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The year is 2023. Beginning in April and continuing through October, over 7,000 wildfires will burn 18.5 million hectares of Canadian wilderness. Locally, much of June would be dominated by repeated rounds of air quality issues as dangerous, particulate-heavy smoke would move through Pennsylvania.
The year is 2026. Beginning in April and continuing through the present day, over 3,000 wildfires have burned over 2.4 million hectares of Canadian wilderness. Locally, the last week of July has served as a reminder of the 2023 smoke season -- a term which we must begrudgingly begin to consider may be becoming a more typical experience we will have to live through.
And, of course, there are plenty of wildfires right here in the United States that have their fair share of nationwide impacts. In fact, this current bout of smoke comes not just from Canada, but also from northern Minnesota, where wildfires are also burning massive swaths of land.
Ultimately, no matter what what we may think of our carefully-constructed borders and laws -- they are ink on the page before the raw power of nature.
The smoke which has poisoned our lungs this week does not respect our border with Canada.
The increasingly warm and dry conditions which have sparked these repeatedly severe fire seasons, as well, are not a home-grown issue.
Of course, we cannot definitely state that Canada has managed their forests perfectly.
However, what we can definitely state is that, as residents of the planet Earth, our actions impact more than just ourselves.
We have written before -- and doubtlessly will again -- of the need for our society to develop resiliency in the face of increasing crises and an ecological, environmentally-friendly viewpoint.
Some readers are likely scoffing at this. But this sentiment comes not from a place of misguided idealism or some such.
It comes from understanding the situation we are going to end up in if we do nothing.
Everyday citizens may view climate change as a myth or a grift -- and there are elements of both present, for sure.
However, there also are elements which aren't, and it is those elements which actuaries focus on.
Actuaries are the people behind insurance rates, among other things, because they calculate risk using advanced math and statistics.
And while "lies, damned lies, and statistics" is a famous saying, the truth is that the world humans have built in the 21st century relies on statistics.
If you want to look into it for yourself, look at what has happened -- and is still happening -- to home insurance rates in Florida and other southern states.
Whether storms hit or not, whether the threat is real or not -- neither matters, ultimately. Sky-high insurance rates are a very real, very serious threat for homeowners all throughout regions deemed as unstable.
And that instability is expanding. Every time a climate event happens -- be it here or elsewhere, the invisible hand of the market determines a few more changes at the edges of our society.
You don't have to believe that our climate is changing for you to be priced out of your home. You don't have to believe it for your lungs to fill with smoke from a fire 1,000 miles away.
Financial systems and natural systems share a few things in common: they are intensely complex, they take a broad approach when considering foreign events and downstream effects, and they are emotionless, crushing systems the gears of which take their actions dispassionately and inevitably.
For average folk, there is no hope of changing these systems -- there is only surviving them. And the best shot of surviving them is to build resilience into systems which have abandoned it in favor of exacting, min-maxed perfection.
We have seen this with logistics disruptions, especially. A wrench thrown into the system half a globe away has catastrophic downstream impacts on the rest of the supply chain -- anyone remember the time a ship got stuck in the Suez Canal?
The same thing holds true elsewhere.
Global systems are experiencing more and more disruptions every year. That is a fact, regardless of feelings, beliefs, or protestations. The cause of those disruptions can certainly be debated. But as the once-in-a-lifetime events become once-every-few-years, none of our pleas will suffice.
Nature leads -- and if that isn't enough for you, finance follows.