Welcome to a new Maine, where the way life should be is having to become far more accepting of the way life will be. It’s commonly said that if you don’t like Maine weather just wait a few minutes. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for a dislike of our Maine climate steadily heading south.

Temperatures increasingly change from one extreme to another from one day to another. One day it seems like summer will never come and then the next it’s as if we’ve fast forwarded to the zenith of its dog days. No sooner are complaints of unending heat expressed than remarks arise in concern that it already feels like fall. Predictions of the weather daily or seasonally are now truly anyone’s guess. Whatever one’s belief as to its cause, we’re now on a yearly climatic roller coaster ride whose non-stop shock value is providing less and less amusement.

Some make passing mention of global warming. Most just blindly register their dismay until their comfort zone is again accommodated by more reasonable and seasonable highs and lows. As the saying goes, “This too shall pass.” Maybe. Unless, ridiculed or dreaded, the “tipping” point of no return has already actually passed. No one seems to truly believe that the time of never being able to go back to what was is very near, or at hand. Some momentarily awake from a myopic insistence that what was will return, look around and then double down on a professed belief that there’s really no problem at all. Weather excesses have always presented themselves from time to time.

Playing the “cyclical” card in the game of climate denial is getting harder to argue when the cycle of our seasons has become so disorienting. Once familiarly comforting “weather patterns” now seem a quaint notion of a previous existence when meteorological science was still trusted as an arbitrator of truth rather than an accused cabal of contrived environmental extremism.

Fortunately or unfortunately, humankind is naturally resilient, extremely adaptable and all too able to alter its environment. Whether that’s the chicken or the egg in bringing us to where we now environmentally find ourselves is a question far too many still refuse to give much thought. Why give that any consideration when traditionally unquestioned technology has always been so good at overcoming any dissatisfaction we might have with the natural order of things?

Whether too cold or too hot, mankind simply circumvents everyday climate. Our species, early on inventing a mastery of fire, can casually slip into some artificial “polar fleece” warmth or chill out by raising the AC a notch. Science may be suffering some rebuke from some quarters but technology still reigns supreme, left, center or right. Even the politics of environmental correctness still embraces a species domination where “man-made” rule remains unquestionably acceptable behavior and a go-to problem solver where solar panels and wind turbines are deemed benign enablers to our insatiable energy addiction.

Whether accepted or refuted, science says that human behavior is the culprit in our environmental downward spiral. Even when acknowledged, the problem is never presented as a choice to return to the natural world but rather how human technological “achievements” can least manifest a detrimental impact. Nothing about technology, high or low, comes even close to ever being as earth friendly as the unharmful nature of every other species. Only mankind feels compelled to improve upon or subdue the world as it was originally designed. Rather than learning from nature we keep refusing to co-exist, even within our own kind, even if our behavior harms ourselves.

Meanwhile, the flora and fauna that are our planetary cohabitants do what they can to get by. Some are simply up an environmentally challenged creek without any hope of acquiring a L.L.Bean online ordered and UPS delivered paddle. Others are steadily trespassing upon our comfort zone because our man-made world has made their traditional habitat increasingly unlivable while making what they are encroaching upon newly habitable. Unable to mitigate their environment they’re forced to find more favorable climes.

Animal, insect and plant refugees from climate change, particularly global warming and related drought, are becoming a familiar and often unwanted addition to our immediate environment while many desirable native species are packing up and heading elsewhere. Cold-water fisheries are heading north. Warm-weather pests and plants are invading from the south. Diseases once a rarity here are becoming alarming.

Summer in Maine used to mean shorts and T-shirts, some sunscreen and insect spray. Now I wear a wide hat, long sleeves and pants tucked into my socks when anywhere ticks or Browntail hairs might be encountered, and a dust mask when mowing the lawn. Such is the new, now mournfully shrimpless, Maine.

Until a few years ago my urban Bath yard was never visited by deer or foxes. Now that’s commonplace. I looked up from gardening the other day to lock eyes with a very close and surreally beautiful gray fox. We starred at each other equally surprised at our worlds apart shared proximity, while I tried not to think of rabies.

Gary Anderson lives in Bath.