Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer/ Those days of soda and pretzels and beer…
Summer, the four seasons’ tall drink of water. The one that makes the rest of the year worthwhile.
Summertime, and the living is easy.
Long languid days by the water.
… she’s your tootsie wootsie girl/In the good old summertime.
Deliciously hot sticky nights that deliver up ardent youthful summer flings and purple prose.
Summer breeze makes me feel fine/Blowing through the jasmines of my mind…
from the summeriest of 1970s easy rockers, Seals and Crofts.
Summer.
The apogee of existence. The very reason for being. Cut-offs and flip flops. The season of beer commercials. When our responsibilities ebb their lowest and relaxation takes centre stage. Kick back. Stretch out in the hammock. Made in the shade. Cottage Life.
Lazin’ on a sunny afternoon/In the summertime.
“Does it get any better than this?” the most frequently asked rhetorical question.
Before the clock starts ticking. Before the long weekends get struck off the calendar, before there’s only that last one left, the last summer one, technically speaking, although it never really feels like it. Before the Thanksgiving countdown begins.
Don’t be a crank about this, though, at least until August, mid-August if you can try and hold off. The dog days of summer, apty named, for too much sun, too much fun, too many breakfast sangrias. Can you just try and be chill for six weeks or so, bro? Just June and July. Mid-June to early-August. Ish. Give or take. Give over to the estivation vibe.
Honestly, I can, and I do.
Except for the fact that these summers of ours lately haven’t felt particularly carefree or laidback. Now, we don’t get heat waves. We get heat domes. Instead of wildfires, it’s wildfire seasons. Historical flooding vies with catastrophic droughts for the top headlines. Deadly ticks migrate northward.
The climate crisis seems intent on fucking with all our summer plans.
Even quicker and more devastatingly than the scientists who’ve long predicted this course of events foresaw. Clearly past the tipping point, our (man)ufactured heat already locked in, we slap on the sunscreen, tuck our long pants in our socks, pop on the Tilley hat and cross our fingers in the hopes that it doesn’t get too hot, too humid or rain down in buckets too often.
Summer as we’ve known it through those most maudlin of memories, gentle and benign picnic and summer camp episodes, the most maudlin memories of the most undisaffected, summer as seen through the Ray Bans lens of gauzy nostalgia of the privileged few, our vaunted summer idyll, that summer, those summers, are over.
Our new summers will be packed with more death. More disease. More destruction. More displacement. More conflict and upheaval.
Thank god there are no actual Beach Boys around anymore to sing about it.
Help me, Rhonda! Help help me, Rhonda!
No seriously, Rhonda. I need your help. My Malibu beach house is on fire.
If all that isn’t frightening and dispiriting enough, we’ve got governments here in Canada still insisting on playing footsie with the oil and gas industry, talking up new pipelines, kiboshing emission reductions, undermining international efforts toward renewable energy, all under the guise of national unity and sovereignty. Canada, our Prime Minister informed us the day before our national birthday, “will prioritize national unity and economic affordability over near-term climate targets.” There is no such thing as ‘near-term climate targets’ anymore. We’ve blown past those targets and our long-term targets are already outdated. “We can’t afford to restrain the growth of an important part of our energy mix, oil and gas,” Prime Minister Carney added, without mentioning the cost of that lack of restraint.
Never mind that this is a complete and utter reversal of the green Mark Carney we were pitched last year when he was running for office, last year being 2025, with Donald Trump already wreaking havoc on us and on the international order. The world hasn’t changed that much since then. The fiery, ill-winds were already blowing. Mark Carney knew what he was getting into when he took this position on.
But the unsettling thing isn’t that our Prime Minister either misjudged the situation or lied bold-facedly to the voters’ faces, it’s that now his dark, technocrat heart and cold calculating banker’s mind have assessed the facts on the ground, noted the figurative and literal fires burning, and decided to fan the flames further. That a unified and sovereign house, already partially alight, is somehow stronger in the face of an increasingly bigger conflagration, than the house prepared to battle the blaze, even if it means burning some bridges to the past.
That’s some frosty figuring in these overheated times.