Haze Of Our Lives
It’s been a few weeks since the smoke started.
Now, from the standpoint of proximity to the actual fire, I’m one of the lucky ones. My hometown in Massachusetts was not evacuated, mainly because the actual fires are hundreds or even thousands of miles away. The people of Flin Flon, Manitoba, a small town of about 5,000 people, were not so lucky.
Consider this: Two years ago, there were several days during which New York City’s sky was orange due to the smoke. The Big Apple briefly had the worst air quality in the world. In my Boston suburb, it wasn’t nearly that bad, but there were still a few days when we were advised to stay indoors if at all possible. Compared to 2023, Massachusetts air quality hasn’t been awful.
I say this not to minimize the tragedy that’s currently taking place. Several people have lost their lives as a result of these fires. It’s likely that a few orders of magnitude more people will lose their homes by the end of the fire season. I don’t want to be flippant about that.
Nor do I want to be flippant about the reason these fires are getting worse. Yes, forest fires have always been part of the ecosystem, and they are a natural cycle. There’s a reason why many indigenous peoples used controlled burns to prevent fires from reaching the areas in which they lived. Contrary to what Smokey the Bear once said, some fire is good.
As I write this article, I’m lying sideways beside a beach towel beneath the moderately strong sun. This is the same town beach at which I recently spent part of my 25th birthday. My right leg feels pretty tan, and I know intellectually that I might have given it a little too much sun. A mild sunburn is quite likely, and if I didn’t have a swim shirt on, my chest and back would itch like a motherfucker pretty soon.
Like fire, the sun is an essential ingredient of life on Earth. We need it to survive, unless you’re one of those progressive Norwegian scientists who can grow tomatoes in a greenhouse. In all seriousness, too much sun can be very dangerous. Hell, even looking too directly at the sun can cause severe eye damage. That’s no secret.
We keep hearing about how 2024 was the hottest year on record, and that May 2025 was the hottest May on record. And we’re sure breaking a lot of records, aren’t we?
Here’s the thing, though: The current hottest year on record may well end up being the coldest year of the rest of our lives. We will still have cold days and still have some blizzards, but the overall trend is clear to anyone paying attention. That’s why Jim “Senator Snowball” Inhofe, may he rest in piss, was so brutally mocked.
Trends are real, even when they’re inconvenient.
Earlier today, I went on Google Maps and used their air quality layer. Say what you will about Google as a company and their capitulation to Donald Trump on stupid naming disputes, but their maps are pretty awesome, which is why I keep using them. Anyway, I saw that my area of Massachusetts is back in the lime green zone after enduring a couple days of yellow air quality. It was never that dangerous for most people, but it was less than ideal by our standards.
A Google Maps view of air quality in North America and Europe. Hotter colors indicate higher levels of air pollution.
The “usual suspects” were not terribly surprising. Parts of several Canadian provinces (really, parts of all Canadian provinces) are on fire, so it’s no wonder that they have high AQI indices due to the smoke. There are also wildfires out west in my own country.
Over in Europe, the Po Valley of Northern Italy was in the yellow/orange transition zone. Being an industrial area surrounded on three sides by mountains, that makes sense. But I noticed that the south of France had worse air quality than northern France (which seemed odd to me thanks to air pollution in and around Paris, even if Mayor Hidalgo’s anti-car efforts have been laudable).
I took to the Geography subreddit and asked why this was. And I received answers.
Some people said that dust from the Sahara Desert blew into the south of France, hindering the air quality there. That struck me as odd - that’s a pretty far distance for sand to be blown. Phoenix, the “perfect” American city, also has this issue with haboobs. Yes, that’s a silly name, but deal with it.
But then more responses trickled in. It was smoke from the Canadian wildfires, they said. Said smoke had traveled all the way from the remote areas of Earth’s second-largest country geographically to some of Europe’s population centers. The winds carried it across the Atlantic, they told me.
This serves as a sobering reminder that we’re all interconnected in this world. The wildfires in Canada affect air quality not just in Canada and the United States, but also a lot further afield. I also remember reading that one reason South Korea struggled with air pollution was because of industrial activity in nearby China. And speaking of China, that country (along with India) is often cited as an excuse by people who don’t want to do anything about our greenhouse gas emissions.
But here’s the thing. It’s total whataboutism. Whether or not China truly is a climate villain (and I posit that they are not; their renewable energy revolution is palpable, whatever you can say about their government’s human rights record), that doesn’t change our moral obligation to act. We must, in the words of Bernie Sanders, transform our energy system away from fossil fuels. If not, the fires are only going to get worse.
Of course, we’re not doing that right now. Donald Trump is President of the United States. He’s not only pulled us out of the Paris Climate Accord (which, in all honesty, doesn’t mean much in practical terms since it has no enforcement mechanism), he’s also signed numerous executive orders to drill for fossil fuels on public lands and roll back Biden-era renewable energy incentives.
Will it completely halt progress toward renewable energy? Probably not. And let’s be honest: Even if Kamala Harris had won, I don’t foresee any new climate legislation being passed with what would still probably have been a Republican Senate. One election wouldn’t have solved this problem. Additionally, it’s not like 1.99°C of warming is “everything’s fine” and 2.01°C is “absolute doomsday” - it’s more nuanced than that. But that’s a topic for another day.
Make no mistake, however: The election of Donald Trump as President was a giant leap in the wrong direction.
That’s the thing about the 2024 election. If it was just about domestic policy, that would be one thing. Gun violence is a massive red stain on this nation, but at least it mostly only affects Americans (the occasional unlucky foreign tourist notwithstanding). But when it comes to the climate crisis, what the United States does carries a massive impact on the rest of the world. Because of Trump, the climate crisis is going to get a lot worse.
We had no right to elect Donald Trump, and in my opinion, other countries would have every right to invade us if they so chose.
Yes, the rain may have washed away the smoke for now. But it’s not going to wash away my guilt by association. It’s not all of our fault, but it is all of our responsibility.
Fuck, I hate this timeline!
