The Canadian Wildfires

This isn’t just a Canadian or American problem. Wildfire smoke doesn’t carry a passport. In 2023, scientists at the Climate and Environmental Research Institute in Norway found that smoke from those same wildfires in Canada was drifting into the Nordic countries. As of right now, although the skies aren’t orange, poor air quality is causing symptoms such as coughing, eye irritation, and fatigue, and microscopic pollutants can enter your bloodstream, triggering systemic inflammation and increasing the risk of asthma attacks, heart failure, and strokes. This causes casualties, not from a war, not from a plague, but from global warming. It’s what happens when a warming planet makes fires longer and fiercer across the globe.

I remember the color. Something as if it were from the dystopian societies you read about in the books: a strange, filtered orange. It was a normal high school day, and slowly but suddenly, the smoke rolled down from the Canadian wildfires hundreds of miles away. Within the hour, the masks we thought were retired for good were being pulled out and handed out in the hallways. That wasn’t a one-time event. This week, as I write this, wildfire smoke is bringing unhealthy air quality to 115 million people. Not just in Canada, but thousands of wildfires across the globe have consumed acres of land. When you combine fires with these changing atmospheric conditions, it steers smoke towards population centers, endangering people.

Wildfire smoke doesn’t carry a passport.

As the planet’s global temperatures rise every year, the atmosphere pulls the moisture out of trees before a single spark happens. As a result, global warming has been steadily increasing the likelihood of extreme fires worldwide. We always talk about climate change as a future problem, something for the next generation to deal with, but that “someday” is now. Ronald Reagan’s presidency vouched for an environmental policy--an issue presented almost fifty years ago.

That someday is now

Today, as the global temperature has risen by a degree Celsius since then, the effects we were warned about are now hitting us. Wildfires have gone from an occasional contributor to air pollution to one of the most dangerous, undoing years of clean-air progress. You don’t need a climate model to understand that this is a failure on our part. Whether you live in Canada, the United States, or even Norway, you can taste it in the back of your throat, and this has to end now for the sake of the next generation.