Climate anomalies arrive first as a shock, and then as a pattern.
But what does the pattern reveal? The skies above New York are now cleared of smoke, after several grim and portentous days when parents worried over whether to keep their children indoors and the middle-aged worried over the health and safety of their parents and plenty of others endured just a throat-burning dread, with déjà vu indistinguishable from environmental foreboding. For New Yorkers, less than a week later, it may seem almost to have been a bad dream.
But particulates still hang thick as soup over large parts of the Upper Midwest, more than 800 fires were still burning across Canada as of Monday and dozens of new fires were ignited by lightning storms across Oregon and Washington and British Columbia last weekend. Already, they have burned hundreds of thousands of acres, spewing plumes of hazardous air across the Pacific Northwest and western Canada. So when the sky cleared over the Meadowlands on Sunday, with billions of eyes turned toward the World Cup to be played there, what future did we all see?
Per-person smoke exposure in the United States has surged over the last decade, now four times as high as it was between 2006 and 2019. And even before the apocalyptic Canadian wildfire summer of 2023 — when Americans on the Eastern Seaboard were introduced to the eerie orange skies they had previously believed only possible in fire-prone places like California and Australia — more Americans were dying of wildfire smoke-related deaths east of the Mississippi than west of it.
Those 2023 fires alone contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans, according to one estimate. All told, the monetary damages from wildfire smoke deaths are now expected to exceed those from all other climate impacts combined, as Robinson Meyer noted last week, and yet until very recently climate scientists and climate economists were not even counting them at all when projecting future costs from warming. That wasn’t because nobody knew to expect more fire; everyone knew to. It was just that we hadn’t really started to think about all that smoke.
Smoke events like these aren’t exactly unheard-of on the Eastern Seaboard, though there aren’t too many people still alive to remember the “Great Smoke Pall” from the Chinchaga fire of 1950, for instance.
But again and again, with environmental disarray, what we tell ourselves is still rare, even in a world wracked by warming, is becoming more and more common. That is true of thousand-year floods in the Texas Hill Country, which claimed the lives of 139 people last summer, including 27 girls drowned at Camp Mystic — and just struck again 12 months later. It is true of European heat waves that have historically come once every 26,000 years but have grown a 100 times more likely over the last couple of decades. And it is true of oppressive smoke events blanketing the East Coast: However unusual the weather patterns that carry ash and particulates from Canadian megafires to American megalopolises to the southeast have been in the past, those fires are going to be common enough that we’ll have to get used to encountering them in our eyes, our throats and our lungs. Our emergency rooms, too.
For now, exposure events like these tend to last a few days at most — the length of less ominous-seeming weather events, like thunderstorms or extreme heat, which we take mostly in stride. Perhaps, in time, we will relate to smoke the same way as we do thunderstorms, with some measure of adaptation and some acclimatization and somewhat less rune-reading and hair-rending about the future of life outside.
But adapting even to the future of life indoors has proved maddeningly slow. By rights, smoke events like these should be pushing us headlong into campaigns to mass-retrofit buildings to make the air inside them, at least, more breathable — particularly because smoke can so easily penetrate American homes that indoor monitors sometimes register similar concentrations of particulate matter during toxic air events as outdoor ones. There was a brief window of enthusiasm for this kind of work, just a few years ago, when a respiratory pathogen killed more than a million Americans. Billions of dollars were allocated to retrofit our homes and schools and offices but little was actually accomplished. American homes need effective air filters just as European homes need air-conditioning, but when heat waves strike Paris and London, Americans lecture their European friends for their resistance to obvious solutions without realizing we are forgoing obvious ones, as well.
More harrowingly, we may have to get used to more fire too — not just across the continent, but closer to our doorstep. Last year, 49 percent of American wildfires began in the East, believe it or not, and if you draw a line from Minnesota down to Texas, more than two-thirds of last year’s fires burned to the east of that. Most of them were pretty small, as Jeva Lange wrote in an eye-opening survey of the future of fire in the American East this year. But the number of large fires there has grown tenfold over the last 40 years.
Last year, when monster Canadian fires dumped their exhaust across the border, some Republican congressmen faulted the government of Canada for the quality of American air. This year, that pattern repeated itself, a bit more loudly, with the president threatening tariffs against our neighbors to the north and Republican senators and representatives promising that — presumably as Mexico would pay for the wall — the tariffs would be used to establish a “victim compensation fund and pay for cleanup.”
But megafires in landscapes so remote they cannot be reached by car are not the fault of forest management, as the climate scientist Zeke Hausfather detailed last week; as Stanford’s Michael Wara put it, “Wildfire smoke, particularly from the boreal forests of Canada, cannot be controlled.” And these new reactionary climate politics are among the more ominous signs of the new age of megafire, to me: that in the face of ecological and human disaster, a growing number of politicians seem eager to bully and scapegoat.
But perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise, given the years of warnings that climate change might not inspire global solidarity, but the opposite — an intensifying, zero-sum competition over a world pinched by perceived resource scarcity and pockmarked by more and more frequent extreme weather. If you insist on believing climate change isn’t real, or that its effects must be trivial, then whenever you find yourself overwhelmed by those effects you have to place the blame somewhere.
This has been an eye-opening decade for fire in North America, with the sudden return of the urban firestorm (Santa Rosa, Paradise, Lahaina and Boulder County and the Pacific Palisades and Altadena) and an explosion in acreage burned as well (the nine largest fires in modern California history having occurred in the last 9 years.
Throughout this period of public reckoning, fire scientists and fire ecologists have been eager to point out the ways in which policy choices have shaped this problem alongside warming; in fact, some argue that misguided forest management has been the main driver of the crisis. By too aggressively suppressing fire throughout the 20th century we have prevented healthy small-scale fire and allowed a continent-size pile of ready fuel to accumulate. By building deep into the wildland-urban interface, they said, we had exposed too many homes and communities to unmanageable risk. By refusing to impose or enforce fire standards to help protect those structures, we had multiplied that risk.
It was, in its way, a message of hope: that we could take control of what the fire historian Stephen Pyne has called the “Pyrocene,” and wrestle ourselves back into a position of real ownership over this terrifyingly combustible landscape by reversing those choices. It would mean reintroducing a lot more good fire onto the landscape, in the form of prescribed and Indigenous burning; it would require a different and much more attentive approach to forest management; and it would require redesigning some communities and retrofitting a lot of homes. But it could be done.
The message contains plenty of wisdom: The fire risk is huge, and so demands a huge response, and we have some tools at our disposal which will help. But almost every aspect of response involves not eliminating fire risk but learning to live with considerably more of it. And over the last few years, and especially over the last week, I’ve begun to wonder how much the hopeful story of human responsibility for wildfire, too, serves the same need to lay blame somewhere else, rather than on warming, as a way of reassuring ourselves we remain in control, rather than reckoning with the world-shaping changes already afoot.
There is much that should be done to alleviate wildfire in the United States and Canada, and to protect people and communities from the growing risk of destruction. But even if half of the increased reach of fire risk in the American West is the result of fuel buildup that could theoretically be reduced or eliminated, that means that half is not, and cannot. As I’ve written before, Canada is almost a randomized control trial designed to illustrate the effects of warming: These are largely untouched forests, not landscapes transformed by fire suppression and human management, and so what we see when they burn is pretty simply the natural fire cycle of the boreal forest plus the effects of warming.
Many of the worst fire disasters of the last decade have not been traditional forest fires at all, burning instead through brushland or grassland and beginning sometimes on the sides of highways or right in the middle of dense residential communities. What does forest management have to do with those disasters — as in Lahaina, for instance?
In some cases, brush clearance can help, as can holding homeowners to new landscaping standards and requiring them to fire-harden homes — but each only to a point.
Fire suppression can help protect homes, and under certain conditions wildland firefighting can sometimes achieve miraculous control over roaring walls of fire. But doing so also means contributing to that buildup of fuel which did so much to bring us to this crisis point in the first place.
A new generation of fire-spotting and firefighting drone technology holds promise, but, if they work, these tools could lead to fuel buildup too.
Prescribed burns are very effective at reducing future risk, but even planned fires can escape containment; in New Mexico, several years ago, two eventually joined together and set a record as the largest fire in state history.
The effects of these burns on smoke are perhaps even less significant, and the returns even less encouraging. One study published last month suggested that California could quadruple its program of controlled conifer burns for a full decade and still reduce smoke pollution from wildfire by only about 10 percent.
In Canada, the job is even harder, with the scale of the combustible landscape almost too large and too remote for Americans to comprehend. “When you start talking about the vast expanse of the boreal forest of Canada,” the anthropologist Wade Davis once told me, “you could toss England in there, and the English would never find it.” During the monstrous 2023 season I reported on the evacuation of Yellowknife, the largest settlement in Canada’s Northwest Territories; residents fled 14 hours south through the burning forest. The escape route didn’t even have a turn for 500 miles. The communities destroyed in this year’s fires had no road access; residents had to flee by boat. And almost no matter what we do with emissions in the future, there will be more Canadian fire in the decades to come.
This is a wickedly hard problem. We have to stop telling ourselves it will be easy to solve.
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