The first day in early June when my 5-year-old and I camped in Minnesota’s lake country was the usual heaven — perfect calm for canoeing, an osprey overhead as we braved a swim in the cold spring water and a clear blue sky.
But the second day the sky was smoke, the sun a ruby disc. I yearned for the blue and wondered how long the smoke would stay. The winds eventually shifted, but the smoke returned last week and the Twin Cities’ air quality index on Wednesday climbed high into the Environmental Protection Agency’s “very unhealthy” level. I worry about how often it will return this summer and fall…
New research suggests that wind patterns and cloud formation are growing increasingly erratic. In some places, we have too much rain, in others too little. Huge wildfire smoke events are becoming more common. The list of changes occurring above us, spurred on in part by burning fossil fuels, is long and getting longer. It means we must now contemplate the more frequent loss of our blue skies.
When the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term “solastalgia” about two decades ago to describe a form of grief he later defined as the “lived experience of the desolation of a much-loved landscape,” he wasn’t thinking specifically about the sky, but he might as well have been. Already many of us are experiencing something previously unimaginable: We are homesick for the sky…
About three decades ago, the environmental activist and author Joanna Macy argued that until the late 20th century, parents lived with “the tacit certainty” of something every previous generation had enjoyed. The certainty was that their “children and children’s children would walk the same Earth, under the same sky.” That certainty was now lost, she wrote, and that loss was “the pivotal psychological reality of our time.” …
It is yet another retrenchment of our experience on Earth, another instance of “it didn’t used to be this way.”
Are we supposed to just get used to more smoke in the sky? With so much climate change baked into the future, the answer is probably yes. But this new reality feels overwhelming, especially as I imagine the rest of my child’s life…
I hate this smoke for what it does to our present and what it says about her future… But I also have to find another way to feel. I have to find ways to hold joy alongside anger, hope alongside grief…
Maybe on mornings like this, rising to find the sky full of smoke, just enough people will decide: This burning world is not the world I have known, and it’s not the world I want my children to know.
Maybe losing our blue skies more often will be just what we need.
— Paul Bogard, from “I Am Homesick for the Sky” (NY Times, June 20, 2023). Bogard is author of The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light
DK Photo: June 8, 2023. Smoke from Canadian wild fires. More photos here.
