Darkening Skies

Four-year-olds should not be thinking about the Air Quality Index.

(Listen to the radio version here.)

Last week, when I picked up Walter to spend the day at my house, the sky was murky with smoke from the Canadian wildfires, making the sun an eerie red. Walter saw it through the car window and said, “Dee Dee Nana! I can see MARS!”

It’s adorable that a 4 ½-year-old knows that Mars is the red planet. But it’s heartbreaking that this sweet 4 ½-year-old is already being impacted by climate change—something I learned about in college a half century ago and something Al Gore’s been warning us about for decades even as energy corporations, their own scientists confirming how bad it would become, started suppressing the information and focusing on ways to ridicule and discredit those of us discussing the issue.

Had we lowered our dependence on fossil fuels starting in the 70s, we could have not just reversed the trend before things got too dire but made the world much safer for everyone in terms of air and water quality and eliminating our reliance on oil from the Middle East. Of course, we’d have no idea that we’d averted the attacks on 9/11, people wouldn’t be taking off our shoes before flying, and we'd all be enjoying cleaner air and water, but corporate forces don’t care about averting real problems for Americans—they care about their bottom line and so kept their information about climate change away from the public as long as possible. They could and did always blame other causes for global instability and pollution, including the mercury that coal-burning power plants belch from their smokestacks.

We’ve always had droughts and wildfires, some massive. In the summer and early fall of 1988, when my own children were 2, 4, and 6 years old, enormous drought-related fires in and around Yellowstone National Park combined with a long period of westerly winds to send smoke all the way to the eastern United States. A thousand miles from Yellowstone, Duluth’s sky became a yucky brown. Back then, there weren’t air quality alerts of the kind we can count on now, and except on one day when my eyes were burning, I let the kids play outside without even thinking about it—I spent even the worst days outside myself, counting birds at the Lakewood Pumping Station or Hawk Ridge.

I did a “For the Birds” program about that fire and the unprecedented number of western birds it sent our way. On September 9, 1988, the counters at Hawk Ridge broke the record for Swainson’s Hawks, tallying 37 in a single day when most years we often didn’t see any, or just one or two, over the entire season. That 36-year-old record still stands today. The smoke from so far away was memorable because it was so rare. Nowadays, smoke from far away is no longer rare.

This year the Midwest had a huge dust storm of the kind that was so regular in the Great Plains in the 1930s that that era was called the Dustbowl. We developed government programs to help farmers protect their soil, but as increasing numbers of people resist government regulations along with skyrocketing cattle production, agricultural and grazing soils are extremely vulnerable again. On May 16 of this year, dust from far away hit Chicago with its first major dust storm since the 1930s, bringing visibility to near zero and endangering the lungs of not just people stuck out in it but birds and other animals who didn’t have the option to go indoors.

The dry soils required for dust storms are related to droughts, which have always happened. But like so many other natural disasters, droughts are exacerbated, in number and extent, by climate change.

We need not just the kinds of regulations that protect our soil, air, and water, but strict enforcement of those laws, at the exact point in history where billionaire anti-regulation forces are running the very government agencies our lives and our environment depend on. Ironically, every single thing we could do to slow down climate change in the 70s and 80s would have improved our air and water quality. The same is true today.

But even if we had the most environmentally conscious government possible, it’s going to take decades to clean up the new messes we’ve created thanks to the billionaires we elected, and the ones we didn’t elect, to run our government. They’re focused on short-term profits at any cost to the rest of us.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump promised literal “shock and awe” to overwhelm his opposition, and in the 135 days since he took office, his billionaire-directed policies have indeed hit us from every direction, overwhelming the resources of everyday individuals to fight back. But fight we must. I'll be babysitting Walter every Tuesday and Thursday this summer, and checking the EPA's Air Quality Index every morning to decide whether we can play outdoors or have to stay inside. Well, I'll be checking that as long as the EPA still exists.