The Anishinaabe call this Mshkawji Giizis, the Freezing Moon.
It’s a name that carries weight. It speaks of a hard, honest transition, a time when the land finally shrugs off the memory of warmth and submits to the ice. It’s the stillness of the first true freeze, the locking of the lakes, the silent signal for the world to go quiet and wait.
I’m standing on the shore of a familiar bay, camera cold in my hand. It’s late November. By all rights, I should be testing the ice, or at least hearing the high, singing tink of it forming in the shallows.
But the air is just… damp. The optimism of the first few frosts has been betrayed by a stubborn, unseasonal mildness. The freeze, when it comes, feels brittle. It’s here one day, gone the next.
This is the new “edge” of the wild. It’s not just the teeth of a wolf or the isolation of a remote valley; it’s the profound, unsettling sense that the ancient rules are being rewritten.
I pull out my phone, not for a photo, but to check a forecast. The screen’s glare feels like an intrusion. And with the forecast comes the rest of the world—a relentless digital hum of disaster. Record-breaking wildfires in the west, atmospheric rivers reshaping coastlines, catastrophic floods in places that have never known them. The background noise of a planet in a low-grade fever.
We used to talk about climate change in the future tense. Now, we talk about “tipping points,” a clinical-sounding phrase for a terrifying concept: the moment the cascade becomes irreversible.
It’s a concept that feels abstract until you stand here, waiting for a freeze that won’t come.
These tipping points aren’t just happening “out there.” They are here, in our own Canadian backyards. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and our own federal climate assessments, the North is warming at nearly three times the global rate. The permafrost—the “permanent” frost that underpins entire ecosystems and communities—is thawing. This isn’t just a slow melt; it includes “abrupt thaw events” where the ground literally collapses. As it thaws, it releases vast stores of trapped carbon and methane, a greenhouse gas over 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the short term. This creates a feedback loop: thawing releases gas, which causes more warming, which causes more thawing.
This isn’t a story about a far-off glacier. It’s about the very ground beneath our feet. It’s about ice-free Arctic summers and the winter roads—vital lifelines for remote northern communities, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike—becoming unreliable or non-existent. It’s about our own boreal forest, the great green crown of the continent. Stressed by drought and heat, it’s becoming more susceptible to pests like the mountain pine beetle and, as we saw in 2023, catastrophic wildfires. Scientists have warned for years that the boreal is dangerously close to a tipping point, shifting from a massive “carbon sink” that absorbs CO2 to a “carbon source” that permanently emits it, accelerating the very problem it once helped to buffer.
And then there’s the paradox that haunts the North Atlantic. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a massive ocean current that includes the Gulf Stream, acts as a heat pump, bringing warm water north and giving Eastern Canada and Western Europe a milder climate than they would otherwise have. But as recent studies, including those published in Science and Nature Communications, warn, this system is weakening, diluted by a torrent of freshwater from melting Greenland ice. If this current collapses—a tipping point scientists now see as frighteningly plausible this century—the irony is that global warming could plunge areas like the Maritimes and Newfoundland into a new era of extreme cold winters and chaotic, unpredictable weather.
The cynicism of it all is heavy. It’s the feeling that we are passengers, documenting a decline we’re powerless to stop. My camera feels less like a tool of discovery and more like a device for recording what we’re about to lose.
But then, I put the phone away.
The news feed vanishes. The silence of the bay returns. A black-capped chickadee, a tiny, impossibly resilient spark of life, lands on a bare willow branch. It doesn’t care about the IPCC report. It is here, now, doing the hard work of surviving, just as its ancestors have done through countless Freezing Moons.
This is the optimism that fights the cynicism. The land is still here. The wisdom of Mshkawji Giizis was never about romanticizing the cold; it was about acknowledging a hard, lean season and having the resilience to prepare for it. It’s a lesson in stewardship, a relationship.
We’ve been taught to see the land as a resource to be managed. Perhaps it’s time to listen to the cultures who have always seen it as a relation to be respected.
That respect begins with paying attention.
The Call to the Wild
This is my challenge to you. Don’t just be a summer hiker. Go out in the “shoulder seasons,” the “ugly” months like November and March. Find your own quiet spot—a local creek, a marsh, a simple patch of woods.
And watch.
Become a witness for your small corner of the world. Take notes. When does the ground freeze? When does the ice break up? What birds are here? What birds should be here? This is called phenology—the simple, powerful act of observing the land’s natural cycles.
The first step in healing any relationship is to show up and listen. The land is talking. And in the unsettling quiet of the modern Freezing Moon, we need to learn how to hear its warning.