The year is 2035. After a week of high temperatures, the news reports that temperatures will be above 95 degrees for at least another week with temperatures topping out at 100 degrees. The news is also reporting that the air currents that brought wildfire smoke to the area, will continue as well reducing visibility and contributing to an air quality index above 200 for the next few days (very unhealthy, with the risk of health effects increased for everyone).
The year is 2035 in Binghamton, New York. The forest fires on the west coast have continued to surge and worsen from the far north of Washington all the way down to near Bakersfield in California, where the Sequoia National Park has lost two-thirds of its plant life to a state of charcoal. I thought it wasn’t going to happen much over here on the east coast, where I’ve lived all my life in the peace and tranquility of natural landscapes of the Hudson Valley and Southern Tier at university. But I should’ve expected differently, with the way things continued to just go about their regular pattern under the guise of profit and progress in capitalist and industrial ventures. The forest fires up above us in Canada happened more frequently than we saw before. News stations covered the disasters day in and day out and it came to a point of complete desensitization where I sit back and think, “what am I supposed to do about this anymore?” Why is it that the focus of these organizations is just to show and tell you the atrocities we’ve been creating through our own actions, and not just shut up and get our hands dirty to stop this. Too late I guess. The volunteers and specialists on the ground and in the air trying to combat these fires that have been leaving blankets of thick ash and murky air have been trying endlessly to stop it. Sometimes it’ll be weeks of hot air where echoes of coughs ring throughout the neighborhoods and streets. Some loud and hoarse enough you can hear from someone’s bedroom from your own across the street. I just think about the time before this and how badly I just want to go out on my bike and pass by the rivers that converge in the heart of downtown Binghamton. Sometimes I’m ready to do that again when in the forecast it says it most likely will rain! Oh just to be outside with cool water falling on my head. I seem to forget though that with the changing problems we’ve faced with the fires and the air, the floods of Binghamton have gotten worse. I look outside my second floor apartment window and see the water level at my building’s front door window, about four feet from the ground as it creeps ever so slowly to the starting base of my own floor. Homes along the main vicinity of the Susquehanna and Chenango are uninhabitable, some have been torn down from construction for future flood mitigation, others have been left to rot in the still waters that never seem to drop back down. The floods are so prevalent that construction on flood mitigation has been stopped completely for weeks on end. I just fear going outside at this point, how will I ever get out and visit my family back home? Is it worse there? Or is it the same everywhere now.