Under the Heat Dome Summer, 2023
After three weeks of 100-degree temperatures, it’s raining. I go outside and let the rain wet my hair and splash widening drops on my shirt and pants. I feel its coolness against the top of my feet and along my lower arms. I smell the scent of dirt risingfrom the flower beds and see drops bounce off the stone patio. The grass and heat-tolerant Asian Jasmine must be getting a drink. The rain doesn’t last long, but it breaks the heat. How cool 90 degrees seems!
Recently, the Houston PBS station aired a documentary about Rachel Carson. As I watched, I thought back to 1964 when her book Silent Spring appeared, and the word ecology first came into my consciousness. The notion that everything on the earthis connected to everything else on the earth came as a revelation. After all, I had grown up in post-World War II America where the only limits many people felt were economic ones. My father instructed my sister and me to turn the lights off in a room when we left it, not because it would save electricity and lessen global warming, but because it would save us money. Like everyone else, when our family took road trips, we threw our gum and candy wrappers out the car window. Coke bottles we took home, not because they would trash (and break on) the roadside, but because we could take them back to the store for a few pennies. It all seems so innocent and long-ago.
Carson’s book helped wake us up. Within a few years, DDT was regulated; the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were passed; the EPA was started, even as powerful corporate interests lobbied and propagandized against them. Since the legislation of the 1970s, corporate interests have succeeded in slowing environmental legislation. Even though scientists warned that carbon dioxide in the air warms the planet like a blanket, many believed that we would feel it only decades from now.
So let me tell you how it feels now: The sun becomes the enemy. If I go for a walk in the morning, I weave from shady spot to shady spot. When I come back, I must hurry to do errands and outside chores before noon. Walking across a Target parking lot at 4 p.m. with no shade is like walking through hell. The heat rises from the pavement and blasts my face; the sun overhead burns my skin; the glare blinds me. A hat or an umbrella don’t help; they just block out any air movement around my face.
So how are people here reacting to this heat? When I meet friends in my middle-class economic and social strata for lunch, we blithely talk about staying inside in the air conditioning, going from house to car and back to house again. Maybe we offer a concerned comment about the construction workers we passed on the way to the restaurant who work all day in the heat; rarely does such concern go beyond talk. At least one such outside worker has died, and we lament the failure of a bill introduced in the Texas Legislature to mandate water breaks at construction sites. Even that little nod to humanity over profit got squelched.
As I feel the anger rise, I begin to rant, but I realize that ranting without action is of no use. Should we take to the streets, join a climate action group, write letters? Some may think they will escape the heat dome, or the fire, blizzard, hurricane, or flood. But evidence otherwise is growing: fires in the American West and Canada, smoky skies in New York and Chicago, drought in the heartland, hurricanes along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts—in the last few years, just about the whole U.S. has been affected. And then there is the rest of the world.
Now, however, in Houston the rain has cooled the air, and the sky is clear. The birds and squirrels are skittering about, and we have a reprieve for a bit. The old climate I knew, the before-time, returns, however briefly. But let me not be lulled into passivity by this cooling air in my backyard. Rachel Carson wrote a book; what will I do? What will the rest of us do?
