To the editor,

Another summer of wildfires. We hear of a friend’s daughter caught in a canoe on a smoky lake in Ontario, her YMCA camp evacuated. She and her fellow campers paddle exhaustedly to avoid the burning shore, are finally rescued after 30-plus hours.

Hundreds of miles south, our own skies go hazy with “very unhealthy” particulate matter. I hear our president call for Canada to be punished for the wind-borne pollution of those hundreds of fires out of control in the dry extreme heat. This is the same president who has denied our responsibility as chief contributor to global climate change with one disastrous executive order after another. The administration’s hypocrisy is another kind of smoke, shrouding the reality of our role in the conditions leading to the fires.

Even the historically failed Nixon presidency moved environmental science in America forward with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Now the Trump administration aggressively erases that progress, to the advantage only of polluting energy industries, and exposes us all to health hazards from which we’ve enjoyed virtual immunity for the better part of the past 50 years.

It’s especially horrifying at this late date to watch this rollback of environmental progress threatening the health and survival of future generations. As far back as the early 1950s scientists were able to accurately predict the trouble we find ourselves in now. The prophetic environmentalist Rachel Carson wrote in 1953, when President Eisenhower replaced Interior Department professionals with big business appointees, that “a politically minded Administration returns us to the dark ages of unrestrained exploitation and destruction.”

Ms. Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring alerted the American public to the environmental dangers of pesticides widely used at the time, urged us to consider the damages those substances were inflicting not only on bird populations but ultimately on ourselves.

As the summer wildfires rage and fill our sky with toxic particles, I wonder what Carson would say about the harm our evident disregard for the earth is doing to our fellow creatures, the birds and insects, on whose health our health depends, which have no voice but what we think to give them in our public policymaking. In reality, whether or not we know it, we are all in the same canoe, paddling for our lives in the middle of a smoky lake.

Thomas R. Smith

River Falls