Summer was truly hellish this year for both humans and nature. June was much hotter than usual portending the weeks long temperatures in the hundreds throughout July and August in Texas. Adding insult to injury was the lack of rain that left lawns and plants struggling to stay green and healthy. Even my hardiest specimens lost their usual luster and some simply gave up and died. Only the weeds seemed to be as hardy as ever as they propagated faster than I had the energy to pluck them from the ground. They choked my roses and flowers much like the hot air choked me whenever I attempted to spend more than a few minutes working outside. 

We were lucky to avoid fires like the horrific devastation in Maui. Most of us have air conditioning which kept up cool, but the threat of losing power was real as reminders to use as little as possible lest the grid collapse under the stress became a regular thing. There were few days when the children were outside playing as they had always done. I missed them but preferred that they not become overheated. It was mostly quiet as though our neighborhood had become a ghost town. The walkers were gone. The congregations of neighbors in their lawn chairs on the driveways did not appear. Everyone was hunkered down inside save for rare moments when the mercury dropped a tiny bit. 

On Labor Day there was great rejoicing when a short rain fell onto our lawns and streets. No big plans for barbecues and final summer flings had been interrupted by the precipitation. Nobody wanted to be outside anyway. Having wet grass on a day when we were prohibited from running our sprinklers was like seeing manna fall from heaven. 

I’ve been around for awhile and have never once seen a summer like the one just that just passed. It was debilitating and should have been a wake up call for all of us. Sadly I suspect that until it becomes the new normal far too many will scoff at the idea that we really do have to change our habits if we are to have a more positive relationship with the planet on which we live. We can ill afford to rely on a return to what we have known as normal. It would be a travesty to simply ignore what we witnessed this summer and pretend that we had nothing to do with why it was so. 

Ironically I began the summer reading about the Dust Bowl era in the southern plains of what had been the breadbasket of America. The farmers there had misused the land, plowing under most of the native grasses, ignoring the needs of the soil, creating a disaster just waiting for an extended drought, naively believing that the rains would come again to save them. 

It took great effort to reclaim the decimated land and some farmers actually learned their lessons, but many of the renewed farms came at the cost of using groundwater from an ancient aquifer that took thousands of years to create. Farmers no longer rely only on nature to irrigate their crops and since the end of World War II they have depleted over fifty percent of the water in the Oglallala Aquifer. Since there is not enough water to quickly regenerate itself there is grave concern that this groundwater source will ultimately be bone dry unless there are major efforts to conserve what remains. If the aquifer dries up there will be a huge swath of places in the center of our country without even a source of drinking water. 

Nature has been screaming at us for decades and we have seemed to ignore the signs. It is as though our hubris has overtaken our good sense. We don’t appear to be willing to sacrifice now for the greater good later. We tear down forests, clear land, disrupt habitats, build on every inch of ground we can find. Unlike our ancestors who stayed away from river bottoms and knew not to inhabit rice fields, we think we can tame nature to suit our whims. Like those poor souls who reaped the windy dust storms in places once known as “No Man’s Land” we scoff at suggestions that maybe there are places that we were not meant to be used. We even take a paradise like Maui and overbuild to the point of making a wildfire almost inevitable. 

I heard that people were able to swim in Lake Superior this summer without wet suits. That may not sound strange at all to anyone living along the Gulf Coast where summer time bathing in the sea is a tradition, but to those who have lived on the shores of that northern lake it is an eerie happening. Along with milder winters in the north, warmer lakes are seemingly an anomaly even as such things are happening more and more often. 

We have been warned again and again by scientists who study the earth. They are not mad or crazed people. They are simply reporting what they have seen. They track the trends in weather. They measure the rainfall and the temperatures. They record the declines of forests and creatures who once lived in them. They are simply observing the facts and determining that an unfortunate trend is occurring before our very eyes. We would do well to listen to what they have to say. If we don’t adopt new ways of interacting with nature, we may one day be forced to relinquish our stubbornness when the wonderful resources of our beautiful earth are depleted. 

We can no longer pretend that our individual actions do not matter. Each of us can do something every single day to change, to learn more about the ways that we can sacrifice now for a better future. The health of the Earth depends on us. An ounce of prevention now may forestall a dire event in the future. We have the power to do what we instinctively know we must do. The question is whether or not we have the will. 

I know that I sound like a nag when I keep bringing up this topic but it is important that we keep reminding ourselves of our duty to squarely face the challenges of climate change that are created by humans. Once every adult that I knew was a smoker. Within less than a decade most of them had heeded the constant warnings of the dangers of cigarettes. I know that with the right mindset we as people are capable of doing great things. Sadly we should not wait until we are forced to change when our neighborhoods burn to the ground or there is no water where we live. It would be wrong to think that we will die before the worst hard times come so that we have no reason to bother sacrificing for a future we will not see. We are at our best when we plan for the future rather than simply reacting to the present. It’s time that we all do some heavy lifting together with our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren in mind. It’s time we repair our mistakes out of love for one another and for our beautiful earth.