Summer Isn’t Summer Anymore

Summer isn’t summer anymore. I’ve heard various versions of that sentiment as the realities of an ever-hotter planet sweep the Northern Hemisphere. Maybe you’ve found yourself saying something similar.

I spent last week at a mother church of summer: the Chautauqua Institution in western New York. For nine weeks each year, the place comes alive with an impossible density and array of programming and thousands of eager participants. To acquaint you, here’s a bit about its origins from my recent piece in The Bitter Southerner:

In 1874, the Chautauqua Lake Sunday School Assembly was established—a training ground for Protestant church workers that President Ulysses S. Grant visited the following year. Its purely religious focus expanded over time, growing into a curated spiritual, intellectual, artistic, and recreational program. Today, it’s known as the Chautauqua Institution, borrowing the Haudenosaunee place name.

From a beautiful lakeshore in New York, this movement for adult learning and enrichment spread with gusto. Hundreds of “Chautauquas” or “assemblies” were formed in rural locales across the U.S. and Canada. Others took the concept on the road, popping up a “tent Chautauqua” for a handful of days and then circuiting on. Pastors giving sermons, lecturers making speeches, musicians and other performers offering entertainment—all played essential roles in the life of an assembly.

Growing up, I spent time each June or July at a “daughter” Chautauqua in Tennessee. As a kid, that place was synonymous with freedom. Summer was synonymous with freedom. Long days in and out of water. Shoes optional. Weekdays and weekends a meaningless distinction. Preparation meant sunscreen, a pony tail, and freshly inflated bike tires.

Just 24 hours before I arrived at the Chautauqua Institution, the hot air was choked with smoke from fires in Canada. A storm came through and winds shifted right as we kicked off a week focused on the environment. Our good fortune seemed somehow inappropriate, yet I also felt a full-body sigh of relief—literally. David Wallace-Wells, Aja Barber, Rainn Wilson, and I gave lectures in the open-air amphitheater, breathing easy in 70 degree weather. Leah Naomi Green read poetry and Bill McKibben preached the gospel of clean energy under blue skies.

Chautauqua—with its Victorian cottages and “hall of philosophy” resembling a Greek temple—must always feel like time out of time. A sacred gap in hurried lives and communities without commons. Last week, though, it also registered for me as a throwback to what summer used to feel like—in the weather, in my being. The sense of freedom returned. I became a more spacious version of myself.

But a throwback is, of course, temporary. The truth of summer, now, is that I feel edgy. I worry about drought, fire, storms, sweltering temperatures, and how we’ll cope. I ache as those worries become headlines, datapoints, trees burned, and lives lost. The dog days are fanged and growling.

Is there a lesson in any of this? A gift to glean, even as we grieve? I found myself sitting, and walking, with these questions last week.

For those of us with graying hair, the reckoning we’re having about summer-then and summer-now shakes us out of shifting baseline syndrome, that sieve-like tendency to forget and forever reorient to normal…normal…normal…

As August rolls in, we know in an embodied way that none of this is normal. Summer has shifted fundamentally, and the year-round demands of adulthood are not the only reason why. Climate change, rendered by fossil-fueled capitalism, is the guilty party. The very industry that claims to be an engine of liberty swindles it from us. It used to be the return to school, but now fossil fuels are the archenemy of summer.

If we can name the experience we’re having and its cause, perhaps we can begin, in some sense, to reclaim summer.

There will be no reclamation of a time lost to both the ticking on of years and the wreckage of our atmosphere. Dreamy though my week at the mother church was, I remained fully awake to that. But we can reclaim freedom—that precious air of childhood summer, whatever shape it took—as an essential value. We can cleave to it as a fundamental right to etch into the future, however different it will be.

In his lecture, David Wallace-Wells argued that human beings “​are the product of the conditions we make.” Our species has changed summer. May summer-changed also change us—rouse us and remind us not to give up. May it spark a good fire within.

P.S. If you’ll be in NYC for the circus that is Climate Week, join Leah Stokes and me for an intimate event. We’ll be talking about our new books—Leah’s The Carbon Wave and Climate Wayfinding. We’d love to see you! RSVP here.

If you’ll be in Atlanta on August 20, I’ll be in conversation with a neighbor and true force of nature, Pat Mitchell. RSVP here.