It is beyond irony that more than 120 RV industry leaders—representing manufacturers, suppliers and campgrounds—have converged on Capitol Hill just as the Washington, D.C. skies have turned orange. But that’s not why the RV reps are in town. They’re here to lobby for their preferred legislation, including America’s Outdoors Recreation Act, the Farm Bill, reauthorization of the Generalized System of Preferences and reform of Competitive Need Limitations, and the Travel Trailer and Camper Tax Parity Act.
Have your eyes glazed over? Have you noticed that nowhere on this list of legislative priorities, compiled by the RV Industry Association, is there any attention to environmental issues. Are you unsurprised?
It’s been only a couple of weeks since I wrote about western Canada’s wildfires darkening the skies over Montana, even as that state’s legislators were busy ensuring that greenhouse gas emissions and climate effects would not be part of the mix when assessing the environmental impact of large projects. I suggested that perhaps it would behoove KOA, which is headquartered in Billings, Montana, to take a more active role in preserving the natural environment that it’s been busy marketing to the American consumer. I’m not holding my breath.
Or maybe I should, now that the pyrocene—an apt phrase coined by fire historian Stephen Pyne—has expanded to the Eastern Seaboard. Five hundred miles south of the fires consuming swaths of Quebec and Ontario, my hometown of Staunton, Virginia is on the pollution cusp, defined not just by distance and prevailing winds, but also by our modestly mountainous topography: earlier today, the Air Quality Index (AQI) just to the north, in Harrisonburg, was a healthy 5, but it popped up to 80 in Charlottesville, on the other side of the Blue Ridge—and up to a decidedly unhealthy 180 in Shenandoah National Park, which runs along the top of the mountains.
But that’s also not quite right. One noteworthy observation about these numbers is that the AQI is actually a composite, combining ozone levels and two different sizes of particulates into one reading. So, for example, the AQI in Shenandoah National Park obscures the fact that the reading for PM2.5—particulates measuring no more than 2.5 microns across—is 193 micrograms per cubic meter, or significantly above the 150 level at which even healthy people should avoid going outdoors. Particulates at that microscopic level (human hair, for comparison, is between 50 and 70 microns wide) are particularly worrisome because they’re small enough to be absorbed into the bloodstream, which means they can cause heart disease in addition to the lung disease caused by larger particles.
The other notable observation about the AQI numbers listed above is that none of them are for Staunton itself. There are no air quality monitors in my small city, and indeed, the farther you go from large urban centers, the fewer monitors there are. Moreover, fewer of those monitors measure particulates in addition to measuring ozone. So, for example, the Harrisonburg AQI reading cited above is really misleading because it’s for ozone only—there’s no accurate way of getting a particulate reading.
And where are most campgrounds located? Precisely in those areas that have the lowest concentration of particulate monitors. What you don’t know can hurt you.
All those kinds of concerns are flying right over the heads of those who claim to be industry devotees of the great outdoors—they’re more concerned with getting tax dollars for infrastructure development, loosening regulatory restrictions and selling their products and services to the great American public. Indeed, the current industry orgasm is over National Go RVing Day, which is just two days away and has the RVIA calling “on the RV industry and consumers alike to celebrate the joys of RVing by heading out to their favorite outdoor destination for a weekend of RVing.” As if! Maybe in Florida or the Rockies (at the moment). Not so much in Pennsylvania or New York.
But this is only the beginning of fire season. And unlike hurricanes or wildfires themselves, which affect a more or less well-defined area, wildfire smoke affects hundreds of square miles far from its point of origin. According to one study (paywall protected) cited by the New York Times, between 2016 and 2020, smoke from distant fires was contributing as much as half of local air pollution in great swaths of the West. “Across the country, the number of people exposed to what are sometimes called extreme smoke days has grown 27-fold in just a decade,” the Times observed.
Here’s a suggestion: all those RV suits up in Washington D.C. should step outside of the Capitol for an hour or two. Take a brisk walk around the Mall. Sit on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to wonder why they can’t catch their breath. Admire the orange sky. And think about what they should be advocating to ensure that this doesn’t become the norm, because sooner or later the great American public will conclude that RVing is no healthier than cigarette smoking.
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