I woke up innocently enough, shaking out the cobwebs of another weekend to realize that it was cloudy outside, too. The perks of living in the desert means more than my fair share of sunny days, somewhere around three hundred a year. The occasional cloudy day is greeted with open arms and irrational hopes for rain to drop. Before long, I realized that it wasn't a parade of clouds enveloping the city, but a haze of smoke. Suddenly, my mood shifted from a benign calmness to eerie discomfort.

As most people know, forest fires have devoured huge chunks of Arizona and Colorado due to the combination of a natural drought and foolish mankind. New Mexico has had its share of summer fires but nothing out of the ordinary. This week, my hometown of Albuquerque has been engulfed in smoke. The Sandia Mountains, which are the signature silhouette of the area, disappeared under the haze. Weather forecasts ceased to take the form of sunny, windy, or partly cloudy. Every day, it was the same forecast: smoke. The forecast was in the paper: smoke. It was on TV: smoke. It was on the Internet: smoke. How's the weather out there? Smoke.

The haze actually cooled off the temperatures five to ten degrees. Instead of mid to high 90s, we experienced more pleasant 80s. I wanted to kick around the soccer ball, I wanted to ride my bike around town, I wanted to be outdoors, but to no avail. On the first day, they warned the young, sick and elderly to stay indoors. On the second day, they upped it to just about everyone. Don't breathe the smoke. Hide. The sunsets were an eerie orange. The moon looked ominous. Everyone said it reminded them of the pollution of Los Angeles or New York. My thought was "People live in this stuff every day?"

By the third day, the smoke had taken hold of my mood. I felt trapped inside of my town, and there was no escape. Nowhere was safe. Shortness of breath occurred. General grumpiness ensued. I don't like living in smoke. I felt like I was in Ciudad Juarez where the tires burn every winter and the sky is an apocalyptic pink almost every day. If I didn't know the cause of the smoke was forest fires in Arizona, I would have sworn that it was just a warning that the four horsemen were on their way.

While all of this may sound like an exaggeration or overreaction to one tragic event, I happen to think otherwise. While politicians like John McCain argue that environmentalists caused the fires by protesting controlled burns and environmentalists bicker that politicians misunderstand everything they stand for, the real issue is that clouds of smoke engulfing towns hundreds of miles away from the fires should be taken as a sign that we are screwing up big time.

Nature doesn't use lobbyists to make a point. Nature doesn't wait for bills in Congress to react. Nature doesn't care if we keep screwing up. It will continue react in the cause-and-effect way that it always does, and humans will look for short-term fixes to a long-term problem.

Our problem is that humans on the whole do not consider the Earth as a living breathing organism. When the fires come every summer, we are only seriously bothered when the fires come close to human settlements. When the floods come, we want to know how many humans lose their homes. When the pollution permanently clouds up big cities, we worry about how well humans can breath.

All these radical natural occurrences are signs. We are the ones who need the adjustment. We need to find ways to work with the environment, not in spite of it. Everyone worries about water consumption during a drought, but they do not look to long-term changes. We try to get by until everything goes back to normal.

But what if. . . What if the pollution stays in the cities forever? What if the water runs out for good? What if the weather is Smoke everyday? Then this world would be a sad, sad place to live, and we would have no one to blame but ourselves.

Chris Jungle enjoys a good smoke, but only when it's voluntary.