Did we need a wake-up call?

Personally, I didn’t think I did. For more than three decades, I have written on his page of the dangers of fossil fuels, of the need to move to renewable energy, of the human role in causing climate change.

I have also written here about the imbalance worldwide — the unfairness of the pollution from wealthy industrialized nations having the worst effects on undeveloped nations in places where disasters from climate change are most severe.

Nevertheless, I was awakened — in a new way.

I felt what it is like not to be able to breathe. 

Because The Enterprise is a weekly newspaper, you won’t be reading this editorial, which I am writing on Thursday, June 8, until next Thursday, June 15. By then, I can only hope that the wildfires raging in Canada have been controlled, and that we, here in Albany County, New York, are able to breathe freely once again.

But, at the same time, I don’t want any of us to forget the fear we felt. The poor air quality gave us just a glimpse of the harm fossil fuels have caused and from which people in other parts of the world suffer daily — it also gave us a glimpse of what our future may hold.

The way events unfolded for me this past week may have been typical of what others here experienced. On Monday, I got an emailed news release from the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation about an impending air-quality advisory for Tuesday.

I posted a short story about it without giving it much thought. By Tuesday morning, when I walked my dog on our usual two-mile route, I spoke with neighbors who noted scratchy throats and itching eyes. I noticed a haze over the Helderbergs — not the usual “Clear Mountain” or “Bright Mountain,” corrupted from the Dutch, the name signifies.

Truly weird: The roadside wild morning glories, which are usually open even on the cloudiest of days, were closed shut, like umbrellas, the way they typically are only in the evenings.

By the end of the walk, my breathing was labored. I have asthma so I thought maybe it was pollen in the air that felt heavy.

More press releases arrived in my email, so I added to my story. The governor said she supported the decisions of school districts that had suspended outdoor activities. The acting health commissioner suggested New Yorkers forego strenuous outdoor activity and those with heart disease — that’s me — and asthma — me again — should avoid spending time outdoors.

I delved in to find out more about the Air Quality Index and added that to the story as we were assembling our pages for the June 8 edition. That night, I marveled at a very orange moon.

On Wednesday, I listened to an online press conference with the state’s acting health and environmental conservation commissioners in the afternoon and another with the governor in the evening. I worked late to get a story posted on all I’d learned, thinking it would help others.

I had never before heard of a “clean room” but found directions for creating one from the Environmental Protection Agency website and am writing from one now — window shut, air-purifier running.

I checked my emergency inhaler as the health commissioner had advised, and, as he also advised, unearthed a packet of masks I hadn’t drawn from since the pandemic abated.

I found a website for Société de protection des forêts contre le feu that tracked fires in Québec, and, calling on rusty French, learned that there is a fire season, during which typically a square mile of forest in Québec burns — but this year, so far, 600 square miles had burned. The start to this season has been so fierce because of high temperatures and dry conditions in the province, the site said.

The site has a map where each wildfire is marked — the vast number is staggering to behold.

I discovered AirNow.gov, which, working with the Environmental Protection Agency, has a website where you can type in your ZIP code to get a current reading on the local air quality; it also displays maps rating the air quality in a color-coded format.

I learned that Altamont, at that moment, was “unhealthy,” my daughter in Philadelphia was in a place where conditions were “hazardous,” and my daughter and granddaughter in the Adirondacks had “good” conditions.

At the Tuesday afternoon press conference, a reporter had pressed Basil Seggos, the commissioner for the Department of Environmental Conservation, to know how soon the particulate matter would dissipate. Seggos said that would depend on if the fires are stopped and on how the winds blow.

“We’ll pray for rain up north,” he said, “and pray for the wind to shift.”

His answer made me realize that the situation we were in was, as the governor and others called it, “unprecedented.” It was at once out of human control while being, at its root, caused by humans.

While there is nothing wrong with praying, or with calling on any deity for help, as human beings, we need to stop our ruination of the natural world.

Actions, like the Canadian prime minister’s suggestion of creating a national fire-response team, are reactive; we need to, rather, get to the root of the problem.

Time and time again on this page, because we’re a local newspaper, we have called for individuals to make a difference — to compost their waste, to recycle their goods, to plant native plants that don’t require watering and do sustain the natural ecosystem, to use solar energy, to drive electric or at least hybrid cars; the list goes on.

We’ve also urged our local towns and villages and school districts to adopt sustainable practices and pass local laws that help the environment — and praised them when they have.

But, really, larger forces are at work. We need a better connected, national system to transmit electricity from renewable sources.

And most of our nation’s greenhouse gasses come from large corporations and energy companies. They need to be properly regulated or incentivized. We need to push for such changes by voting for representatives that will carry that out and lobbying those we have.

It can be done.

I remember the Thanksgiving when I was 13, in 1966, when the New York City area was blanketed in smog for three days. Many people suffered and, although no deaths were immediately confirmed, a report the next year concluded 168 people had likely died because of the smog.

That jolted national awareness on the dangers of pollution, leading to not just an update of local city laws but to the passage of the federal Air Quality Act in 1967.

Most Americans have since breathed easy, but that’s not true for the rest of the world. A Harvard study, “Global Mortality From Outdoor Fine Particle Pollution Generated by Fossil Fuel Combustion,” published in Environmental Research, found that air pollution from burning fossil fuels like coal and diesel was, in 2018, responsible for about one in five deaths worldwide, killing over 8 million people.

In the United States, the researchers found, 350,000 premature deaths that year were attributed to fossil-fuel pollution. The states with the highest number of deaths per capita are Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Ketucky, West Virginia, Illinois, New Jersey, and Wisconsin.

I realized stemming the root causes of the current wildfire smog — climate change with its higher temperatures and dryer forests — will take a more concerted effort than the federal Air Quality Act. And the stakes are even higher, threatening plant and animal life, our entire ecological system, as well as human life.

I was at about this point in my writing and thought process on Wednesday night when my husband returned home from a long day at work and found me barricaded in my “clean room” writing closet. I asked how he was — was he having trouble breathing?

He laughed.

“I grew up in Oregon,” he said. “We had this every summer.”

I wasn’t laughing, but I was myself  jolted to a deeper realization. I had led a privileged life in a leafy part of the country far from the ravages of wildfire and far from the threats of rising oceans and oppressive temperatures.

Worldwide, entire species are facing extinction just as entire human cultures are threatened by climate change.

Our governor, attempting to calm New Yorkers in a press conference on Thursday, June 8, said, “I know a lot of people are stressed out after what happened during the pandemic. I want people to know this is a very different circumstance. We believe it will be short term, not long term.”

I believe people should be stressed out and, unless we make radical changes, the problems will persist, long-term. Each of us should feel the brief bit of inconvenience we had as a reminder of the much worse conditions people are already suffering in other parts of our nation and other parts of our world.

Those few hazy, hard-to-breathe days should also inform us of the horrors that lie ahead if we don’t end our dependence on fossil fuels.

I hope, as you read your newspaper on June 15, the skies are blue again and the sun is shining. But do remember the dark days when the smog pervaded our lives, so that you act to make a brighter future for all.