A summer in seattle
| Pages | 23-23 |
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 | 23
Reprinted by permission from The Environmental Forum®, September/October 2021.
Copyright © 2021, Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, D.C. www.eli.org.
Notice & Comment
THE problem now is that the
science behind further gov-
ernment interventions in the
market is dicult to convey.
Today, pollution and its eects can
be invisible. Take this hard fact: more
Americans have died of air pollution
than have died of the coronavirus.
And the toll of particulate pollution
alone continues at over 100,000 cases
of “premature mortality” a year. e
fact that small particles are usually not
visible means there was little outcry
when EPA decided last year not to
lower the ambient standard — in ef-
fect, refusing to lower the death toll.
In fact, we are losing American lives
to air pollution at a faster rate over
time than the nation lost combat sol-
diers during World War II. Every ten
days we endure another Pearl Harbor,
an event that shocked the nation and
loosened billions to win the war, with
little public concern over personal sac-
rice — including giving one’s own
life, to defend our way of life.
Unfortunately, to quote Pogo, in
this case “the enemy is us.” In addi-
tion, the public can’t see deaths from
air pollution; only with a broad sta-
tistical universe can one tease out the
huge death toll. It then becomes chal-
lenging to create the kind of public re-
sponse that helped win World War II
and the space race. Even more dicult
to convey are the benets of decarbon-
izing, since the worst eects are years
away and greenhouse gases cannot be
seen. Consensus in ghting emissions
thus has become dicult.
e coronavirus brought out the
divide between Americans who value
science and those who are suspicious
of it. It has become clear that some
people’s political frameworks inform
their scientic views to the extent that
they are willing to out mask rules and
avoid vaccination, endangering count-
lesss others. ese folks are not likely to
respond well to government programs
to achieve pollution reduction goals, es-
pecially if they require personal action
or sacrice. — Stephen R. Dujack, Editor
NOTICE & COMMENT is written by
the editors and represents their views.
In the comments section of Anne
Helen Petersen’s article, I scroll
through pages and pages of thought-
ful, poignant messages from other
and comfort in the cyclic changing of
the seasons, and who mourn the loss
of this predictability as our climate
changes.
Maybe what I mourn most is the
loss of something I’ve never had: a
true connection to the nature and
abundance that sustains us. Indig-
enous botanist and writer Robin Wall
Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweet-
grass, “Philosophers call this state of
isolation and disconnection ‘species
loneliness’ — a deep, unnamed sad-
ness stemming from estrangement
from the rest of Creation, from the
loss of relationship. As our human
dominance of the world has grown,
we have become more isolated, more
lonely when we can no longer call out
to our neighbors.”
As much as I miss the summers as
they once were, I still struggle to rec-
ognize my “neighbors” in this increas-
ingly altered landscape: the trees I
pass on hikes, the migrating birds, the
bright red salmon arriving to spawn in
the fall. Spending life through a screen
allows us to disengage, to turn a blind
eye to the damage we’ve done and
the harm we’ve caused to the most
vulnerable in our communities.
Inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s
words, and cooped up inside during
the pandemic, I started to go bird-
watching this year. I watched as the
winter’s dark-eyed juncos became
replaced by arrow-shaped tree swal-
lows in the spring, swooping and
skydiving with the breeze. Buoyed by
warming temperatures and blooming
movements.
“See, the chicks come out and
informed me. I hadn’t ever noticed
before. — Akielly Hu, Associate Editor
ENTERING summer now carries
a new sense of dread. Holding our
breath, we lurch into a season of
“What It Feels Like to Lose Your
Favorite Season,” the writer Anne
just the summer, of course, that I’m
mourning. It’s an entire understanding
of the world and its resplendence.”
This past year, I’ve stayed at my
parents’ home in the suburbs of Se-
attle. When I think of my hometown,
I remember a quote from the novel
Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria
Semple that always makes me laugh.
The protagonist, who lives in Seattle
but hates it, laments: “People are
born here, they grow up here, they go
to the University of Washington, they
work here, they die here. Nobody
has any desire to leave. You ask them,
‘What is it again that you love so
much about Seattle?’ and they answer,
‘We have everything. The mountains
and the water.’ This is their explana-
tion, mountains and water.”
Maria Semple, a longtime Seattle
resident, clearly meant to poke fun
at this common sentiment. But what
happens when the things you love
most about home start to radically
change — when the mountains are
shrouded in smoke, the stream emp-
tied of salmon, and normally temper-
ate summer days soar above 110
degrees? What happens when home is
unrecognizable?
-
west feel like home to me is the trees.
red cedar, Sitka spruce — I furiously
tried to learn their names this past
year, desperate to make up for lost
time when I took the trees for grant-
ed. Now, with forests stripped down
summer, I worry I can no longer count
on them to frame the backdrop of ev-
ery happy memory I have outdoors.
A SUMMER IN SEATTLE
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