Every decision matters

I think part of what makes this so psychologically difficult is that it’s both immediate and diffuse.

We’re waking up, getting ready for work and summer activities for the kids, stopping at the grocery store – and we look up. The sun is orange because smoke from thousands of miles away has settled over Wisconsin.

We can smell it.

People with asthma are told to stay inside.

Kids can’t play outside.

Older adults are at higher risk.

And yet … life just keeps going.

It’s a strange thing for the human brain to reconcile. We aren’t very good at responding to slow-moving crises that don’t arrive as one singular disaster. Climate change isn’t just hurricanes or wildfires in California anymore. It’s your morning commute in the Midwest looking like this.

The fire burns in a mostly finite region.

The consequences do not.

One of the things I’ve been grappling with is the feeling of powerlessness in all of this that has crept in and settled in my bones. Do you feel that too?

I’m not naive enough to believe that if enough people recycled or drove less, we could stop smoke from crossing a continent. And when I watch governments continue approving more fossil fuel extraction, weakening environmental protections and selling off our public lands to open them for mining and drilling, or treating climate policy like a partisan game, it’s easy to feel like we’re caught in an eddy in a river, spinning in circles while the current keeps pulling you downstream.

It's a start

But I also think that’s where politics matters.

One election will never fix the climate – or anything that is going wrong.

But it’s a start.

Because every decision about energy, public transit, conservation, clean water, emergency preparedness, public health funding, building codes, insurance, and disaster response either makes us more resilient … or more vulnerable.

This isn’t about hugging trees or some liberal wishlist.

It’s about whether our kids with asthma can safely play in their backyard in July.

Whether our parents can breathe.

Whether our neighbor’s homeowner’s insurance doubles.

Whether farmers can count on predictable growing seasons.

Whether Wisconsin becomes a place where “air quality alerts” are no longer unusual.

I think people are still missing the acute emergency that is climate change, especially when families are worried about groceries or utility bills.

The answer is that it isn’t separate from those things anymore.

It is those things.

It’s your electric bill during heat waves.

It’s your grocery bill after crop failures.

It’s your insurance premium after floods.

It’s the haze outside, and the particulate matter settling on your windshield.

It’s the world we’re already living in.

And if we continue pretending these are isolated events instead of connected consequences, we’re choosing adaptation over prevention. That means we’re willing to simply accept that our children will inherit a hotter, smokier, more expensive, less predictable Wisconsin.

I’m not willing to view this as normal – or inevitable.

Are you?