On a clear day, the view from the top-floor terrace of the Kennedy Center is one of the best in the nation’s capital.
Turn one way, and the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials, along with the iconic pointed top of the Washington Monument, frame the sky above the National Mall. Glance uptown, and there’s the U.S. Capitol dome. Turn behind you, casting your gaze across the Potomac River, and northern Virginia’s sprawl runs away from its banks, stretching interminably into the suburbs.
On Wednesday, with much of the Eastern Seaboard cloaked in dense smog from wildfires raging hundreds of miles away across the Canadian border, all those historic sites you learned about in sixth grade social studies class were still visible – but the dense haze, and the glare from the sunlight bouncing off of it, was impossible to miss. It also was a reminder that, for as much as we talk about “saving the Earth,’’ we’re really talking about saving ourselves. And every time we inflict some injury on our shared home, we move that much closer to hastening our own demise. Because, let’s face it. The Earth is going to be just fine whether we’re here or not. At 4.5 billion years old, it’s survived meteor strikes, the dinosaurs, ice ages, tectonic shifts that have erased and redrawn the planet’s surface like a cosmic Etcha- Sketch, volcanic eruptions, destructive storms, and reality television. Empires have risen and fell. Nations have come and gone. Kings and queens – when anyone remembers their names – are buried, as the Stoics famously remind us, in the same ground as their servants and the peasants they thought they were ruling. For the planet, this too, shall pass. But for the rest of us, whose time here is barely a rounding error, the stakes could not be higher. The wildfires that annually inflict billions of dollars of damage on the American West, where they long have been a fact of life, are now part of the “new climate reality” for the United States’ northern neighbor, experts told The Guardian this week.
In fact, the fires are “a really clear sign of climate change,” Mohammad Reza Alizadeh, a researcher at McGill University in Montreal, told the Guardian, which noted that a 2021 study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association found that climate change “has been the main driver of the increase in hot, dry fire weather in the western United States.” And by 2090, wildfires worldwide are expected to only increase in their intensity, The Guardian further reported, citing a United Nations report released last year. It’s already been well-established that human activity has played a role in climate change. And that changes in our activity can help arrest its progress, though we’ve already missed one chance to turn down the temperature, and the window on another opportunity is rapidly closing. “We’re the first generation to feel the sting of climate change,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said. ...
Those memorials peeking above Washington D.C.’s skyline remind us just how precious and altogether brief that time really is.
