The fossil-fuel industry is poisoning the summer for a generation of kids.
Here in Adams County, the air doesn’t smell like it used to. The notebook has twelve years of this, and the line doesn’t bend back. The seasons are arriving differently. The county fair and the lake and the tree stand used to be the architecture of growing up, and the architecture is changing. The point is not what the notebook records specifically. The point is what the camps are telling us.
Last July, a YMCA camp in Ely, Minnesota, had to submerge nineteen canoes in a lake because the air was too thick to breathe. A seventeen-year-old girl who’d spent twenty-six days on a backpacking trip in Alberta came back to find the homecoming celebration cancelled. The camp director said they’d never sunk canoes before. They did it because the canoes were too fragile to move to safety.
The American Camp Association says a camp that used to see three or four days with the heat index above 105 now sees eight or ten. That is the arithmetic of what happens when you have been burning the atmosphere for a century and the bill arrives at the pool. The heat dome that brought dangerous temperatures to most of the Lower 48 this summer is the same force that shut down the camps. A pediatrician urged caution for babies during the summer heat waves. That caution applies to every kid who is supposed to be playing outside.
There is a writer who has argued, in a book about culture and agriculture, that a community’s economy is its membership, and that extraction destroys the membership before it destroys the economy. Summer camps are community institutions — they teach kids to be outside, to be away from home, to figure out who they are when the screen goes dark. When the air is unsafe, the community fractures. The camp can’t hold the kids. The kids can’t be outside. The parents scramble to find alternatives. The pool noodles become dolphins in a kiddie pool because the woods are too thick to breathe. This is a community collapse, and it is happening in real time — not in theory, not in a policy paper, but in a camp in Ely where the director said they’d never sunk canoes before and they did it because the canoes were too fragile to move to safety.
This generation of kids has already lived through a pandemic that took away their school year. Now they’re up against extreme weather. The summer is a three-month break from school routines and homework, and the American Camp Association says the skills kids learn at camp — independence, problem-solving, and teamwork — will equip them for the future. But the future is being rewritten by smoke and heat.
The article mentions a seventeen-year-old camper who said, “It hasn’t affected me until I’m seeing it right now and I’m just like: now it’s too late.” That is not a quote from an activist or a politician. That is a kid who spent seven summers in the same place, who learned to love it, and who is watching it disappear. She spent twenty-six days in the wilderness with four other girls and a counselor, and the last day was supposed to be a homecoming with hot dogs and watermelon and campfire skits. It was cancelled because of smoke.
This is what the fossil-fuel industry has done. Not in the abstract. In the specific case of a camp that teaches kids to be outside. In the specific case of a seventeen-year-old girl who cries because she doesn’t get to go home to the campfire. In the specific case of a generation of children who have already lived through a pandemic that took away their school year and now face a summer that is being rewritten by smoke and heat.
The industry that kept pumping and digging and burning while the science was clear, while the lakes were warming, while the smoke was coming. The industry that should have been held to account decades ago is now being allowed to keep going. And the children are the ones who pay.
I have a son who is eight. He is the age where summer is supposed to mean the woods and the water and the dark coming late. I live in the same warming region these camps live in — not in Ely, not in D.C., but on the same continent where the air is changing and the pools are emptying and the canoes are going under. The camps are telling the same story: three or four heat-index days above 105 have become eight or ten.
That is what is underneath the camp director’s decision to sink the canoes. That is what is underneath a seven-year-old mermaid playing in a kiddie pool because the air outside is too thick. That is what is underneath a seventeen-year-old girl crying because she doesn’t get to come home to the campfire.
The notebook has twelve years of this. The camps are telling the same story. A generation of kids is growing up in the summer the fossil-fuel industry built. They are breathing what is left.