Drawing (on) a decade of climate change in the North

Alison McCreesh was just finishing a sprawling illustration on the impacts of climate change in the North to close out her latest book, when the call came down that the city she lives in, Yellowknife, was evacuating due to wildfires.

It was the smoky summer of 2023 and multiple fires were creeping ever closer to the city’s borders. Across the Northwest Territories, communities had faced evacuation because of both fires and floods — as McCreesh worked in her studio, the radio rang with alarms to announce which community had to move out next. 

“We kind of knew our turn might come,” McCreesh says of the evacuation announcements she heard while working on an illustration of the interconnectedness of climate change impacts in the North. “That just felt eerily connected.”

McCreesh’s book, Degrees of Separation: A decade North of 60, is a graphic novel memoir about spending her twenties travelling around the North, at first for adventure, and then as a French-English translator. She didn’t set out to write about climate change or its particularly acute impact on the northernmost parts of the country. But she also couldn’t have avoided it if she’d tried (which she didn’t).

As a day job, McCreesh does graphic recordings and illustrations of community meetings, technical briefings and presentations. The subjects vary, and the discussions aren’t always specifically about the environment, but they often circle back to it — as so many things do in the North. 

Degrees of Separation, published in spring 2024 by Conundrum Press, is a graphic novel detailing her travels and life with her young, growing family. She worked on the book for roughly five years, taking a break after her third child was born, as well as for other life events — like the wildfires. 

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Her original idea, she says, was to show some of the humour and quirkier side of her life, like calling a shack without running water home. (Editor’s note: there are some very nice shacks in Yellowknife.) 

But as the project went on, McCreesh realized that while the personal details ensured the book was a fun read, she wanted it to look more at the bigger picture. 

“I struggled with that, being like, I don’t want to be telling everyone about my 20s, who cares about my 20s, we need to care about climate change,” she said. “It’s all part of it. It all makes sense together.”

It’s a realization, and source of character development, that follows McCreesh through the book.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Climate and environmental change is a theme running through this book. We have the increase in polar bears around communities, changes in the ice. Was that something you recognized as you experienced it, or more so afterwards when you began the book?

It definitely came after. In the last five or six years I’ve been doing a lot of these graphic recordings, so I go to a lot of meetings with a lot of people coming in from smaller communities. Even though the meetings are on different themes, often climate change is a big part of it, and that’s really brought it home.

For example, there’d be something on asset management in small communities. I didn’t know anything about asset management and what that connection was but climate change is impacting infrastructure in small communities. That’s a big deal, if there’s coastal erosion and that’s going to impact your dump or your sewage lagoons or your water plant. If permafrost is thawing, that’s going to wreak havoc with your landing strip at your airport, or all those infrastructure type things that I hadn’t necessarily given much thought to. 

I speak specifically about the Northwest Territories, but this applies to plenty of other northern places in Canada — there’s no year-round road access. So in the winter, supplies come in via ice and winter roads, and in the summer it’s often barges. If the winters are milder and the climate is more unpredictable, then your winter road season gets cut really short. And if there’s extremely low water and the barge can’t go up during the summer season, you can’t get fuel brought in that normally you would have had brought in for use all year round.

Whatever the main theme of the conference was, the climate change piece just comes in from angles all the time. 

You live in the North, in Yellowknife, but you’re visiting smaller communities throughout this book — and coming in as an outsider. How much did the people in each community, the things you were told and heard, shape your illustrations and what you documented about change?

I tried to be deliberate about telling the story that had been brought to my attention by people when I was in that community or in that setting. I didn’t know about lots of things — I was in my 20s, I hadn’t been in the North for that long. But sometimes it’s good to think back about those things and not take for granted that people know things that you know now. 

Being an outsider is sometimes almost good. When you’re newer to things you notice things and tell them from that perspective. So for example, I knew nothing about the DEW (Distant Early Warning) line. I’d never heard of the DEW line. (Editor’s note: in case you’ve also never heard of the DEW line, it’s a belt of now-inactive radars built across the Arctic to warn of Soviet attack by air from the North in the 1950s.)

When I was travelling as part of these community consultations, somewhat miraculously, we ended up staying on an old DEW line site that’s called Fox-Main, going back into this sort of Cold War era. That’s how I learned about the DEW line, what it was, and then also how it had lots of impacts on Inuit and on wildlife and on the landscape and all the contamination.

It’s things that I learned along the way, while I was in those places, and that people sort of brought to my attention — not in a full-fledged like, ‘Let me educate you about this thing’ way, but it comes up in conversation for sure. Then I did some research after to fact-check some of that, and give broader context and increase my own understanding of what the issue was. 

I appreciate wanting to be true to what you knew at the time too. You learn things along the way. You don’t want to pretend you were in a place and knew all the things that were to know about that place, right? 

And you want to have some kind of character growth. My personal growth wasn’t my main focus of this story but that is sort of the way our 20s and hopefully all our life goes — we keep learning new stuff and get a bit more mature and get more context for things. The prologue is us hitchhiking towards Dawson City up through northern B.C .and knowing nothing about anything really, definitely not about the North. And then the very last story is me in Iqaluit in a hotel room with my second child trying to get her to sleep while I work on this graphic recording that’s talking about the North and how it’s impacted by climate change. I feel like those are sort of telling of the start and the end of that journey of my 20s.

I really enjoyed reading the index of the book, where you give an illustrated brief on some of the subjects you touch on throughout the book. Why did having an index seem necessary?

I just sort of felt like we needed more substance, to a lot of these things, like climate change, I didn’t want to keep hammering people over the head with it. But then in the notes, it was sort of like, ‘Let me explain permafrost, I need to give context for permafrost related to the story, but also let me just tell you that permafrost is thawing and shifting and this is a big issue. This is what a treeline is in the context of the book, but also the treeline is shifting.’ In the book, there’s mention of winter roads and ice roads and fly-in communities and all-season roads, so then at the end, I can say how it’s impacting people. 

It gave me an opportunity to draw a little more focus to those themes that seemed important to me and that I wanted people to learn about in the northern context.

The feedback loops page towards the end (and the main image of this story) is so fascinating. What was the thinking behind that page, and pulling together all of these different pieces into one illustration?

Something I hear time and time again, and that I see through my work, is there’s just so many details of how one thing ties to another. The trickle down effects of one thing, and when one thing happens here and that leads to something else downstream, it’s all just so much.

Up here, there’s sort of these main climate change themes of coastal erosion, wildfires, changes to freshwater, which would include drought or increased precipitation, and then there’s permafrost, and so on. It’s often divided into those themes, but then they’re impacting one another. The wildfires do lead to more permafrost thaw because they’re burning the ground cover. But also, it’s hotter and it’s generally drier — other than when we’re flooding — which contributes to these bigger, hotter fires. They’re all feeding into each other.