Farmworkers, Climate Change, and “Converging Crises”

Abstract

This past summer in the Pacific Northwest has made painfully clear what climate justice writer Mary Annaïse Heglar (2020) meant by “converging crises.” Glaring inequality, drought, a record-shattering heat wave that killed 569 people in British Columbia, a wildfire season that burned an entire town to the ground, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic have all merged in ways that palpably exemplify how the climate emergency acts as a “threat multiplier.”I took these photos as part of my 2017 fieldwork in B.C.’s Okanagan Valley (Weiler 2021a, 2021b), Syilx territory, during the worst wildfire season the province had ever seen. The following year was even more devastating.