Choking on it
Today my children and I ran masked through the smoke of the worst fires in Oregon, Washington and California history. We wore masks in the car to protect us from the outdoor air—in the same way we now wear masks to protect us from the air indoors—as I dropped my kids off at their new preschool. The one we once walked to has closed due to our collective and long-term failure to manage the pandemic as well as countries as disparate as Germany, Taiwan, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, South Korea, Argentina, Iceland, Greece and The United Arab Emirates.
The current administration has received a lot of well-deserved attention for its denial of the reality of the pandemic as well as its botched response. However it’s denial of the reality of climate change, as well as the long-term and bipartisan failure to seriously address it presents a much more serious problem.
Fire season when I was a child was the time of year when you couldn’t have a campfire and you had to be extra careful with a camp stove. Fire season for children now is the time of year when fires are as common as lightning and it is unsafe to go outside because the environment surrounding us and the air we breathe is toxic. I have great sympathy for those who endure the destruction of hurricane season every year, and though science has definitively linked the number and intensity of hurricanes to rising global temperatures, climate change’s connections to the the fires is much more obvious: record temperatures dry more and more vegetation each year. Dry trees catch fire more easily. Unfortunately the falling ash obscuring the late summer sun every year isn’t the new normal. Things are only going to get worse.
Before having children I asked myself a question many people ask themselves, “do I really want to bring children into this world?” I’m certain people have been asking that question for thousands of years, including periods when human life was lived in an infinitely meaner way than it is by a healthy American today. In the end I decided that asking that question of myself personally was more a potential excuse for someone with a lot of interests who was vigilant in protecting his time. But now I look out the window at an atmosphere suitable for a movie set on Mars and I wonder.
My friends and co-workers are crowding into houses and shelters after evacuating, hoping that their animals, homes and personal belongings are somehow spared the flames. As the smoke slowly creeps into my home it isn’t the immediate physical effects that bother me the most. It’s a psychological malaise. The haze is both a physical manifestation and figurative representation of our failure to change part of our ways of life in the present for our descendants’—and our own—health, fitness and economic well-being in the very near future. Running from the car to school and back today, my children were literally choking on the inertia of generations before them and the lack of imagination, cowardice, and self-interest of the people we’ve elected to run our country.
