I am so angry, so sad. Today I drove my two children to the first day of a weeklong day-camp with a nature theme. They are learning about local species, pressing flowers, that kind of thing. The teachers expected that the kids would spend most of the day outside in nature. Instead, the kids will likely spend the entire week indoors, since there is so much wildfire smoke in our area that the air is designated by the EPA as “unhealthy” or “very unhealthy,” depending on the time of day and the wind.

There have been so many wildfires in our area in recent years that Smoke is officially becoming the season after Summer and before What Happened To Fall. This increase isn’t random. It is due to climate change–climate change that we humans have known about since at least 1981 and have done next to nothing to stop.

As the Sacramento Bee put it: “This is climate change, for real and in real time. We were warned that the atmospheric buildup of man-made greenhouse gas would eventually be an existential threat.”

We were warned. And yet here we are.

As an environmental reporter, I keep my rage and despair about environmental horrors—and especially climate change—locked up in a big strong opaque container that I keep shoved in the back corner of my mind. So do most other environmental journalists I know.

But while I was watching my little kids walk into that building to spend a day–a week–trapped inside like Rapunzel learning about a disappearing nature they can’t even visit without choking on the fumes of our own greed, selfishness, and lack of imagination, my containment unit cracked open and howling anger exploded outwards from my heart along all my arteries until I was vibrating with bitterness and sorrow.

I will stuff this fierce grief back inside and close my box of rage back up. I must if I am to carry on. But for today, I am just so furious at everyone in a position to do something who did nothing. The more power you had to change things that you did not exert, the angrier I am at you.

(This includes myself, of course. I am no climate saint. Despite the solar panels on my house, I fly a lot for work and drive a car. But I am less mad at myself and my fellow “consumers” than at the fat cats at fossil fuel companies and politicians in power. I subscribe to the notion that we should not try to make environmental change by guilt-tripping citizens who are already dealing with trying to get by in a country where upper-income families have 75 times as much money as lower-income families. Environmental solutions must be systemic. The “straw ban” is a great example of this. A catchy campaign encourages already stressed-out consumers to alter their behavior—at a significant cost to the many disabled people who need plastic straws to drink—instead of working to reform waste management systems in key river basin and coastal hotspots around the world…and you get the idea.)

My kids having to spend nature day-camp locked indoors is a very minor issue compared to the global, intergenerational suffering climate change will cause. In a very real way, the fact that my emotional block was finally cracked by a minor inconvenience to my own very privileged kids points out a real problem with the lack of diversity in climate media. If I were the person I aspire to be, this moment of rage would have happened when I heard about some climate disaster befalling people with less power and agency. That’s my own failure.

Many people will have it much, much, much worse. People are already dying in fires, floods, and heat waves. Their livelihoods are taking a hit and some will see their whole way of life crumble, their cultural relationships with other species severed. Forests will die. Reefs will die.

And also, among these huge, sweeping harms there will also be the small harms: childhood summers spent trapped inside in the filtered chill of air-conditioning instead of outside climbing trees and catching bugs.

I am sitting here in my house with all the windows closed against the thick smoke, sweating profusely in the 90 degree heat. My kids are playing legos again instead of playing outside. We are talking about installing air conditioning in our house since this is going to happen every year for the foreseeable future. Of course, not everyone can afford A/C. Welcome to the future of temperature inequality. I am so disappointed in us. I am so angry. I am so sad. We were warned.

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Photo from NASA’s Terra satellite