Latest news with #KristjanLautens
Toronto Star
11-06-2025
- General
- Toronto Star
If the smoke in the air in Toronto feels apocalyptic, that's because it is
Fire is becoming something of a theme in Canadian lives, in my life retroactively, as climate change advances. I cannot grasp the hugeness of the calamity we're facing so I'll tell you about harbingers of dread. I've written before about being evacuated as a child to escape fire overtaking Sioux Lookout, one of the tiny northern Canadian towns where I was raised. It seemed relevant because that year the town was once again threatened by gigantic fire. Now it's happening once more nearby, in Sandy Lake First Nation. What's more, an Alberta town I know by heart is under fire threat as well, and another near where I was born in northern Manitoba. What once was notable is becoming a habit, a toxic, sinister pattern. We face death by landscape, as Margaret Atwood wrote in a famous story. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW Fire smoke drifting east has me wearing a mask in downtown Toronto, where I live as an adult and where the biggest fire hazard is arson, commonplace in a city dotted with ill-financed pre-pandemic developments. I would have realized earlier that I was choking on my past lives burning down, but irony is often lost on me. Gta Toronto air quality at 'very high risk' due to wildfire smoke — and is currently among the worst in the world Kristjan Lautens, Anastasia Blosser, Elissa Mendes But after the 2024 Jasper fire and the 2016 Fort McMurray catastrophe, huge unquenchable fires are no longer singular, they're typical, and people suffer the same way: the motel nights; endless campgrounds; kids clutching the one toy they were allowed to take. People are living in profound fear and flying out in tiny planes. They're not me, safe but sleepless in a distant city mentally walking down remembered sidewalks noting all the battered vinyl-siding structures they may never see again. When I was growing up, there was a terrible fire near Kapuskasing, a place that I love and would yearn for if I allowed myself emotions like that. A teenage girl I knew died horribly in a controlled burn. A friend's brother drowned, no reason, just went under as you do. Northern teens die in northern ways. The entire town revolved around the pulp and paper mill where the parents of everyone I went to school with worked for decades. My school friends may still be working in what's left of the mill. Trees were us. Now they're vanishing in an almost indescribably violent way. If there has never been a better time to be a human than right now, journalist John Vaillant writes, 'there has never been a better time to be a fire.' ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW The Canadian Ophthalmological Society offers tips to protect your eyes as wildfire smoke blankets parts of Canada. (June 6, 2025 / The Canadian Press) I am unable to write well about the Star's Fresh Air Fund summer camp charity because I can't explain that in my world you didn't go into the woods for fun, you were already deep inside them and hoping for the best. They're not instructive and packed with artistic history like Algonquin, they're implacable. I grew up on the edge of the great boreal forest the size of France. When mothers told kids to go out and play, they meant out and they meant all day. It was like entering a whale, on your own with billions of trees, attractive in aggregate but each one spiky and sticky to climb. Snake balls (look it up) writhed. I was a kid, I wasn't Radisson. I respected the bush, as we called it, because unless you were Indigenous you had no way of managing it or even truly understanding it. An aerial view shows spruce trees of the Canadian boreal forest west of Baie-Comeau, Quebec. The boreal forest, which is only second to the Amazon in terms of its vital role in ensuring the future of the planet, encircles the Arctic — and it is in just as much danger from climate change as the South American rainforest. (Photo by Ed JONES / AFP) (Photo by ED JONESED JONES/AFP via Getty Images) ED JONESED JONES AFP via Getty I Enough about trees. In 2022, Channel-Port aux Basques, a famously rugged Newfoundland town where my surgeon father had briefly worked, was hit by Hurricane Fiona and partly destroyed. It wasn't fire, it was severe winds, a storm surge, and clapboard (again) homes broken up and floating offshore. That's four towns. If my own dear Bonavista, NL, is flattened by a caving iceberg, it'll be five. Fire, flood, pandemic, drought. What's next? One supposes famine? Respect what you have, Canadians. Our climate won't change back. If we ever flee north, what will we find?
Toronto Star
01-06-2025
- Health
- Toronto Star
Gardiner, Don Valley Parkway to be shut down on Sunday for a bike ride. What you need to know
If you are planning on being in Toronto today, you may want to plan alternative routes as the downtown core, Don Valley Parkway and Gardiner Expressway will see disruptions. The DVP from the Gardiner Expressway to York Mills Road and the Gardiner from the South Kingsway to the DVP will be closed for the Bike for Brain Health. Participants will take over Toronto's highways from 2 a.m. until 4 p.m., riding traffic free, while raising awareness and donations for Alzheimer's research. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW Gta 'An opportunity to say thank you': UHN's first large-scale fundraising walk celebrates health care and innovation We Walk UHNited's Saturday event advocates for Canadian health care and celebrated the patients helped by the hospital network. Gta 'An opportunity to say thank you': UHN's first large-scale fundraising walk celebrates health care and innovation We Walk UHNited's Saturday event advocates for Canadian health care and celebrated the patients helped by the hospital network. Roads surrounding the Exhibition Place such as Saskatchewan Road, British Columbia Road, Princes Boulevard, Quebec Street, PEI Crescent and Dufferin Street between Springhurst Avenue and Saskatchewan Road will also be closed. While public transportation is recommended, the event has disrupted the 329 Dufferin night buses Sunday morning. The route will not enter the Canadian National Exhibition grounds and will stop at the Dufferin Gate Loop. The TTC warned riders that the event may also cause delays to the 91 Woodbine and 95 York Mills routes until 4 p.m. Adding to the weekend's disruptions, the first-ever We Walk UHNited fundraiser took place on Saturday, with 2K and 5K walks in support of the UHN Foundation leading to multiple downtown street closures through the morning and early afternoon. With files from Kristjan Lautens
