I walked out from theatre rehearsal on Thursday night, and it smelled like a campfire I couldn't escape. I was convinced that the bosque near the river in Albuquerque was on fire. The sky had an off-white haze, the smell was powerful and smokey, and the wind blew hard. When I got home, I turned on the local channels to see what they said about it. They said nothing. I watched some of the NBA Finals, and a message finally scrolled across the bottom. The smoke was from a forest fire in northern Arizona, and no fires occurred in Albuquerque. 200 miles away a massive fire burned, and it smelled like it was just down the road.

In the list of natural disasters that have occurred this year, forest fire smoke is not high up. Even the drought we are experiencing in the southwest (.19 inches of rain in ABQ this year) is not making national headlines. Tornados in Joplin, Alabama and Massachusetts are much bigger. The Mississippi and Missouri rivers flooding are much bigger. Heavy snows back east in the winter, earthquakes along the Pacific rim, the first subzero temperatures in Albuquerque in forty years are much bigger stories. I think it's safe to say the weather has been changing lately.

I'm used to weather predictions like party cloudy and sunny. More common this spring have been phrases like 'blowing dust' and 'smokey.' Wow.

As the caretakers of the planet (it's our world, right?), humans are not really owning up to any wrongdoing. Gas prices keep rising, but it's the price that bothers us. Not many complain about the exhaust and smog it creates. We argue whether the phrase 'Global Warming' is accurate rather than accepting that climate change is occurring. Congress and the corporations that fund them battle back and forth about regulations and how it affects the economy and the business bottom line. No one is willing to admit that what we do and how we live might be causing these drastic weather patterns.

I don't know if we need more regulations as much as we need different energy sources. If oil and gas prices keep going up, eventually there will be an alternative energy source that cheaper and cleaner. If we know how to make cars that run just as well on less gas and emissions, why don't we encourage it? Is it not good for business? Or is it just not good for the status quo?

I've always said we don't need to save the Earth. The planet will find ways to take care of itself. If that means inundating the creatures that walk on its surface with natural disasters, so be it. We can't go to war on tsunamis and earthquakes. We can go to war on fossil fuel use and wasteful use of energy and water.

Or we can get used to dodging more tornadoes, enduring more drought, fleeing more floods and paying five dollars for a gallon of gas. No matter which choices we make, it's going to suck.

And we humans were the ones who made it this way.

Chris Jungle expects a forecast of blowing smoke in the near future.