I grew up in a town with a healthy fear of global warming. Although we may not have felt “warm” during the 8 months of rain a year in Vancouver, we all chanted the mantra of recycling, conserving and composting in an almost paranoid frenzy. I knew from a young age that everything I used and threw away landed on one of millions of garbage mountains around the world, on land and sea, and I felt guilty about it. I mean, I still do – it’s kind of like a religion in Vancouver, the guilt never leaves you. I have seen people litter on the streets of downtown only to have the surrounding five people tell them simultaneously to pick it up. We are all communal watchdogs for the environment, disciplining ourselves and each other when we fall out of line, going out of our way to sort through trash to assuage the deep-set guilt that decades of research and evidence have instilled in us. It’s funny now to live somewhere where the effects of human consumption on the environment is still questioned, where politicians openly claim the overwhelming evidence of its ruin to be false (alongside their claims of Jesus riding a dinosaur 4,000 years ago). And this is the country of drought and tornados, hurricanes and earthquakes. The reason people all over the world feel guilt and shame about the way human beings treat this planet is because soon those things will be widespread across the world, and every place will experience superstorms like they are a normal occurrence. My kids will grow up in that world, with homes that are specially reinforced to withstand the extreme weather conditions. The amazing photos below and after the jump are taken by stormchaser Mike Hollingshead mostly in the US’s “Tornado Alley,” and are, for me, motivation to reduce my ill effects on this planet. I much prefer constant rain to having the roof blown off my house and my entire life swept away in an instant.
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