundary between ourselves and nature.

For a brief moment, Toronto remembered something older than modernity.

The Earth has never stopped sustaining us.

We gradually forgot how to speak of her as though she were alive.

 Before We Learn to Breathe Again

Every civilization leaves something behind.

Some leave poems.

Some leave monuments.

Some leave forests.

And some leave smoke.

History will remember these fires.

The more difficult question is what it will remember about the language through which we chose to understand the world that burned.

Because every transformation begins twice.

First in our words.

Then in the world itself.

July 17, 2026
YF

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