New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
A generation that can’t breathe easy
A group of 12-year old girls in swimsuits are moving up the stairs like a school of fish. The rest of us are dressed in jackets, as temperatures are in the low
60s. From the bus fleet parked near West Beach, these girls look as if they are a part of a class trip to Hammonasset State Park.
The buses are shrouded in haze, what looks a little like ocean mist. The weird light makes it feel as if we’re moving through an eclipse, but the acrid smell makes it feel more like the apocalypse.
The school year is nearly done, and you get the sense these students would be game for a field trip regardless of the weather (chilly) or the air quality (poor).
“You guys!” calls one girl as she looks at her phone. “The air quality just went down!”
One of the other girls asks what that means.
The first girl squints at her screen. “It’s 169!” she says, and while the other girls look momentarily concerned, their attention is soon taken with the vending machine.
That figure (169 on the AQI — Air Quality Index) means the air is unhealthy, especially for vulnerable groups such as people with asthma. Yet here are these pre-teens, blithely enjoying the beach beneath an apocalyptic sun.
There is something brave and sad about that. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, we started talking about a new normal, a phrase that was meant to mark the time after a crisis when we would do things differently, as if doing things differently would forestall the next crisis. The pandemic gave us another new normal, but pre-teens don’t talk like that. They weren’t alive in 2001, and they’ve been living with the pandemic since they were 8 — a lifetime ago, for a pre-teen.
This is their normal, and there’s nothing new about it. It just is. People of my generation (the Boomers) will die of old age. Our grandchildren will die of climate change, and that’s just gross.
The school group was part of a group of 100 million people in 16 states who watched smoke blow in from nearly 200 uncontrolled wildfires in Canada — most of which are burning around Quebec. The next day, the numbers — AQI and the people affected — went even higher. Smoke has been recorded as far away as Norway. One day last week, New York City had the worst air quality of any major city in the world, and a much-circulated video showed a city skyline that went from hazy with low visibility to deep orange with severely limited visibility in just a few hours.
Meanwhile, Canada is losing forests and wildlife at about twice the rate as 30 years ago. The fires — which have charred an area twice the size of New Jersey — are stoked by abnormallyhot, dry weather, as well as human carelessness (a cigarette tossed from a car, a camp fire not properly extinguished). Tens of thousands of Canadians have been displaced, Climate change activists say they hope the power of direct experience will move the needle on public attitudes, as Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, told the Washington Post.
But these conditions are not new, at least, not for the western United States, where residents have long since found creative ways to avoid the dangerous particles found in broad-reaching wildfire smoke. Ask anyone who lives around San Francisco. This is their normal, and it isn’t new.
Back in the east, last week’s baseball games were cancelled. Outdoor recesses were, too, and none of this is escaping the attention of children and young people. A 2021 Lancet study looked at people ages 16 to 25 in 10 countries (including the United States) and found that when it comes to climate change, 84 percent were moderately worried, and 45 percent said their feelings about climate change — which include sadness, anxiety and guilt — were hampering their ability to function.
Connecticut is preparing to follow New Jersey and include climate change in its public school science curriculum, This comes from the legislative efforts of people such as Rep. Christine Palm, D-Chester, and vice chair of the legislative environment committee, who has been pushing for this since 2018. Codifying the curriculum brings the roughly 10 percent of Connecticut public schools that don’t teach the crisis into line with those that do, and it protects those lessons from shifting political winds.
The curriculum will include looking at how human behavior affects the climate, as well as exploring solutions that may vary by community, since the effects of climate change tend to land heaviest on groups whose members are vulnerable already.
Back at Hammonasset, the girls have purchased their snacks and returned to their group, where the boys are tossing a football.
Though we were all advised to do so, no one is wearing a mask. My hiking partner and I discussed it. I have a box of masks I still carry in my car, along with hand sanitizer. This is our normal — though it shouldn’t be. You want to think these kids are rolling with it — but they shouldn’t be.
Susan Campbell is the author of “Frog Hollow: Stories from an American Neighborhood,” “TempestTossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker” and “Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism and the American Girl.” She is Distinguished Lecturer at the University of New Haven, where she teaches journalism.