My plan upon taking this morning seat was to discuss the interesting new book I had read about Vermont forests. Then, boob-tube in the background, my attention shifted to yet another image of poisonous black smoke billowing to the heavens.

Does it matter where? It seems to be a daily news occurrence. Local, national, and faraway. Today, a fighter jet burning in an Ohio neighborhood. Yesterday, a helicopter in Los Angeles. Before that, another Strait of Hormuz oil tanker torched by US warplanes, thick, black smoke rising, oil fouling another precious ocean ecosystem.

It seems never-ending. Smoke and more smoke. Drought. Unbearable summer heat. Wildfire tornadoes. Ten- and 20-inch rainstorms. Flooding in rare places.

Is anyone else concerned? Or are we just used to it? Then again, maybe I’m overreacting. But it sure does seem that smoke on the horizon signals serious trouble down the road on our abused planet. Problem is that it may be too late to reverse it. Opinions vary.

Often, as I sit watching these scenes unfold on the repetitive, 24/7, daily-news feeds, I utter the same kneejerk comment to my wife sitting nearby. It goes something like this:

“Does anyone else view these events through my lens? Do they see the smoke as a health threat? Do they think there’s a limit to what our planet can endure, the smoke mixed in with exhaust from more than a billion motor vehicles worldwide, plus that of ships and aircraft and you name it? And don’t forget the industrialists celebrating relaxed regulations now governing American smokestacks and effluents.”

Do others share my concerns about the air we breathe, the water we drink? Do they understand they can’t be taken for granted, and must be protected?

The harbingers of doom are many. Look at that Nepal flood disaster and, quick on its heels, the eerily similar Grand Canyon tsunami. Does anyone else hear the coal-mine canary singing? Do you share the belief that it’s high time to stop ignoring the pretty yellow bird’s sad song before she’s prostrate and raven-black on the cold stone floor?

To me, the recent floods and wildfires signal that Mother Earth is angry. She’s been abused and neglected too long. Now in attack mode, she’s back on her haunches ready to spring forward with a new brand of fury we have not seen.

It’s not like we haven’t seen this coming. Is it not clear by now that climate-change and global warming are real; and not only that, but accelerating faster than even the most daring forecasters predicted 40 and 50 years ago? Back then, in progressive, free-thinking magazines like Rolling Stone and Orion, and on occasional PBS documentaries and 60 Minutes episodes, global-warming gadflies like Middlebury College environmentalist Bill McKibben were sounding the alarm. Problem was their shouts fell mostly on deaf ears, and sadly continue to be ignored in high places.

Those forecasters did not, and still do not, hesitate to predict devastating consequences in the days ahead if we don’t change our ways. In fact, a group known as “doommongers,” by now shortened to just plain doomers, has been asserting for decades that it’s already too late to escape worldwide horrors, particularly for those in the impoverished Third World.

One such man is alternative English thinker Paul Kingsnorth, born in 1972, a year after I graduated high school. I discovered his radical, Gen-X, environmental voice some 20 years ago. Then I watched as he ventured into doomer land with famous essays like “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist” and “Dark Ecology,” before publishing his 2025 book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. The last is his take on where we’re headed in the frightening era of artificial intelligence.

Though I admit I can’t get through the novels Kingsnorth writes in the ancient English tongue, I would recommend any of his non-fiction for a change of pace. A little nibble is sufficient. When I read Against the Machine fresh off the press, I didn’t even know what AI was. Now, after learning to use it as a research tool, I’m being told that, if unregulated, it could destroy the world by the end of the decade.

Huh?

Going back more than a generation, pre-Kingsnorth McKibbenites were predicting global-warming catastrophes by as early as 2050 in important cities up and down our Eastern seaboard. That means Boston, Providence, Rhode Island, New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Charleston, South Carolina, and especially Miami. These cities, experts cautioned, were likely victims of, at the very least, serious, destructive storm-flooding caused by otherworldly torrential rains. A mix of such storms with oceans swollen from Arctic glacial melt promised big trouble, they said.

And guess what? They were right. We’ve already tasted it.

Many of the most-vulnerable cities named back then have already been visited by unprecedented rains and flooding. Can you say 10- and 20-inch rainfalls in Gulf Coast cities like Houston and New Orleans? Yep. Been there, done that. More on the way. But don’t tell anyone. Better to dismiss it as another lefty hoax worthy of sending the Red-voting uneducated masses in lockstep to the polls.

A half century ago, before the editor reading this was a twinkle in his daddy’s eye, I remember reading of emergency planning secretly underway to prepare for the possibility of emergency seawalls to protect important cities. We’re talking urban areas with populations in the millions, here and around the globe.

I wasn’t the only person who read it. Problem is that some listened and most didn’t. Easier to ignore the warnings as tired examples of bleeding-heart hysteria and propaganda. Now the “official word” out of DC identifies global warming/climate change as a hoax, and measures have been taken to remove the terms from government documents and speech.

Although anyone with a third-grade Arkansas education ought to know better by now, loyal partisans take the bait, hook, line and sinker. Sheeple. A whole flock. Oh my!

Leading the “Drill, Baby, drill” chants are politicians bankrolled by Big Oil and its investors, along with “conservative” journalists and voters marching to the beat of their drums. They believe the Big-Oil pitch, repeat it often, and demand “fair press,” which means “balanced reporting” that’s careful to include the threadbare caveat that some experts do not believe humans have a hand in global warming.

Do these folks not see, or breathe, the wildfire smoke choking our cities? Are they sleeping through the nightly reminders of black smoke billowing to the heavens from different sources around the globe? If the source of this air pollution is not wildfires or Midwestern train or factory explosions, it’s bombs and missiles hitting foreign oil tankers, refineries, and reserves, not to mention never-ending structure and highway blazes.

We’re not alone in our misery. Western Europe is roasting. Look at France, where heat exhaustion stopped some of the world’s best tennis players from finishing French Open matches this year, and where, during the same weeks, a nuclear power plant was shut down because the river water used to cool its turbines was too hot. How long before that happens here?

Sorry, fellas. Time to face the facts. We’re killing our planet to the defiant “Drill, baby, drill” chant coming from one side of the aisle. It’s ridiculous. They know better. Theirs is not head-in-the sand denial. It’s willful blindness to hara-kiri in the public square.

It feels to me that we’re teetering atop a glacial-till dam, like the one that burst in Nepal, eroding like the sands of an hourglass. We’re headed for a catastrophic breach we deserve.

Greed and lies. All about greed and lies. Have we lost our grip on truth? On what’s real and what’s fake?

Whew! Glad to get that off my chest. Maybe I should leave the TV off when writing.