“Some say the world will end in fire…”- Robert Frost

For the past three years I’ve spent an August vacation in a different U.S. national park, and for the past three years that national park has been on fire. 

The scene has become all too familiar; every summer the West is ablaze. This year is no different. 

Allow me to provide some details.

I have an ongoing love affair with our national parks. When my family travels, I spend time poring over maps to see if there’s a way to take in a National Park Service unit somewhere along the way, unless of course the park itself is the destination. 

A seven-hour drive to Las Vegas becomes a 14-hour detour to Great Basin, a simple drive to Thermopolis is a really good excuse to drive through Grand Teton and Yellowstone and any excuse at all is a good reason to visit Utah’s “Mighty Five.” 

In the past five years, we’ve managed as a family to take in the delights of 17 different national parks and monuments. NPS units are not only some of the most beautiful places on the planet, they are also repositories of our shared history and heritage. They hold priceless and irreplaceable treasures. 

They are sacred. 

Here’s the best part: They belong to all of us. These precious jewels don’t belong only to the wealthy or the privileged few. They are yours, mine and ours. 

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns had it right when he said they were “America’s Best Idea.” 

People flock to them by the millions and every year visitation continues to climb. 

Why?

I suppose everyone has their own unique reasons, but I suspect it’s similar for all. They feed our souls. They have an unparalleled ability to remind us of what really matters, to pull us out of our sometimes paltry concerns, our technology addictions and our often superficial hang-ups. 

Especially in these units of scenic beauty and grandeur, they make us feel closer to God, in every person’s individual interpretation of what that means. For my family and me, they’re our “church.” 

To get back to my recent vacation, I just returned from a trip to Glacier National Park in Montana. 

Glacier is a place of jaw-dropping and awe-inspiring beauty that defies adequate description. 

Sweeping vistas, lush green vegetation, glacier-fed streams and lakes of varying shades of blue that rival any artist’s imagination, and a legendary road bisecting the park that challenges even the most fearless among us to tackle its soaring heights and hairpin curves without white knuckles and butterflies in the stomach. 

For days we played in these waters, hiked through that vegetation and let those vistas raise our spirits, with no emails, text messages, social media, computers or television. 

It was blissful. 

There were signs of trouble, however. Smoke hung over the park the first couple of days, an ever-present reminder of the fires raging off to the west. The temperature hit 100 degrees on Saturday afternoon — the hottest day in the park’s recorded history. 

Sunday morning dawned clear and beautiful. A brisk wind had cleared the smoke and we spent a glorious day hiking and viewing wildlife. By late that afternoon, the smoke had returned. 

Unbeknownst to us, dry lightning had ignited multiple fires the evening before and the wind we had viewed as a blessing became a curse, fanning the flames. 

We left the boundaries of the park at about 8 p.m. on Sunday to return to our campground just to the southwest. By that point it was clear there was a big problem as we watched the growing plume of black smoke fill the sky. 

Shortly after we left the park, officials closed the Going-to-the-Sun Road behind us. They evacuated the historic Lake McDonald Lodge and nearby campgrounds, and the lakeshore we had played on the day before was engulfed in fire. Most of the west side of the park was closed. 

By Monday morning, the east side of the park was overrun with tourists as refugees from the busier western side overwhelmed roads, facilities and NPS staff. Park rangers manned entrances, turning people away because they simply couldn’t handle anymore. 

As of this writing, structures near Lake McDonald, including Kelly’s Camp — a series of cabins constructed in the 1890s to house visitors to the area more than a decade before a national park designation — have been destroyed as the fire rages on. 

Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Crater Lake, Yosemite — all have been ravaged by fire in recent years. Glacier itself burned last August as well, with the loss of the historic Sperry Chalet hotel. 

A number of factors play into the increasing destruction wrought by these fires. Years of a policy of absolute fire suppression, before scientific research brought an understanding of the role of fire in a healthy ecosystem, resulted in overgrown and unhealthy forest in many areas. 

As people continue to seek out those soul-lifting experiences, they venture in greater numbers into backcountry locations where a hot campfire or even a hot car can have devastating consequences in areas where it is exceedingly difficult, not to mention dangerous, to fight a fire. 

And then there’s climate change. 

I have to say it, folks, I’m really sick of this argument about whether climate change is happening. 

The federal government can delete scientific data and all references to climate change off of every website, and some of our spineless leaders and aspiring leaders can continue to dance around the truth, but climate change is happening.

Look out your window, visit your favorite hunting spot or step into any national park and see it for yourself. In Glacier National Park, only 26 glaciers remain out of about 150 that were there just a century ago. They’re expected to be gone by 2030. Let that sink in for a moment. There will be no glaciers left, in a place named for glaciers, in just 12 years. 

The glaciers are responsible for the beautiful blue rivers and lakes. The park area serves as the headwaters for river systems that include the Columbia and the Missouri. The west is renowned for wildlife that depend upon the ecosystems that are kept healthy partly due to glacial runoff. But the glaciers will soon be gone. 

The entire argument about whether the changing climate is attributable to human activity or cyclical changes that have been happening for millennia is ridiculous. We’ve already spent most of my adult life getting sucked into a debate instead of actually doing anything. 

The truth is, a large amount of climate change is now a certainty. We’re living in the midst of it. 

Climate change is resulting in hotter temperatures and less precipitation, both of which make fighting fires more difficult. In Glacier, they have had no precipitation for nearly six weeks. Rising temperatures provide a climate in which pine beetle infestations worsen and flourish, resulting in dying forests that are more likely to burn. 

I don’t understand the logic of climate change denial. For those who doubt it — even if it were a cyclical pattern, isn’t it possible that human activity is accelerating that pattern? Aren’t we going to have to deal with what’s happening no matter the cause? People living on coasts will be displaced the world over, agricultural patterns will have to change, natural disasters and storms will continue to worsen. We have to deal with all of these things. 

If it’s at all possible that human activity is worsening the situation, shouldn’t we at least try to lessen the damage instead of pretending it isn’t happening? Aren’t there plenty of other good reasons to desire clean air and water and healthy ecosystems, in addition to climate change? 

People flock to our parks to be reminded of something we tend to lose in our day-to-day bustle, a spiritual connection to nature and even to one another, to feel at once very small yet part of something far grander and larger than ourselves.

It’s heartbreaking to think of all we stand to lose, all the world and everything in it stands to lose, as we watch it, quite literally, go up in smoke.