The Limit

Last Friday, here at my house in Northern Utah, I could not see the mountain. The mountain I refer to is a beautiful 9,700 foot peak called called Ben Lomond, part of the Wasatch Mountain Range just beginning behind our house a few miles away. The smoke, (from the numerous west coast forest fires), had blanketed our state with a thick fog of impenetrable haze and I could not see Ben Lomond. We live up here against the mountain on what we locally call a bench. The bench is actually part of a 12,000-year-old shoreline of a recent large glacial body of water called Lake Bonneville. This lake once covered 20,000 square miles of Utah and Nevada and was over 900 feet deep. Over the years since, this large body of fresh water has shrunk to the very salty 1,700 square mile puddle with an average depth of 16 feet called the Great Salt Lake.

So you might say we already live in an area that has seen massive adjustments due to climate change. A dozen thousand years ago it was very much cooler with those glacial lakes and large numbers of ice age megafauna such as woolly mammoths, whose bones have been found all over the state. Over the last two months the temperatures here have hovered in the upper nineties with regular weekly forays into the hundreds, and the only animals around have been a small flock of quail and one hot, tired ground squirrel, hardly in the same league as a mammoth.

I really am fed up and have reached my limit, when you can smell and taste the air and not even see the beautiful things around you, it has gone too far. Last summer was pretty much the same with foul air from wildfires all over the west and winter was worse with smog and pollutants trapped by temperature inversions in our lovely valleys. Next summer will be the same with a very good chance of continued extreme drought, and probably every year after until there are no more trees left to burn. Why did we let it get this way, and why do we continue to let it go on? How much worse must it get before we understand what is happening and try to stop it. Humans are great at waiting until the last minute to do things, but what if there isn’t a last minute? It took 12,000 years to go from freezing cold to broiling hot around here. It will only take less then a hundred more years to get to uninhabitable.

(As least you can see the mountain today. Actually the trees are starting to block the view now, so it guess it will not matter much if the smoke returns.)