SuttaCentral
Much Metta, @DhammaWiki , and to you, Bhante, as you consider where to go. 
My family and I are also mapping out various escape plans. The wildfires, smoke conditions, and/or extreme heat might push us out of BC. Though I have US citizenship we’d prefer to stay in Canada. So we’re thinking we’d head East.
I think it is, because that’s what happened to me. For a bit of background, this started occuring around 10 years ago. Without going into a bunch of sordid details, my personal, professional, and spiritual lives were in a mess. Stress and dissatisfaction were at an all time high and I basically had a breakdown. As I was sitting there in the figurative ashes, I started asking myself “why?”. Was all this that I was inflicting on myself necessary? The answer was an obvious “No!”
Things that I had previously lived my life for became repellent to me, because I had seen first hand that they were actually sources of suffering, not happiness. I wasn’t Buddhist at the time, but after becoming Buddhist later I would recognize that experience as my first step on the Buddha’s path.
Thanks, likewise to you.
Here is a report about the cities that will best handle climate change in the U.S.:
Seattle is on my short list, so maybe that’s the one. We’ll see. 
I’m aiming for the Deva realm. I hear the climate is great there. 
Yeah, well until the end of the aeon. then it gets burnt up like everything else. Nibbana or bust!
I try to create awareness and lead a more sustainable lifestyle, knowing it has little effect on some of the most subsidized industries on the planet. I suspect we’re doomed to learn the hard way (if at all), but consuming in a simple, austere manner has its own benefits.
Sometimes I wonder if the Visuddhimagga did successfully predict what we’re going through:
What is the reason for the world’s destruction in this way? The [three] roots of the unprofitable are the reason. When any one of the roots of the unprofitable becomes conspicuous, the world is destroyed accordingly. When greed is more conspicuous, it is destroyed by fire (Ñāṇamoli’s translation, XIII.64).
The American way of life?
…humanity facing “collective suicide”, the UN secretary general has warned
Somehow human greed seems resolute in destroying the only home we have…
Also an interesting interview on economic growth
Feels like a sauna today in Toronto. Topped off my bird feeder and multiple trays of water about 3 times already and it’s only 3 pm. Bit of a bird party out there as they seem to know when I head outside 
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Lots of panting sparrows 
Sorry for your poor sparrows! Here, let me send you some cool, wet air from Sydney: 
I was waiting to catch a flight back to Sydney from my father’s house. In the lounge, someone came up and said hi. Turns out he was listening to my talk the other day. And he was travelling with his colleagues who are … working on building climate resilience in communities. We had such a good talk I almost missed my flight!
Anyway, point being, there are others out there!
I find it helpful to work on ecological restoration and to plant trees. In addition to being a committed Buddhist practitioner, I am an environmentalist, ecologist, and horticulturalist that is very focused on sustainable ways of producing our food, fuels, houses, and fiber, and a person who is extremely saddened by the loss in biodiversity we are currently witnessing. Most of which we can see with our own eyes when a beautiful natural ecosystem turns either into a monoculture corn field and then later into a mall parking lot.
I find that this connects on a much visceral level to what is actually happening on the ground on the planet as compared to reading about climate change, or guessing about how much weather events could be linked to climate change. We can see that our landscape is being cut up by roads, primary forests are still being cut down somewhere relatively near to us, I could go on but everyone can see for themselves our world rapidly changing in front of our eyes if we ever take a moment to pay attention to what the world used to look like or what it could look like, compared to what it does look like.
The changes are really discouraging to someone that loves nature, and for me the only sensible reaction is to buy extremely degraded farmland with low amounts of carbon stocks and work on land regeneration through managing the natural ecological succession utilizing the plants that are native to our region as a guide, but also planting improved varieties that offer food and fuel to humans and other animals. Mark Shepard’s new forest farm here I find one of the best models worldwide for what I am talking about, his book is worthwhile for people interested in this subject which i’ve tried to describe in just a few sentences for brevity.
Personally I can’t sit around and do nothing when I can at least make a small impact on a small piece of land. I first bought 5 acres that I successfully put on the path to regeneration while over 5 years in Sweden, and now am doing it again on 44 acres in France. I am working alone but I have my practice and encouragement of others to keep me company, and the joy I feel working with trees and plants. This to me feels a lot more useful than talking more, and it feels great to stop investing multinational corporations through index/retirement funds.
And a general knowledge of the history of the planet helps my spirits, that the world transformed from a cold, dark rock to the wonder we see in front of us today; life will manage to survive even if we manage to do our best to kill everything around us. The history of humans has generally been that we kill and destroy things in our path, even to the point of sabotaging ourselves. Soil and Civilization is a good book tracing all the various empires in history, and the degraded, denuded, lifeless landscape they all left behind them. We seem to be no different inherently from our ancestors and it seems likely we also will leave a desert behind us worldwide as the first global civilization. I am no different from my ancestors and the human chain of desire, the greed and selfishness present to create the conditions for those previous generations to leave destruction behind them hasn’t left us, but I’m still not giving up and I will keep planting trees until I die.
Hi @nineallday00,
Welcome to the D&D forum! Enjoy the multiple resources here available: may these be of assistance along the path.
Should you have any questions, feel free to contact the @moderators.
With Metta,
Alex on behalf of the moderators
Thanks so much, this is a really beautiful and helpful answer. No matter what the future brings, today there is air and soil and water, and plants to grow in them, and beetles and bugs and birds and worms that live in them. 
I think we may be the same person.
Keep up the good work friend.
Labour MP Nadia Whittome worked with campaigner Scarlett on the private member’s bill to change the Education Act to “reflect the climate emergency”. It would require primary and secondary schools to teach climate change in all subjects, including vocational courses that prepare students for specific jobs such as business or social care.
And the best bit
Aged 25, Ms Whittome is the youngest MP and says that gives her a unique perspective in Parliament.
“It wasn’t that long ago that I was in school myself, and I remember not learning about this. I think that’s pretty surprising for older MPs,” she explained.
I recently drove across the western United States, about 1,800 miles from the southwestern desert to the midwestern plains, to visit family. It was roasting hot in places it’s not supposed to be roasting hot. 110F in the Nevada desert? Sure, it’s plausible. 107F on the Nebraska plain? Not so much.
Myself, though, I’ve always been and likely always will be a working-class American. Which means that the knowledge that I have no power in this world and that the world is constantly trying to bury me is just baked into my bones. And most everyone I know have lived that life. It was a struggle in 90s, the 00s, and the 10s. It’s still a struggle. That’s life in my world.
Still, though, the world is changing dramatically. It’s not just the drip-drip of gradual inflation and flat wages or the slow erosion the political class’s grip on reality. We’re over a tipping point in many ways. We’re entering a maelstrom of history again. It’s happened before. I’ll either survive or I won’t. I worry much more about political collapse or war than I do about the climate, TBH. Those things, though, are made more likely by the changing climate as well as the adventurism of naive political leaders armed with a new breed of weaponry.
How do I cope? The way I’ve always coped. It’s like having chronic pain. It’s just there and there’s not much can be done about it. Eventually, it’s just part of life, even if life could theoretically be better without it. It’s dukkha. I feel worse for the people who honestly expect much more from life because they got impressive degrees and are paid impressive salaries to live in very nice expensive places. They have much further to fall and more to lose in their imaginations about the future.
Sigh. I take it day by day. I have seen the effects of climate change; elevated lake levels, shortened winters, weeks of heat warnings. I also see the repercussions of extreme right wing beliefs. Here in Canada we have relegated the First Nation peoples to areas with substandard housing and unclean drinking waters. I believe mass populations will be eradicated in the near future and the only peoples left will be First Nation peoples. They will care for the lands we have carelessly subjected to contempt and disdain.
I feel the same may be true in Australia. The period of white settlement may, in the long story of the land, be no more than a blip, the tale of an arrogant people who thought they could have it all and never pay the price. And then they’re gone, so that the long, slow process of restoration can begin.
My approach is not to think about it too much. To that end, what’s most important is not reading doom-and-gloom articles and not letting the doom-and-gloom attitudes of others take hold in my mind. It’s astounding how much the attitudes of those who we read and associate with can affect us. I already know it’s bad, so why make it worse?
