J.B. MacKinnon’s piece is about the Comox Glacier, or Queneesh, as it’s known in the local Indigenous language. The thing about living here is that the glacier’s everywhere even when you can’t see it: business names, street signs, the junior hockey team. It’s part of how the Valley thinks about itself.

MacKinnon talks to a retired millworker who’s been photographing the glacier every year since 2013. The change is visible even in that short time; more blue crevasses, more exposed rock. Scientists figure Vancouver Island’s glaciers will be gone by 2060. The Comox Glacier might not make it five more years at the current rate.

The article gets into what it means when a place loses something like this. There’s a word for it: solastalgia—being homesick without leaving home. For the K’ómoks First Nation, Queneesh is tied to an origin story about a great flood and a white whale that became the glacier. It’s more than scenery; it’s an anchor.

The piece also covers what we’re learning about glaciers just as they disappear; turns out they’re not lifeless rock and ice, but home to species adapted to exactly these conditions. Remove the glaciers and you lose about 40 percent of aquatic insect diversity in the watershed.

It’s a thoughtful look at climate change through the lens of one specific glacier in one specific place, and what it means to watch something fundamental to a landscape, and a culture, melt away.

Read the full piece at Hakai Magazine