Not a day goes by without someone commenting about strange weather, sometimes multiple times a day. Always there is a veneer of amazement: “That hail was so unusual!” “So much rain at once!” “So hot even for July….” The unspoken message is that none of this is any longer unusual. The unusual has become the norm; the weird has become the expected; the extreme is moving inexorably toward the center of our experiences, shifting our gaze to the immediate.
Two and a half years ago we flew to California to lend support for the birth of our third grandchild. Within a day of our arrival the Paradise fire, 200 miles away, began to fill the air with smoke. Suddenly our task of occupying the older kids shifted from enjoying local parks to being indoors all day every day.
Smoke seeped in around the windows and doors of the handsome, California-built house; we spent several days insulating every reachable crack. Air purifiers were purchased and we watched their dials start red, then relax toward purple, then settle into blue — until one of us walked by, stirring the particles still in the room and sending the dial flaring to red again.
We drove our daughter to one of her last pre-natal appointments and were shaken to see the medical personnel arriving for their shifts wearing full-blown gas masks inside their cars. We could barely make it from car to door without coughing. By the end of the first week the bay view was entirely obscured and we could not even see the houses across the narrow neighborhood street. Baby Leo was born into a world where the air of San Francisco was worse than the most polluted parts of China.
Recently we headed to DC to help with our son’s new daughter, 2 ½ weeks old. When we left Northfield the air was thick, foggy, murky. By New Jersey, reports were that the air quality was dangerous. By the time we reached DC we were definitely driving through an inversion of smoke from the West Coast fires 2,000 miles away. (Possibly the smoke was from closer Canadian fires, but we took no comfort.) Eventually the air cleared enough so we could walk with the baby outdoors, but there was a haze of unease about taking those tiny, freshly formed lungs out into the muggy air.
The day we left there was a brief, violent hailstorm at our son’s house. “So weird,” he pronounced. Two days before he had shared a video from his mother-in-law showing the complete decimation of her community garden in Philadelphia, pelted and flattened by hail, winds and gushers of rain.
If we finally face the truth, the reality that has moved in to grab us by the throat, we find ourselves gasping for air and for answers.
In an emergency like a house fire we jump into action sometimes without planning or thought. In dire circumstances we reach for who and what is precious and outdo ourselves, even at our own peril, scaling walls, breaking down doors, leaping from windows. At this moment we are all being called to be firefighters.
But what, we ask, can each of us do? Do more and do it now. Honestly assess your energy use. Reduce your driving, live with temperatures warmer in summer and cooler in winter. Insulate, solarize, electrify, update as soon as you can to more efficient cars trucks, appliances and sooner than you may have planned. Yes it’s costly, but not as costly as lost lives, livelihoods, crops, trees and animals, homes and the planet. There are programs, subsidies and no-interest loans to use.
Support the national infrastructure bills — the current one, wholly inadequate but still urgent, and the new one, full of urgent solutions to the climate emergency. It will be more controversial since most Republicans deny the need so your voice is needed.
Push elected officials — town, state, national — to invest in climate-focused efforts. Now, not sometime.
Trustworthy voices and decades of data indicate that inflation or deficit should not be our worry now; even if we borrow, interest rates are so low, the payback outweighs the risk.
Volunteer firefighters are a rare breed who sign up of their own accord to protect our communities. Most of us are not so altruistic by nature, but we can all see the smoke.
Let’s sign up to generate the winds of change needed to clear the air and protect a future for the children.
Judith Wagner lives in Northfield.