Talking About the Weather

By Frank Trippett

In an ordinary heat wave, Americans typically fume and fuss, grab relief where they can, and slog through the pestiferous weather with sweaty humor and prayers of gratitude to the great god A.C. This summer's record-busting hot spell, however, has aroused an extraordinary response. On top of the usual chafing at day after sticky day of hot, humid and hazy punishment has come a communal attack of the worries. Many Americans have found themselves concerned less about passing misery and more about the whole bruised and abused human habitat. Soggy, unremitting heat sometimes seemed a symptom of general ecological collapse. Had the great breakdown begun?

This fretful mood has been easy to notice in small talk and just as easy to experience. It is evident in tense radio weather reports and the spastic smiles of television weather forecasters as they explain the now well-known greenhouse effect -- the inexorable warming of the earth under the global canopy that civilization has created with gases like carbon dioxide. The friendly, familiar promises of good ol' summertime have yielded to the hallucinatory imagery of technology.

Ecophobia, as the mood might be called, has not been induced by the hot spell alone, even though many places have scored the heat the worst in history. Chicago reported an unprecedented number of 100 degrees days, and temperature records have been broken in New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Oregon and Washington. Stifling heat made it easy for an all too varied constellation of environmental disasters to mobilize popular anxiety. Consider some of the summer's invitations to fret:

-- Beaches by the dozen up and down the East Coast have repeatedly been closed to swimmers because of waters infested by sewage or contaminated hospital waste such as blood samples and hypodermic needles.

-- Persistent drought has laid waste to America's agricultural midsection. Damaged grain harvests in the U.S., Canada and China will result in the sharpest ever one-year drop in world grain stocks, Worldwatch Institute reported last week.

-- Forest fires have destroyed immense swatches of Yellowstone National Park, where an 18,700-acre burn pushed close to Old Faithful. Other wildfires have afflicted areas of Wyoming, Colorado, Oregon and Idaho, including a 2,300-acre blaze that came within a few miles of Boise.

-- Air quality in the U.S. was reported to be the worst in the decade by monitors of the Environmental Protection Agency. In Milwaukee 18 days of unhealthy ozone levels represented an 80% increase over 1987. Says Steve Howards, executive director of Denver's Metropolitan Air Quality Council: "The air is still breathable, but clearly the trends are running against us."

There was plenty of other fuel for worry: reports of inexplicable fish kills, warnings against eating shellfish, tales of lakes and forests dying from acid rain. Who could forget that up to 12% of all U.S. houses suffer unsafe radon exposure? That by sending up chlorofluorocarbons used in coolants, man is still destroying the ozone layer that protects against ultraviolet rays?

Public television's nature shows provide fresh images of catastrophe: dolphins dying mysteriously at sea, developers torching the South American rain forests that scientists consider vital to absorbing carbon dioxide, Chesapeake fishermen dolefully describing the deformed oysters they now often haul in. Last week came New York City, which treats the Atlantic like a municipal cesspool and dumps some 4 million wet tons of sewage sludge annually 106 miles out to sea, promising that it will stop that practice -- maybe in ten years.

Most experts blamed 1988's heat on a northerly shift of the jet stream that shut the U.S. off from some of the Canadian cool that usually drifts down. Still, it was hard not to suspect, as a few experts did, that the man-made canopy high above was already busy roasting the earth. The combination of heat and pollution gave a "sense of foreboding" to Jeannie Little, 32, visiting Chicago last week. She had taken a dip to cool off in Lake Michigan. "I climbed over garbage at the water's edge -- Coke bottles, potato-chip wrappers, cigarette butts," she said. "The water felt nice, but when I got out I felt all sticky and attracted flies. It was disgusting. In a few years' time, where will you be able to go to escape the oppression of this kind of heat? This summer makes me nervous about what we have in store."

Popular fear of crime is often disproportionate to the amount of criminal activity. Apprehensions about ecological dangers may be similarly exaggerated. Every worry, however, is reinforced by the common knowledge that governments and political leaders are doing precious little about mundane pollution problems, and almost nothing to arrest or curtail the fossil-fuel emissions that are turning the planet into an oven.

Ecophobia may wax and wane, but it is not likely to disappear as though it were free-floating anxiety. Any species that has endured four decades with the thermonuclear fantasies of Mutually Assured Destruction knows how to worry big, and there is sufficient cause for fear about almost every aspect of the human environment. Sooner or later, Americans inevitably hear Charles Dudley Warner's observation that while everybody talks about the weather, nobody does anything about it. It is time to bury that aphorism for good. Mankind has, willy-nilly, done altogether too much about the weather -- and all too little to reduce or control the mindless damage.

With reporting by Elizabeth Taylor/Chicago, with other bureaus