BulkyOtter

More than 900 wildfires are burning throughout Canada, with devastating impacts for First Nations. Thirteen Nations remain under evacuation orders that have forced 2,182 people from their homes.  The Namaygoosisagagun (Collins) First Nation watched one blaze largely destroy its entire community in less than an hour, forcing residents to flee by boat. Residents reported having only minutes to gather their belongings before homes were overtaken by the flames on Wednesday, and Anishinabek Nation Grand Council Chief Linda Debassige said in a statement that all community members have been accounted for pending a full assessment.  

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Reusing Potentially Contaminated Landscapes: Growing Gardens in Urban Soils (https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2014-03/documents/urban_gardening_fina_fact_sheet.pdf)

Steps to Creating a Community Garden or Expand Urban Agriculture at a Brownfields Site at (https://www.epa.gov/brownfields/steps-creating-community-garden-or-expand-urban-agriculture-brownfields-site)

July 16, 2026

When the boreal forests of Canada catch on fire, no one can do anything about it in many cases. The forests are part of Earth’s largest land biome, a greenbelt of wilderness that encircles the globe, and they’ve been suffering from the planet’s thermostat being jacked up. Wood-boring pests that flourish in milder climates have swept north and east, through tens of millions of acres. Droughts and dwindling snowpack have stressed the trees. They are ready to burn.

Many people simply don’t grasp the sheer magnitude of the boreal forest or what it would take to manage fires across its enormous area, Jed Kaplan, a professor in the Department of Earth, Energy, and Environment at the University of Calgary, told me: “You can’t control these fires. You cannot put personnel, fire engines, over an area that is the size of the entire American South, or something like that. It’s just way too big of an area.”

And so the fires spread, pouring out smoke that washes over the residents of faraway cities. The “Ontario Armageddon” (as one wildfire newsletter called it), along with several large fires burning in northern-Minnesota forests, has left Toronto with some of the worst air quality in the world this week and has shrouded New York City in a sickly gray haze. Canada has 869 active fires at the moment, and most are burning in wilderness areas where authorities monitor them but don’t try to put them out.

Although these boreal forests have evolved to burn and are adapted to fire, the size and intensity of the wildfires have increased as the atmosphere warms. Two of the worst wildfire seasons on record in Canada, in terms of acreage burned, occurred in the past three years, the worst of which was in 2023, when smoke crossed the border to cover East Coast cities and turned New York’s sky a deep, eerie orange. Smoky summers have become a familiar reality in Western Canada and the western United States, but eastern cities are now dealing with the same problem more often, Anabela Bonada, the managing director for climate science at the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation, at the University of Waterloo, told me: “It’s slowly becoming a fixture.”

The smoke rolled into her area, outside Toronto, yesterday and quickly reached the worst level on Canada’s air-quality health index. The fires also prompted the closure of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, in Minnesota, this week. First Nations communities in Ontario have been forced to evacuate. And in one particularly harrowing incident, caught on video, the crew members of a freight train in rural Ontario were surrounded by flames. They managed to escape.

Canada’s wildfire season had been off to a slow start, but now more than 6 million acres have burned so far this year, on pace to become the third-highest total on record. “What is unfolding is what climate and forest scientists have been predicting for 30 years,” Werner Kurz, a retired senior research scientist at Natural Resources Canada, told me. “That as the world gets hotter and drier, we are exposing forests to more and more risk, and the old strategies of fire suppression are simply being overwhelmed.”

In the particularly bad stretch from 2023 to 2025, some 8 percent of Canada’s forests burned, Bonada said. Repeated, large fires have caused a decline in the predominant species of conifers, the black spruce, shifting what vegetation regrows. These enormous swaths of boreal forest from the Yukon to Newfoundland and Labrador—more than 1 million square miles—act as massive vaults for carbon, which is locked away in billions of trees and the forest floor. But so much of those forests is going up in smoke that they have become their own notable source of greenhouse gases in recent years. A 2024 study published in Science found that carbon emissions from wildfires had increased by 60 percent in the prior two decades. Fires in boreal forests such as Canada’s were the main reason. Another study, published in Nature, found that Canadian wildfires in 2023, when more than 43 million acres burned, generated more emissions than the burning of fossil fuels in all but the three most-polluting countries.

When these forest fires really get going, they can generate a destructive power that is hard to fathom. A notorious 2016 fire, known as “the Beast,” destroyed much of Fort McMurray, in an oil-producing region of Alberta, and burned across nearly 1.5 million acres. Such huge fires can generate hurricane-force winds and towering pyrocumulus clouds; when the smoke gets high in the atmosphere, it can drift across oceans and continents. Many of these fires coincide, as this week’s blazes in Ontario have, with heat waves. The town of Lytton, in British Columbia, was nearly wiped off the map in 2021 the day after it endured Canada’s hottest temperature on record, 121 degrees.

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

by Jenny Odell

"When the technologies we use every day collapse our experiences into 24/7 availability, platforms for personal branding, and products to be monetized, nothing can be quite so radical as…doing nothing. Here, Jenny Odell sends up a flare from the heart of Silicon Valley, delivering an action plan to resist capitalist narratives of productivity and techno-determinism, and to become more meaningfully connected in the process."

Anyway I was just going to grab the link, but the used bookstore marketplace I usually use currently has a bunch of physical copies for less than $2 USD rn, so psa if that is of interest!

Canada will spend almost $2 billion over four years on 190 armoured combat support vehicles that will be built by London, Ont.-based General Dynamics Land Systems-Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced on Thursday.  Speaking in the southwestern Ontario city, Carney told reporters that the new vehicles will boost Canada's fleet of armoured combat support vehicles to 550 and will serve as key military assets for "decades to come." "Today’s announcement is our defence industrial strategy in action. Our bold plan to get our Armed Forces what they need, when they need it, to scale Canadian defence companies and to put hundreds of billions of dollars to work in the strategic sectors of our economy. We have a simple framework: build, partner, buy," Carney said. 

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xAI has open-sourced Grok Build after backlash over secretly uploading users’ repositories

xAI has released the full source code of Grok Build, its AI coding agent, after Cereblab researchers found that the tool was uploading users’ entire Git repositories to company controlled Google Cloud storage. The transferred data could include sensitive files such as SSH keys, password databases, private documents, and photos. xAI disabled the file upload feature and said data storage had been turned off by default since July 12. Elon Musk also stated that previously uploaded user data would be permanently deleted and promised to open source the project after a security audit. The code is now available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license, although it was published as a single commit without previous Git history or pull requests. The codebase contains approximately 844,530 lines of Rust covering Grok Build’s core agent workflow, tools, terminal interface, and plugin system. Code related to the disabled upload feature remains in the repository. Grok Build can read repository configurations, plan tasks, generate or modify code, execute shell commands, run in automated pipelines, and integrate with editors through the Agent Client Protocol.

An energy company owned by a major Canadian natural gas producer is proposing to build a massive data centre in west-central Alberta, even though the developer has yet to secure a tech company to operate the facility. Emerald Energy Technologies, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tourmaline Oil Corp., is planning to build a power-generation facility and a data centre called Malachite One.  The proposed site is on Crown land, adjacent to Tourmaline’s active Banshee Gas Plant about 40 kilometres southwest of Edson in Yellowhead County. 

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Scientists in China have developed a more efficient form of solar desalination that uses 47.4% less energy than alternatives. After the first year of testing, the scientists believe that at scale it would be able to desalinate water more cheaply than producing bottled water.

While 97% of China's electric ships are ferries, they are rapidly increasing their electric cargo ship capacity as well. Between 2022 and 2025 the number of electric cargo ships in use in China jumped from four to 42.