Making the E.E.R.K.
By Mark Simpson, co-author of Energy Emergency Repair Kit
It’s 7:40 am on July 24 when the email arrives: “Town of Jasper, Jasper National Park, evacuated due to wildfire.” Two days later, the fire reaches the rustic townsite, burning so fiercely it has created its own pyrocumulonimbus weather system complete with a raging firewall nearly 400 feet tall. By the next morning, over a third of the town has burned to the ground. The devastation’s quicksilver speed is quite simply staggering. While many factors contribute to this wildfire – cuts to the provincial firefighting budget, dead growth left by mountain pine beetle infestation, fire suppression practices, the aesthetics of wilderness that condition and produce how mountain parks are supposed to look – it’s brutally obvious that climate crisis is the driving cause, a fact made all the more painful by Alberta’s status as an obdurately, obtusely climate-skeptical petrostate. Welcome, yet once more, to what Andreas Malm calls the warming condition (The Progress of This Storm 11).
The Energy Emergency Repair Kit, a multimodal, genre-bending manual I’ve created with my comrades in the E.E.R.K. Collective, was written with such harrowing occasions firmly in mind and in view.
