In a strange way we humans are drawn to disasters, even our own. Last week, locally, we lived through an historic air pollution event. With over 235 square miles of forest burning in Nova Scotia and an unfavorable wind flow, our air was as thick as the meringue on a lemon meringue pie. On Facebook, I posted a picture of the sun burning red through the smoke and commented that this is what it was like on a daily basis back in the 1960’s. We could barely see the Shawangunk Mountains from our farm then and we could barely see the mountains now. The 1960’s were running on the great post-war expansion of the 1950’s and it was a time before pollution was a topic of concern. Industry was in control. It did what it wanted. PCB’s? Let’s just dump them here (in the Hudson). And the government let them do it.

My comment drew denials from Conservative/Republicans who do not believe in government regulations. As much as I loved watching the quintessential conservative of my youth, William F. Buckley, even as a ten-year-old, I knew he was absolutely wrong when he postulated that the free market would keep our air and water clean because those companies that were most responsible in their approach to the environment would be rewarded by the purchasing decisions of the public. This was a hoax of a thought. People are still falling for it. With Buckley, it was either naivety or cynicism that could have propelled such a notion, and I never found him to be a cynic. Those Facebook commentators were saying my memory was faulty and the air wasn’t like that on a daily basis, and I guess they were implying that the Clean Air Act of 1970 simply wasn’t needed.

Last week people were going outside to look at the sun. Garcia suggested it would be a good time for a solar eclipse because you could look right at it while it happened and not burn your retinas. Photographs of the sky and sunset flooded the internet. People said “I can’t stop looking at it. It is like being inside an apocalyptic film, or like something from David Lynch.” In Lars von Tier’s terminal film “Melancholia” (2011), humans stream to the outside to gaze transfixed at the approaching asteroid, Melancholia, moments before it destroys them and the Earth they are standing on. We can’t stop looking at it.

As much as I despised Richard Nixon with his lies and manipulations of the Vietnam War, I will give credit where it is due, and say he did have a healthy attitude towards protecting the environment. The Clean Air Act of 1970 created the EPA and set standards on car emissions that called for a 90% reduction in critical emissions from vehicles before the end of 1975. What an outcry! To those who say it is all my imagination, data shows between 1970 and 2022 Nitrogen Oxide (NOx) and Sulfur Dioxide (SO2) have decreased 80% and 94% respectively. These are the two main components of smog. In the mid ‘60’s, I could stand in our yard by the red maple with the boyhood swing and watch the yellow cloud roll up the Hudson Valley to the east and stretch over us and to the mountains and it reached all the way to the Adirondacks. And if you thought it was just water vapor, you were simply wrong.

I don’t react much to outside irritants (other than stupidity), do not have asthma, have no known allergies, can pull poison ivy out by the roots, but I have to say by the end of the second day inside our recent Canadian cloud, my lungs hurt and I had trouble sleeping. I can only imagine how other people were impacted.

It’s a good reminder. We get second chances and third and fourths, if we are lucky – some are not – but when will we see what we are doing to the earth? The wind will swing again. We are not going to be ready for it.