Far beyond the fires raging across Europe and North America, the smoke, dangerous to breathe, hangs in the air, dimming the view, changing the very color of sunlight into something grimly unsettling.
An estimated 20,000 are said to have died in the extreme heat in Europe earlier this year, and heat is climate change’s quiet killer, compared with the dramatic violence of death by fire or flood. In eastern Washington, 600 homes have just burned down, and in both Europe and North America, firefighters have died in the effort to contain the climate-fueled firestorms.
Once, across much of the the world’s temperate zones, we looked forward to summer as a time of delights, from summer’s bounty of fruits, long days, warmth, school holidays, activities like camping and swimming, travel and adventure. Now many of us dread it.
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Summer was the sweet season celebrated in poetry and song, often pictured as a gentle goddess; now it is too often a threat and a misery. All this makes me think of Bill McKibben’s 2011 book Eaarth, a proposal that we can understand climate change as equivalent to moving to a more perilous, unwelcoming planet than the gentle, stable one we evolved over the 12,000 years since the last ice age.
I know that there are parts of the world where summer was already harsh, intense – 20 years ago, my friend Mark Klett, a photographer living near Phoenix, Arizona, joked: “Phoenix has two seasons: summer and hell,” summer being January and February; hell being the rest of the year.
But even in Phoenix, summer is now more intense; there, people get severe burns from falling down on superheated asphalt. It’s changed everywhere.
I’ve driven to New Mexico almost every summer since 1989. A few years ago, I found that I feared heat for the first time: the temperature in Needles, a California desert town on the Colorado River near the Arizona border, was going to be 116F (46.6C). I didn’t know if my car could survive temperatures like that, and I feared what survival would look like for me if the air-conditioned car broke down on the highway. (I managed it by staying on the edge of the Mojave Desert the night before and darting across the low desert to Flagstaff, which at 7,000ft elevation stays cooler, and pressing on to New Mexico the next day.)
I’m in New Mexico now, as I write, enjoying the beauties of its incomparable skies and summer thunderstorms, but 37 summers since I started coming, summer is not what it used to be. It’s hotter.
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The monsoon rains are less reliable and often more violent when they come; one New Mexico town, Ruidoso, has over the past few years been beaten up repeatedly by flood and fire. Like so many westerners, I have too often breathed in the toxic smoke of burning forests, have followed the news of forests and towns being consumed by flames, have friends whose homes have been reduced to ash and rubble, have seen brick chimneys standing above the blackened ruins of a neighborhood.
As I hear about summer tourists sweltering miserably from Japan to Spain, I wonder if, going forward, travelers will shift peak vacation times to spring and fall, if schools will change when students have their holidays.
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Keeping them indoors in air-conditioned spaces may be even a safety measure for those who lack such protection at home. Summer has too often, in too many places, become something to brace against, prepare for, and dread: the season of danger, heat, fire, misery. The New Yorker reports: “ A conflagration west of Bordeaux, described as four times the size of Paris, prompted the largest peacetime evacuation in the country’s history: 220,000 people.”
It’s as if we launched a war against nature, and that has turned place after place into something that resembles a war zone. The climate movement is a peace movement, a movement to end this war and its casualties.
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We often talk about what climate change has wrecked in terms of what’s material, tangible, structures lost to fire, flood, or sea level rise, trees dying, species threatened, glaciers melting in warmer weather. But summer was an immaterial treasure and joy that belonged to all of us.
There have been youth-led lawsuits against the producers of climate chaos and the governments who’ve refused to act adequately – essentially for robbing them of their future. Robbing us all of the immeasurable joys of summer as it was is part of that theft. It’s not the main reason that climate action matters so much, but it’s a reminder that what we’re losing is not only the terms of our survival and our safety, but our freedom and pleasure.
