What a year this has been, nature-wise. Also otherwise, but I’ll stick to what I know for sure, my home.

Recently someone visited the post I wrote back in August 2018. That was the first year I lived out here in the middle of nowhere Massachusetts. While five years is not a significant dataset, this year has been very different. Rainy, but that’s not unusual. It seems we alternate droughts (2022) with flooding (this year and 2021), but this year has been unusual for the regionwide devastation of flooding. Vermont got hit hard. Here in western Mass., all the farms in the Connecticut River Valley, all the river valleys, got hit hard. Millions of dollars of crops lost.

Then there was the humidity. I remember growing up in a Boston suburb. We had no air conditioning. If it was hot, I slept head at the foot of my bed, next to the open window, catching a breeze. If a summer got really bad, my dad would turn on the furnace fan to blow cool basement air up into the house. There were plenty of hot, lazy days full of boredom, but my body was young and better able to cope with heat.

Now, I’m not imagining that summers are worse. Even when my wife and I first moved out here, every summer night dropped into the 50s and we left windows open, a nice breeze infusing the house with fresh air.

That changed in the last couple of years. The humidity sets in and does not leave. Thank god we put in heat pumps. I figured that as I aged, fans alone wouldn’t do it (and there’s the added advantage of heating—I’ve cut our use of heating oil in half in the last two years and it’ll get even better since I put in a heat pump water heater). We dehumidify more than cool. I can handle 80 degrees if it’s dry.

Nights are as muggy as the day, dropping only to the mid-60s. Still, I open the windows for the fresh air—when it’s not filled with smoke from Canada’s wildfires.

A local meteorologist confirmed that summers are, in fact, more humid than they used to be. More like the Mid-Atlantic states than New England.

We’ve had one winter with heavy snow. The rest have seen more rain and ice than snow. It’s done a number on our pines, which have lost piles of branches.

But this year has been out of whack in another way. One deep freeze in February—down to minus 17 F—and another freeze mid-May (which took out the peach and apple crops) had repercussions that have echoed all summer long.

First, the azaleas and forsythia bloomed only at the bottom of the shrubs. These bloom early and are important for bees. Usually my azaleas are buzzing with activity. What did the bees find this year? Not much.

The serviceberry (aka shadbush or Juneberry) had copious blooms. Yet no berries. Nada. Zilch. Berries are bird food. What did they find? Not much.

I found a huge pile of dead lady bugs in the shed. Never seen that before. If they thought it would be a good place to spend the winter, 17-below might have done them in. Likewise wasps who congregate in my attic.

I had to remove only one wasp nest from a tool chest lid in the back yard. Every other year, I’ve had to do morning patrols to knock down nests before the queens get too committed. Go nest somewhere else, I have lots of good habitat. I’m all for nature, and won’t spray unless it’s a bald-faced hornet nesting on the house, but keep to the yard and woods, please.

Few wasps. Normally I’m catching several in the porch every day to release outside (how the heck do they get in?). This year? No paper wasps (with the yellow legs, not sure of the scientific name) and only the occasional other, smaller all-black wasps.

The pollinator gardens were full of blooms but with few bees, wasps, butterflies. A shortage of pollinators is a serious problem. For commercial crops, sure. But also for other wildlife.

As usual, birds have nested prolifically in my yard, starting with robins (which I didn’t see the first few years) then the phoebes back at their nest over the bedroom window. Catbirds, chipping sparrows, hummingbirds. The wrens set up right away in the house I bought for them. I heard thrushes and ovenbirds and warblers of many kinds. (Nothing makes me happier than a thrush singing at dusk!) Each pair raised more than one brood. A cowbird laid her egg in a chestnut-sided warbler’s nest. The tiny warbler dutifully fed the much larger fledgling.

I can only hope they all found enough insects and caterpillars for their young.

On the upside there seem to be fewer Japanese beetles. Did the grubs get dug up by the robins and catbirds? The Virginia creeper, which we’ve let expand, finally has copious berries and it looks like the winterberries will be lush. But the cedar waxwings passed by our blueberries, which were ready long after the disappointing shadbush.

You’ve all seen the headlines about the hottest July worldwide ever. Florida waters heating to the high 90s. Sea ice in wintry Antarctica at its lowest point ever.

What’s going on? Is it just weather? Sure. Seasonal variations? Absolutely. Are we on a dangerous trend? Yes.

Did you know it’s a myth that a frog in a slowly heating pot of water will not notice till too late? Yep. They’ll jump out well before they boil. Humans, however, seem incapable of understanding that the trajectory we set this planet on will destroy us, or at least life as we knew it. We could have turned this ship back in the 1980s, when I remember a summer hot and awful enough that Time magazine replaced its Man of the Year with Planet of the Year and called it Endangered Earth.

Young people are understandably pissed. They blame us Baby Boomers for wrecking things. But we were lied to. By companies, by the government.

I worked for environmental organizations almost my whole work life. We tried. We really did. And for what? My town has PFAS in the water. Plastics, it turns out, really aren’t recyclable (or they could be but aren’t). I’ve been recycling since I was a kid and my town was among the first in the state to set it up and to this day they make residents do the sorting, which, it turns out, is the only way plastics and glass remain recyclable. So-called single sort became a thing because people are too lazy to sort, but that just contaminates everything and it all ends up in landfills or incinerated.

I’ve toured a recycling plant. No one should have to work that kind of job, sorting smelly, greasy plastics along noisy conveyor belts.

I thought I was doing the right thing. I bought gas efficient cars, then a hybrid. Now the push is to electrify everything, but typical for Americans, we think that as long as it’s not burning a fossil fuel, it’s a plus for the environment.

But the heavy electric cars Americans want (compared to Europe) are actually worse than gas guzzlers. My hybrid is full of chemicals and rare metals. Imagine that on a larger scale and millions of them. The mining, the processing, the eventual disposal.

We can’t electrify or drive our way out of this mess. We have to cut back and we’re never going to do that. Especially as corporations bent on continuing to drill for oil and gas lie to us about what they are doing and why they are doing it.

Can individuals make a difference? Is that corporations’ way of passing the guilt onto us? Shouldn’t government step in and make it all better? You can get lost in the arguments. It’s not us vs. them. It’s all of us, from the individual to Monsanto to ExxonMobil to the Biden administration and Congress. If we don’t all do everything possible to stop this madness, we’re destined to look back on this hottest year in the planet’s history with a fondness for the good old, cooler days.

Since that post in 2018, some things changed, some stayed the same. Bluebirds come to the yard for afternoon baths, blotchy juveniles, motley molting adults. A red shouldered hawk vied for hunting spots with the broadwing, who I think lost out since I’ve hardly seen her. Only one monarch butterfly caterpillar this year, even though our milkweed supply is taking off. No woolly bear caterpillar sightings yet. I did get back in the habit of writing, publishing Endurance last year, with more to come.

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For more

What I said five years ago.

Read Hope Jahren’s book, The Story of More. Get it from your library or a local bookstore.

Time magazine, January 2, 1989

And if I’ve depressed the hell out of you, here’s how to be a climate optimist.