As our politics degrade, so does our ability to deal with the most urgent issue we all face.

Climate change is so very hard to wrap your head around, especially for people like us who live in an area where a river runs through it and powers our homes and businesses with green, hydro-electric energy.

It’s easy to be complacent here, until August anyway.

That’s when, over the last few years, we’ve come to expect “smoke season” if we’re lucky, “fire season” if conditions push the nature around us to kindling levels and something, anything, causes a spark.

That’s happened far too many times over the last dozen years or so, even threatening our local towns several times.

As bad as that sounds, it can be made to sound worse than it might be. And as tempting as it might be to think of it as no big deal, don’t buy into any position put forth just to win an argument. The threat may not be as bad as some want to make it out, but it is real.

We live in a time when overstating your case seems to be the normal course of any discussion. Every time I get a press release from a Republican or Democratic politician these days, almost certainly it makes out the other side’s position on whatever policy is being discussed as clearly delusional, anti-American or evil. That really needs to stop.

Especially with respect to our climate challenges, we need clear, factual thinking, not flame-fanning rhetoric designed to win the argument for a short-term political point at the expense our understanding of what it will really take to survive and thrive in the long term.

April 22 is Earth Day, which started sometime just after a river caught on fire in Ohio in 1969. I remember that. In the decades since, we’ve come to understand that could happen because we had not understood that it’s up to us to not screw everything up.

Now we know how deeply that ignorance has pervaded our lack of stewardship of the planet that sustains us. That we can cause not just a dirty river, but a change in the ocean currents that result in a collapse of the food chain, or a shift in the global weather patterns with catastrophic consequences.

After a long couple years of dealing with what is largely perceived as a more immediate threat in a pandemic, now leaders are ignoring the far more dangerous threat because elections are coming, so painting the other side as villainous is better for polling and riling up the base.

That, in the end, is what could be our fatal flaw.

Solutions are obtainable tomorrow; political will can be more difficult to engineer.

So, push back at rhetoric that paints anybody as the other side and remember on this nearly forgotten Earth Day that to solve our problems, we need everybody to become allies as quickly as possible.

Scott Hunter

editor and publisher