Earlier this month I visited friends in the interior. New Denver is small town about an hour outside of Nelson, on the edge of Slocan Lake, overlooking the Valhalla Mountain range. It was beautiful. Wonderful people, surrounded by nature. But I couldn't shake the videos they'd sent me last year - the mountain range burning up, then jumping the lake to their side of the shore - and how I would have survived with the very smoke sensitive respiratory system I have. Then, on the

The lockdowns of COVID 19 seem so long ago, and yet so recent I am writing this email as passengers from the cruise ship where the hantavirus was first identified, are being repatriated. It feels like a bit like deja vu but time will tell if that is just me, sensationalized news that leads to nothing, or something similar to what we saw 6 years ago. Regardless I was thinking of what living through another pandemic would look like - and how/if lockdowns would change. 2 weeks

At this year's Super Bowl halftime show, Bad Bunny climbed atop a damaged utility pole and performed "El Apagón" — The Blackout. It wasn't just a concert moment. It was a political statement about Puerto Rico's chronic energy crisis, the post-Hurricane Maria struggles that never fully resolved, and a community that has had to build resilience not because it chose to, but because it had to. It stuck with me. Because I've seen versions of that story play out across the Caribbea