Within an experience of sleeplessness is a glimpse into a world of ever-worsening climate disasters.
In June 2013, unusually heavy rains fell on the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta and on the prairie communities to the east.[i] Over a span of 48 hours, some places received the amount of rain that they would usually get in the entire month of June and then saw double that amount again. Rainfall near the tops of the mountains caused rapid snow melt. Meanwhile, much of the deep soil was still frozen and couldn’t absorb water, and the shallower ground was already saturated from earlier spring rains. With nowhere else to go, the raging waters quickly overran the rivers that come down from the mountains toward Canmore, High River, Calgary, and other communities. The Bow River that runs through downtown Calgary peaked at eight times its regular flow rate, flooding neighborhoods, streets, buildings, critical infrastructure, and parks. “Gather your valuables and go,” said Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi to the people in the evacuation zones.[ii]
In Restless in Sleep Country, Paul Huebener pulls back the covers on cultural representations of sleep to show how they are entangled with issues of colonialism, homelessness, consumer culture, technology and privacy, the exploitation of labor, and the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Even though it almost entirely evades direct experience, sleep is the subject of a variety of potent narratives, each of which can serve to clarify and shape its role in our lives. By guiding us through this imaginative landscape, Huebener shows us how to develop a critical literacy of sleep.
Learn more and purchase the book.
Huebener, Paul, Restless in Sleep Country: Imagination and the Cultural Politics of Sleep, MQUP, 2024. Print and Digital.
From our little two-bedroom apartment in Calgary’s Beltline neighborhood, Niki and I scrolled through newsfeeds as reports of the rising flood waters became more dire by the hour. As the evacuation orders spread through downtown and other neighborhoods that line the river, we sympathized with all those poor people rushing to escape with little notice, on the verge of losing their homes and businesses and everything inside. Looking down from our third-floor balcony at the quiet street that runs past our apartment, we talked about how lucky we were that we didn’t live downtown, that the Beltline is separated from the city center by a series of sloped underpasses that would collect any water runoff, and that we weren’t near the smaller Elbow River that connects with the Bow near the Stampede grounds a couple of kilometers to the east. As anxious new parents with an eight-month-old baby, we couldn’t imagine how awful it must be for the families close to the rising water. On the city social media channels, the mandatory evacuation zone spread wider and wider as darkness fell on the city, but we were the lucky ones, calmly turning off the lights and peacefully falling asleep in our own beds.
Around midnight, Niki squeezed my shoulder, waking me up. “We have to go,” she said. “We’re being evacuated.”
What? This didn’t make sense. We didn’t live close to the rivers. We weren’t anywhere near the water. I tried to focus my blurry eyes. How could we evacuate? We don’t even have a car! Niki was already packing a go-bag. “We have to call Julie,” she said.
Our friends Julie and Chris, living another kilometer farther away from the river than us, suddenly became our only frantic hope. I’ve always been anxious about asking people for favors, and the thought of waking someone up with a midnight phone call seemed as horrifying to me at that moment as the flood itself. Maybe I’ll take my chances with the water, I thought. But the evacuation was not optional; we needed help. I dialed the phone. Thankfully, a sleepy Julie picked up.
“My good, good friend, Julie,” I said, trying to make light. “Did I ever tell you what a good friend you are?” Not missing a beat, they invited us over to stay. We quickly finished packing, put out extra food and water for our cat—surely, she wouldn’t be flooded on the third floor, right?—and headed out to the curb where Julie and Chris arrived shortly to pick us up. Back at their place, they immediately insisted on sleeping, somehow, on their living room couch so that Niki, baby Jamie, and I could take the bedroom. We stayed in their apartment for several days, anxiously watching the news reports and occasionally trekking delicately through the neighborhood to check on our cat, named Cat. Luckily, our street remained dry, but as the days without power stretched on, our dark apartment became surprisingly alien and cold. Everything in the fridge had to be thrown away.
This was how our family became, for a brief period, climate evacuees in our own city. The lived experience of climate disaster took the form of our own lost sleep: Niki stayed awake for hours checking the evacuation zones, we abandoned our home in the middle of the night, and we in turn disrupted the sleep of our friends, who unexpectedly became our 24-hour disaster response team. Amidst all the flooded homes, the lost lives, the ruined infrastructure, and the $5 billion financial impact of the flood, a few nights of fragile sleep may seem insignificant, yet within this experience of sleeplessness was a glimpse into a world of ever-worsening climate disasters. Niki and I have marveled at how quickly we went from “Thank goodness this won’t affect us” to “We’re being evacuated!” For us, this climate-induced disruption of our sleep was a shocking event, the likes of which we had never seen before. Jamie, in contrast, was born into a world where the next climate disaster might always be waiting just outside the door, ready to knock in the middle of the night.
By imposing more and more severe sleep disruptions, a hotter planet creates a population with reduced learning abilities, poor emotional regulation, and damaged immune systems, harming exactly those capacities that are crucial for adaptation and collective survival.
In the first large-scale study “to examine the implications of climate change for human sleep,” a team of American researchers in 2017 compared personal sleep surveys from 765,000 people with the corresponding weather records for their cities.[iii] Higher body temperatures tend to make sleep more difficult, and sure enough, the study showed that people had more trouble sleeping on the hotter nights. This finding does not bode well for the future, especially since nighttime temperatures are rising more quickly than daytime temperatures. In the United States alone, the researchers calculated, a conservative average increase of 1 degree Celsius would result in “nearly nine million additional nights of insufficient sleep per month.” What is more, as with so many of the impacts of global heating, these kinds of effects are not felt equitably across the population but are several times worse for seniors and people with low incomes.
Although this kind of study can be useful for thinking about average temperatures, my family’s brief experience with sleepless nights during the Calgary flood of 2013 is just one small example of how the disruptions the climate crisis poses to good sleep are not limited to the obvious measure of increasing heat. Climate collapse is characterized not just by rising average temperatures but also by tipping points, cascading effects, and sudden disasters. Fires, floods, dangerous storms, water shortages, poisonous ground-level ozone, and continent-wide clouds of smoke are all arriving faster and with greater severity. Whereas global heating can be measured in terms of increasing average temperatures, the weather in any given location tends to be much more erratic, with some places, such as the Arctic and the Global South, faring worse than others. Events such as the flooding of a third of Pakistan in 2022, which displaced 33 million people, and the years-long drought in the Horn of Africa, which has left over four million people in severe humanitarian crisis,[iv] go far beyond disrupted sleep, yet sleeplessness is surely one terrible part of them. If an average increase of 1 degree Celsius in the United States is a troubling scenario, what will it mean to see more severe heat waves in Lagos, worsening drought in Yemen, or stronger hurricanes in Haiti?[v] With Canada warming twice as fast as the global average, where will we see the next fires like the ones that ravaged Fort McMurray in 2016 and great swaths of the country in 2023 or the next “hundred-year flood” like the ones that struck Quebec in 2017 and 2019?[vi] How can we address the fact that urban heat deaths are strongly correlated to poverty and race?[vii] Or that 80 percent of the people displaced by climate change are women?[viii] Calculations of global averages can unintentionally conceal the inequitable chaos of global heating.
In June 2021, several years after the flooding in Calgary, a severe heat dome lumbered onto the West Coast, bringing previously unimaginable temperatures to British Columbia, Alberta, and the northwestern United States. As is becoming common with climate change, the weather system became stuck in place, pumping hotter and hotter temperatures down onto the Okanagan, Vancouver, Edmonton, Portland, and hundreds of other communities. Whereas the heat waves of the 20th century would have afforded some relief with lower temperatures at night, the heat dome was relentless, keeping temperatures dangerously high both night and day, one day after another. The village of Lytton broke Canada’s all-time high temperature record (previously 45 degrees) with a scorching temperature of 46.6, followed over the next two days by new records of 47.9 and 49.6.[ix] The day after that, Lytton burned almost entirely to the ground.[x] Earlier the same month, the Canadian Institute for Climate Choices (now Canadian Climate Institute), a federally funded independent research partnership, had released a report called The Health Costs of Climate Change: How Canada Can Adapt, Prepare, and Save Lives. The report cautioned that, by 2050, extreme heat in Canada could cause roughly 300 to 400 deaths per year.[xi] When the heat dome struck just one week after the release of the report, the extreme heat killed 619 people in British Columbia alone over a period of seven days, making it the deadliest weather event in Canadian history.[xii] And the disasters keep accelerating; a few months after the heat dome, swaths of British Columbia were submerged in catastrophic “once in a century” flooding.[xiii] Two years later, the province saw its most destructive wildfire season on record so far.[xiv]
In such situations, saving lives and homes is the urgent priority, yet the problem of sleep will increasingly become a nightly struggle for billions of people throughout this century and beyond. The report from the Canadian Institute for Climate Choices did not mention sleep as a health concern associated with climate change, but sleep is a genuine problem for those who are stuck inside a heat wave or seeking shelter during an evacuation. As the heat dome event unfolded on the ground, news articles remarked that the heat was not only causing heatstroke and dehydration; it was also causing significant problems with people’s sleep. Dr. Wendy Hall, a sleep expert at the University of British Columbia, explained that “our core body temperature needs to cool down as we get closer to sleeping, but due to this heat wave, our temperatures are staying elevated which makes it much harder to fall asleep.”[xv] The quality of sleep is affected, too, as an overly warm sleeper will get less deep sleep and less REM time.[xvi] This is not even to speak of the insomnia that many people endure due to climate anxiety or of the sleeplessness associated with climate-related post-traumatic stress disorder, such as that experienced by survivors of the 2016 fire in Fort McMurray.[xvii] By imposing more and more severe sleep disruptions, a hotter planet creates a population with reduced learning abilities, poor emotional regulation, and damaged immune systems, harming exactly those capacities that are crucial for adaptation and collective survival. It has become a dark truism, each sweltering summer, for people to remark, “This is the coldest summer for the next 10,000 years.” As my family lay awake on those June nights, trapped inside the awful heat dome, I couldn’t help wondering: is this the best sleep for the next 10,000 years?
Although mindfulness phone apps and luxury mattresses might promise to give us a better sleep through consumer spending, taking strong action against global heating is one of the best ways to help us sleep easier over the long term, both figuratively and literally. What is more, as Julie and Chris showed us, fighting the climate crisis isn’t just a matter of cutting fossil fuel use or building bigger levees, as crucial as those things are. It’s also a matter of caring deeply for others, even to the point, sometimes, of sharing our beds. In their own recollection of the Calgary flood, Julie says that it could just as easily have been them landing on our doorstep that night. They tell us that, far from imposing on them, we gave them the chance to feel hopeful about how we can all collectively take care of one another in an uncertain future.
Endnotes
[i] For details on the 2013 Alberta floods, see City of Calgary, “Flooding in Calgary”; and Davison and Powers, “Why Alberta’s Floods.” For information on how attribution studies can link climate change to specific weather events such as the 2013 floods and the 2021 heat dome, see Ness, “Are Extreme Weather Events?”
[ii] CBC News, “Calgary Mayor.”
[iii] The information in this paragraph comes from Obradovich et al., “Nighttime Temperature.” For a reader-friendly summary of the study, see Cross, “Scientists Warn.”
[iv] On the Pakistan flood of 2022, see CBC News, “Pakistan’s PM.” On the drought in the Horn of Africa, see CBC News, “Deadly African Drought.”
[v] Lagos, Yemen, and Haiti belong to a list of places identified as most at risk of humanitarian crisis due to climate change. See Law, “Climate Crisis.”
[vi] For the report indicating that Canada is warming twice as fast as the global average, see Environment and Climate Change Canada, “Canada’s Climate.” For comments on the “hundred-year floods” in Quebec, see Eschner, “Canada.” Reporting on the fires of 2016 and 2023 is also widely available.
[vii] See Witze, “Racism Is Magnifying.”
[viii] Halton, “Climate Change.”
[ix] Uguen-Csenge and Lindsay, “For 3rd Straight Day.”
[x] Schmunk, “‘Most Homes.’”
[xi] Canadian Institute for Climate Choices, Health Costs, 33. These numbers are based on the mid-range estimates for low- and high-emissions scenarios.
[xii] CBC News, “Coroner’s Report”; Gomez, “June Heat Wave.” Both articles note that most of the people who died were seniors. In global terms, Asia, India, and eastern Europe have been suffering from the highest rates of heat-related excess deaths in this century. Zhao et al., “Global, Regional,” fig. 2.
[xiii] Schmunk, “In a Single Week.”
[xiv] CBC News, “2023 Wildfire Season.”
[xv] Cited in Parmar and Doban, “B.C. Heatwave.”
[xvi] Ibid.
[xvii] On insomnia and post-traumatic stress disorder in survivors of the Fort McMurray fire, see Purdy, “Fort McMurray Residents”; and Snowdon, “5 Years On.”
Header photo by Donovan Kelly, courtesy Pexels.