Summer is only half over, and the death toll of people out for a walk over the past month is already impressive. Toward the end of June, it claimed a 31-year-old man and his 14-year-old stepson hiking in Big Bend National Park; roughly a week later it added a 57-year-old woman hiking in Grand Canyon National Park. On July 18 it was a 71-year-old man collapsing at a restroom shortly after hiking in Death Valley National Park, two weeks after a 65-year-old man had also died in the park. Four days later, two women, ages 34 and 19, were found dead after hiking into a Nevada state park outside of Las Vegas.
All were doing nothing more remarkable or strenuous than taking a day-hike in areas traversed by countless others. They weren’t roofing a house or picking crops or working at some other job that required them to be outside—they were simply “recreating.” And all had headed into that tantalizing wonderland known as The Great Outdoors during the hottest summer ever recorded, in temperatures that greatly exceeded that of their body cores, seemingly without a second thought about the mortal danger they were courting.
What were they thinking? Can we just write them off as stupid or ignorant, gene-pool outliers that confirm yet again why the Darwin Awards will never run short of nominees? But if that’s the case, what are we to make of the tens of thousands of presumably more aware Americans who each year move to Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Antonio and other gateways to hell, where if the heat doesn’t get ’em, the lack of potable water eventually will?
The fact is that as a species we’re not very good at changing ingrained behaviors, nor are we mentally flexible enough to recognize when a shifting social or environmental landscape makes such changes prudent. We’ve always done things this way, so we’ll continue. And if we do somehow recognize that a change is afoot, we tend to think such change is lineal—a straight-line progression—rather than exponential, which it sometimes is, and which would require a far more robust response from us.
As a result, the prophets are ignored. It’s been just one year since First Street Foundation released its sixth national risk assessment, this one devoted to hazardous heat. The bottom line, as I wrote at the time, was that “extreme danger days,” with temperatures over 125 degrees, would affect approximately 50 counties with 8 million people this year. Presciently, the report went on to claim that extreme temperatures would be concentrated across the middle of the country, in an area stretching from the Louisiana and Texas border north through Iowa, Indiana, and Illinois. The map that accompanied that prediction looks an awful lot like the heat map at the top of this page, generated this week by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Yet most people are still oblivious to such research, even as the heat keeps cranking higher: Phoenix, for example, which continues to be a relocation magnet, is just wrapping up a full month of air temperatures exceeding 110 degrees every day, never mind the temperatures on asphalt roads and car door handles, which can cause second- and third-degree burns. But people in leadership positions whom we might expect to know more, and to know better, are just as oblivious to the implications of what’s happening—even when those implications pose a threat to their livelihoods. Or maybe that’s precisely why they turn a blind eye.
The campground and RV park industry is the poster child for this sort of willful ignorance. Global warming, climate change, extreme weather—all are subjects that never get broached by the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds, whose preferred sense of “leadership” is to promote the latest whiz-bang technology or hotel-derived hospitality trend.
And while Kampgrounds of America has at least started asking campers about their weather-related concerns, it has yet to translate its findings into any kind of action agenda, despite many opportunities to do so. KOA’s July report, for example, found that 62% of campers have changed travel plans because of weather concerns, “with 22% canceling, 22% altering locations, and 18% revising the nature of their trips.” What did KOA learn from that? Apparently only that there’s enough camping demand that nothing much changed, as “approximately 21.5 million households participated in camping” over the July 4 holiday, a level “mirroring the previous year’s.”
Nothing to see here!
So now, as we head into the dog days of August and toward the traditional Labor Day frenzy, it’s steady as she goes. The status quo will prevail. The campground and RV industries will keep enticing people to go camping, with pictures of happy families roasting marshmallows and millennials spooning in their Class B vans, dirt bikes suggestively parked nearby. We’ll hear a lot about about “making memories” and “world class experiences” and about the restorative powers of connecting with Mother Nature.
Just don’t take a walk while you’re out there.
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