Hazed and confused
When climate impacts hit home, we don't know what to do.
Welcome to Planet Days, a green newsletter for a greenwashed Planet. Thank you to Sam Liptak for editing this post.
If you’re new to Planet Days, every other week I try to send out a three-minute read on what it means to go green — ranging from topics on recycling bins and electric vehicles to college football and baseball.
🔥💨 This week, wildfire smoke from Canada triggered Washington, D.C.’s worst air quality in years, prompting an incredibly rare “Code Purple” alert and giving me a lot of extra time inside to write. So here we go.
This week, the Eastern United States had a wake-up call. Typically shielded from the wildfires out west, the region was enveloped in a blanket of smoke, sweeping down from record burns in Canada.
Though the East Coast is no stranger to heat, hurricanes, and sea level rise, the wildfire smoke was altogether different. As New York City’s air quality became the worst in the world, people were left scrambling on what to do: Schools canceled outdoor activities, teams postponed professional baseball games (ahem), and people spent hours online researching the effects of smoke inhalation.
Though wildfires up north are rarer than those out west, they’re not unheard of. And we know from previous years that wildfire smoke carries hundreds of miles away, polluting the air quality of regions unaffected by drought.
Then why were we so unprepared?
I can’t help but think of the early days of the pandemic, when Europe faced its first COVID outbreak, while the U.S. remained largely untouched. But rather than prepare for the impending wave of COVID cases, the U.S. government’s response was largely, “Thank god we’re not Italy.”
Because until it happens to you, it’s very hard to envision a scenario where you’re actually hurt by climate impacts — even if all the evidence points to that inevitability. It’s why we keep building (and rebuilding) along the coast, despite hurricanes and rising seas, and why we keep developing the desert, despite dwindling water supplies.
So how’d we get here? A dry spring, combined with hot, humid conditions, fueled what’s been called Canada’s worst wildfire season. Though it’s tough to pinpoint climate change on one event, as the Planet warms, water is sucked from the soil, increasing the likelihood of fires.
This reality hamstrung several of the world’s most powerful cities, showing how no one cannot escape the litany of climate impacts in a warming world.
It’s worth noting that wildfires aren’t foreign to the U.S. The American West has been dealing with especially bad ones for the last decade. And the poor air quality experienced in the Eastern U.S. this week is felt every day in some parts of India and China.
Despite knowing about the devastating human impact (poor air quality accounts for seven million deaths annually), as well as the financial costs (State Farm and Allstate recently announced they would stop insuring new homes in California) of wildfires and air pollution, the region has done little to prepare for it.
That climate impacts are at the doorstep of some of a region as wealthy and populated as the East Coast, however, may also have a silver lining, writes author and activist Bill McKibben in The Crucial Years:
This is what a huge percentage of the world’s people breathe every single day of their lives. In fact, we should probably — in our hearts if not our lungs — be grateful for a few days like this. They bring us much much closer to the lived experience of billions of our brothers and sisters.
In other words, there’s nothing like lived experience to drive action. And that action not only means better preparing for health emergencies like this one but also cutting our dependence on fossil fuels.
It’s ironic that this is happening the same week that Apple launched its newest product, the Vision Pro, joining the likes of Sony and Meta in the virtual reality business. Perhaps there’s real value in blending “digital content with your physical space,” as Apple advertises, but I also fear that it will amplify something the smartphone already does well: further isolate us from our surroundings.
We’re so used to viewing things through screens that we’ve become desensitized to the catastrophic impacts of climate change. Our unpreparedness this week shows how we’ve failed to get the picture — or, at least, are content with an outdated “it can’t happen here” mantra.
Until now, we’ve had the comfort of watching videos of climate disasters through our smartphones. Now, we’re the ones taking the videos.
The point made about how big NY's population is, alongside it's wealthy residents, is SO interesting. We had a similar experience in the UK last year when we had a ridiculous heatwave for the first time. Stuff like this really has the ability to wake people up to what's going on, climate change cam no longer be a far away problem.