[I’m thinking about thinking. I bitched about wildfire smoke and came off like I was kicking Canada while it was down. I’d like to rectify my rude griping.]
Like all (most) summers, this one has forest fires.
I want to start with a premise we can all agree upon. Forest fires in summer aren’t new.
When we go further it becomes a rabbit hole. Lets see how deep it goes.
I think multi-week shifting plumes of smoke hitting big cities hundreds (thousands?) of miles away are more common now than they were previously.
I thinking of within my lifetime. As a historical aside, the worst fire I know of was in Wisconsin in 1871. It melted locomotives and turned sand to glass. That’s some serious shit!
Limiting discussion to big smoke plumes in my lifetime, are they increasingly common?
My own experiences are an incomplete measure. I’ve moved a lot but smoke sources stay put. Also, air pollution freaks me out. I’d never experienced air pollution until I got a heaping serving. I grew up thinking “air pollution” was “smog”. Remember “smog”? It’s an old timey malady associated with Los Angeles gridlock traffic back in the day. Youthful Curmudgeon simply didn’t know otherwise.
Since then, I’ve breathed bad shit all over the west; including but not limited to the San Joaquin Valley CA, Missoula MT, and Denver CO. The locals were used to it. I wasn’t. I’d go for a walk or ride my bike in the worst of it, and then regret it. I think “inversion pollution” has gotten less severe with time but I’m not sure. I suspect fuel injected cars did most of the work.
So, I had to learn. As a kid I’d read National Geographic articles about pollution in Beijing or Mexico City… but nobody talked about pleasant little mountain towns like Missoula. You don’t know what you don’t know. Was this media bias from the 1970’s? Maybe.
I did some fire fighting. As I said, it was OK. It wasn’t as awesome as I’d hoped. It wasn’t awful either. I don’t regret it but I discovered I’m a whiny little bitch about air quality. I’d rather shrug it off like a macho dude. I can’t. It hits me hard.
I moved to a place that has minimal air pollution. (Also less light pollution. My dark night skies make watching the stars a celestial pleasure!) In winter it’s so damn crisp and cold; the air cuts like a knife. It smells and feels as pure as crystal. When the air goes bad from summer fires far removed I go into a snit.
I rack my brain trying to remember if it was always like this. Was Chicago or Cincinnati or whatever always getting choked by a couple weeks of wildfire smoke every few years? I don’t think so. How would I know? Modern media loves to panic about shit and leaves out context. Telling people to stay inside because global warming something something will kill us all is their favorite story!
If a smoke plume hit Chicago in 2005 or 1990 would I have known? Would you? I read newspapers; if there was an article about Canadian smoke in Chicago I would have turned the page and kept reading about some other irrelevant shit. (Remember the summer of OJ Simpson? That circus was front page news for weeks!)
Now it’s 2026 and social media is a panic generation machine. Smoke, especially from a far distant foreign nation in a place where they do mystical things like play hockey and have more beavers than people… that’s prefect for stirring the pot. If you’ve got asthma and live in Philadelphia you’re at the whim of a thing about which you are helpless. Cancel your golf game and sit alone in your house doomscrolling.
I feel like giant, multi-week, multi-state, plumes are more common. Particularly sweeping out of Canada into the Eastern Seaboard. But I can’t be sure.
I recall that big giant huge pollution events decades ago were rare and notable. I remember the Yellowstone fires of 1988. I remember the Mt. Saint Helens eruption in 1980. I even remember Chernobyl’s radiation plume in 1986. None of those were “business as usual”.
I picked Chicago at random as a place that isn’t likely blasting itself with it’s own local forest fire smoke and searched on Google. It says Chicago had Canadian forest fire smoke in 2023, 2025, and 2026. Three years out of four seems like a pattern. But what do I know?
In frustration, I wrote unkind words about our good neighbor to the north. I try to be positive. I sometimes fail. I caused understandable consternation in the comments. I had it coming.
But I think I see the smoke in a different way.
A lot of folks chalk forest fires up to “there’s nothing that can be done”. Someone mentioned Boundary Waters in Minnesota. If you’re traveling by canoe to deal with a fire, shit’s weird. Personally, I’ve experienced the weird shit. I was canoe camping in Quetico (just north of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters) during a bad flare up on the Minnesota side. I maintained a watch eye on the horizon and coughed a little more than usual. We would have been fine had the fire come our way, but I’m glad it didn’t. I’m also glad the fire didn’t burn down the trailhead where I’d parked my truck.
I get it, once the shit’s on fire it’s often unstoppable. Feeling that there’s nothing that can be done is reasonable. That’s especially true if the fire is a thousand miles from your backyard.
I think differently. To me, fire is just the end state of biomass accumulation. Also I think of forests and something the overclocked apes living on earth (us) can manage, should we chose to.
Sure, we can’t easily stop a raging inferno, but we can do things so we don’t have to face it every damn summer. A big plume choking the Eastern Seaboard could be rendered less common and less severe.
I’m not going to go into the science of vegetation management. I’ll just say that humans are aware of biomass and fire.*
The thing is, what is “unsolvable” once it’s choking Chicago is “partially solvable” but boring before the fire starts. I think “boring” is a big portion of the issue. It’s easy to fund an air tanker. It’s hard to fund a thinning operation.
We see similar refusal to address things that are “boring” in other collective decisions. Nobody wants to paint a bridge or fill a pothole but everyone loves to freak out when the bridge fails or a politician can make a speech about a proposed light rail project.
Scott Adams used to say two people could watch the same event and see two different things in their head. He was a keen observer.
My brain sees a problem left to get worse and worse until I have a coughing fit a thousand miles away. Other brains see a raging inferno that can’t be tamed because it’s in endless spruce thickets or lake hopping the Boundary Waters.
We’re both seeing the same thing. What changes is our perception of humans capabilities. Ponder all the hard things that humans do. It’s amazing!
Humans “virtually” teleport Panamax ships around South America. We call it the Panama Canal and it’s been running over a century. Humans blanketed most of USA (and Europe, and Asia and pretty much every city planet-wide) with cell phone service. A technology that didn’t exist when I was in high school is spans continents. In a century America went from the Model T on horse paths to Interstate Highways coast to coast. You can watch individual tractors piloted by a single farmer (using GPS) plow fields bigger than some counties. When you’re ignoring flyover country in a jet, look down and marvel at center pivot irrigation. Las Vegas used air conditioning to transform from nothing to a recreation destination.
I’m typing this post on a live two way satellite link. The first Starlink satellite was launched 7 years ago. There are over 10,000 in the current constellation.
Think about that last one. From nothing to 10,000 satellites in seven years. Thinning spruce is hard but is it unattainable?
I have joy and appreciation for humanity’s grit, motivation, and ingenuity. Humans can do almost anything they decide to do. More sadly, I think there are forces out that that want us to feel helpless and dependent. Those forces have had many successes. We have been trained to see Chicago’s modern “smog” and think “reducing this is impossible”. Then again I sometimes see the freak show at Walmart and doubt we’ll make it another year.
If you think there’s nothing that can be done, I get it. You might be right. Canada (or Minnesota) sure is acting helpless and incapable of managing things. Maybe it has to be that way. The examples I listed above all came with a profit motive. Nobody will make money reducing Chicago’s smoke. So maybe I’m just yelling at clouds.
It’s two sides of the same coin. Perhaps we can agree the glass is both half full AND half empty.
Regardless, I’ll tone down being grumpy over pollution. It’s negativity and I shouldn’t propagate it. Besides, in a few months it’ll snow.
A.C.
*I once had a job reducing forest fire fuel risk. It was called “slashing”. I tromped around with a chainsaw chopping sub-commercial felled trees into smaller pieces. Small stuff will rot when in contact with the ground. Big stuff stays suspended drying into tinder. It was hard work but I liked it.