When the Canadian wildfire smoke descended on my hometown of Indiana this summer, I was distraught. I live in London now, but much of my family remains in the Midwest, and as an orange haze blanketed the landscape and the air quality plummeted, I worried about their health. “Smoke everywhere!” Dad texted me, along with a photo of the fields near my childhood home, shrouded in smog. “I probably better stay in when I get home.”
The effects of climate change will vary from region to region, but everyone's lives will be affected in some way, ultimately. Even though I know this to be true, I selfishly and naively hoped that the Midwest would be insulated from the worst of it. I worried about my friends on the East Coast and my mom in California. But for my relatives in the middle of the country, I was never so worried.
And it seems I'm not alone. A recent Heatmap News poll found that, compared to people in the South, Northeast and West, Midwesterners were consistently disapproving of climate change. The poll tried to present this question in different ways: Are you worried about what climate change means for you personally? Are you worried that extreme weather events will happen more often in your area? Worried about what climate change means for your children? Again and again, the Midwest recorded the lowest alert level.
On the issues of wildfires, drought, flooding and extreme heat, the Midwest has the highest percentage of respondents who say they are not concerned. 52% of Midwesterners say climate change poses little or no risk to their region – no other region comes close to this level of confidence in their own safety. In fact, every other part of the country thinks the Midwest is in more danger from a burning planet than the Midwest itself.
It would be easy to dismiss this phenomenon as politically fueled, but that would be too simple. It is true that Pew
research shows the majority of voters in the Midwest are austerely conservative, and there is no doubt that Republicans are historically less possible they believe that climate change is a serious problem. But in Heatmap's poll, at least, respondents in the Midwest largely identified as moderates and independents. Moreover, the poll does not show that Midwesterners doubt that climate change is real. They just don't think it affects them that much.
And in some ways, they're right. Because of its location, separated by hundreds or thousands of miles from flood-prone coasts and wildfire areas to the south and west, the Midwest has so far been spared some of the scariest, most extreme weather events of recent years. No hurricanes decimating neighborhoods. No great fire burns the landscape.
“So far we have not suffered losses and damage to many coastal or mountainous areas,” he said
Dr. Gabriel Filippelli, professor of earth sciences at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and executive director of the Indiana University Environmental Resilience Institute. But climate change is it happens here. It just happens more slowly.
Take floods, for example. While warming oceans and rising sea levels pose imminent threats to America's coastlines, climate change is gradually making extreme rainfall events in the Midwest more likely. “Our 100-year floods are no longer 100-year floods,” Filipelli said. “Now they happen every 10 to 15 years.” Last year heavy rain brought devastating floods to states including Illinois and Missouri. In 2019 it was the Midwest
the wettest calendar year since 1895, causing at least 6.2 billion dollars in damage.
Dangerous heat and “flash droughts,” extremely dry periods that come quickly and with little warning, are also inherent risks.
Research from the nonprofit First Street Foundation shows that the Midwest is part of a growing “extreme heat zone” that, over the next 30 years, will experience more days when the heat index—what the human body temperature is, factoring in humidity—hits 125 degrees Fahrenheit. Such heat can kill not only humans, but also farm animals and crops. Natural Resources Defense Council says Extreme heat and drought could wither crops across “America's Breadbasket,” “potentially causing ripples in food supplies around the world.”
So why aren't Midwestern farmers sounding the alarm? Because many “think this is a cycle we're going to go through,” he said
Jane Climb, chairman of the Nebraska Democratic Party and recipient of the 2023 Climate Breakthrough Award for her work in blocking the Keystone XL oil pipeline. “They've been through hard times, whether it's the Dust Bowl or the Depression or the World Wars, and those generational lines still run through the families,” Kleeb said. “There is enormous value in hard work in rural communities and the idea that as a community, we will get through this together. I think that's how they see climate change.”
In other words, Midwestern farm families are used to doing the Very American thing of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and getting on with it. The federal government's Crop Insurance program makes it easy to continue to believe in the power of clean dumping — the government pays if crops fail because of “
natural causes”, meaning farmers rarely feel the full impact of climate change on their pocketbooks.
There are many other effects of climate change that the federal government won't help with—an increase in tick- and mosquito-borne diseases. The latest from the federal government
National climate assessment predicts that the Ohio Valley could see more than 200 cases of West Nile virus each year by 2050. Lyme disease is already endemic in the region.
There is also the secondary risk of an influx of climate migrants seeking safety, affecting not only agricultural and industrial communities but also population centers such as Minneapolis and Kansas City. “It's anecdotal at best,” Filippeli said, “but we have evidence that there are people leaving the coasts because of fire danger as well as water problems.” These people may come not only from the US, but also
worldwide.
And then there's that wildfire smoke. The
National climate assessment predicts that drifting fog will become a regular nuisance in the Midwest. Hoosiers were bothered by smoke this year, Filippelli said, but “they didn't always associate it with climate change.” That's what the poll shows: 63 percent of Midwestern respondents said — in November of this year, a few months after the summer of smoke — that their areas have not been affected by climate change.
For Kleeb, bridging this disconnect is the work. Messages are issues, and climate advocates and policymakers would do well to know their audience. Glorifying veganism or focusing on the environmental dangers of methane produced by cow burps probably isn't going to land well with farmers and ranchers.
“Rural people get very defensive because you're basically blaming their grandfather, their father, their husband or wife who is currently farming and, in their view, providing food not only for America, but for world — and you say it's bad,” Kleeb said. “When people say they don't believe in climate change, it's because they feel they're being blamed for something they're not responsible for.”
Instead, Kleeb wants to see more emphasis on how rural Midwesterners can be part of the solutions, from introducing regenerative agriculture to providing the land needed to build renewable energy infrastructure. “If nothing else, they know the land,” says Kleeb. “They know every hill, every blade of grass. They know where it floods when it rains. So it's absolutely critical that we really recognize that local knowledge by asking them to be partners at the table.”
One thing many don't appreciate about the Midwest is how much sky there is – any weather that's on the way can be seen from miles away. The smoke hung over my city for a few days. During that time I hardly slept at all. I checked the weather obsessively, hoping for some sign of relief. I even sent my dad links to articles on how to make your own air purifier. Finally, on the third day, he sent me an update: A strong weather front was approaching Indiana from the west, expected to sweep the wildfire smoke as it passed over the state.
“Rain!” the text read. “Beautiful rain!”
