Wildfire

I overslept this past Tuesday, waking up only a short time before I had to be at work. Luckily, I live close by, so I was still able to get there more or less on time. I was still pretty groggy when I arrived, however, and so it wasn't until one our interns pointed it out that I noticed the strange, orange tint of the sun, and the clouds that were not really clouds, but plumes of smoke wafting across New England from wildfires burning up in Canada. 

An orange sun over Lichfield, Connecticut. The orange color of the sun was the result of smoke particles blocking light at shorter wavelengths (yellow, green, and blue) and allowing red and orange light to pass through. 

Conditions only got worse as the day went on. When we went out to check on some bat houses, we noticed how the sun's orange tint gave the light in the forest a dawn-like quality, even in mid-morning. Eventually, the smoke became so thick that the sun disappeared altogether and the air smelled like campfires. Our intern started having trouble breathing and had to go home early. The rest of us did our best to find ways to occupy ourselves indoors and, when we had to venture outside, to keep the physical intensity of our work to a minimum. Wednesday and Thursday morning were even worse, but by Thursday afternoon, the air was starting to clear. On Friday, we were back out checking trail cameras and installing bird houses. 

Meanwhile, up in Canada, thousands of people living in the path of the fires had to be evacuated and hundreds lost their homes. The government is already expecting this to be one of the worst wildfire seasons in the nation's history. Meanwhile, in the United States, millions of people as far south as Georgia and as far west as the Ohio Valley were exposed to unhealthy quantities of smoke, including many people belonging to vulnerable groups such as children, the elderly, pregnant women, and people with existing respiratory or cardiovascular conditions. The smoke may not have stuck around for as long as it has for some fires out west, but I still have no doubt that lives have been lost, directly or indirectly, as a result of poor air quality over the past few days. 

Smoke over Bantam Lake in Litchfield County, CT. Smoke can drive significant, but usually temporary changes in freshwater algal communities by blocking light and lowering water temperatures.

Whispering beneath discussions of smoke and air quality and health risks is, of course, the specter of climate change. It's too early at this point to be certain about the extent to which climate change contributed to the Canadian fires, but we are getting much better at parsing that kind of thing out and I am sure that somebody will be exploring the question shortly, if they haven't already started. In the meantime though, it doesn't really matter - we know that climate change will cause an increase in the number and intensity of wildfires and that this kind of thing will inevitably happen as a result. 

The ability of wildfire smoke to travel thousands of miles across continents is perhaps one of the most visceral examples of how foolish isolationism and individualism are as responses to environmental problems. The climate does not care about political borders - carbon burned in New York, Huston, Paris, and Shanghai mixes and becomes one in the atmosphere, warming global temperatures and causing fires in Canada with smoke that floats back over the Hudson. Likewise, the consequences of transactions between gas-guzzling SUV owners and international oil companies do not stay between them - just ask the women down the street, trying to reduce her carbon footprint by riding a bike to work through the smog, or the man halfway around the world, digging up his parent's grave and moving it to higher ground as his country sinks beneath the waves.

We can't keep living as if our lives, our businesses, and our nations are hermetically sealed from off from all others. In the face of climate crisis, we quickly find that both the centrality of the nation state and the libertarian dream of a perfectly desecrate, consensual transaction, if they are not consumed entirely by the flames, quickly lose their boundaries in the smog.