The sky over New York City is orange again. Chicago too. Toronto. The smoke rolling in from wildfires burning across northern Minnesota and Canada is coating the lungs of millions of people across the Midwest and Northeast, and officials in all three cities are telling residents to stay inside. We have been here before. We will be here again.
Where It's Coming From and Where It's Going
Axios is reporting that the smoke blanketing the region this week is drifting south and east from wildfires raging in northern Minnesota and Canada. Air quality alerts have been issued in New York, Chicago, and Toronto, with health officials urging people to limit time outdoors.
The situation could get worse before it gets better. Axios notes the smoke could soon spread to other parts of the country depending on wind patterns, meaning if you're currently watching this from somewhere with clear skies, enjoy it. Your turn may be coming.
This is not a minor inconvenience. Wildfire smoke is a genuine public health emergency when it rolls over a dense urban area. It carries fine particulate matter, the kind that gets deep into your lungs and doesn't politely leave. People with asthma, heart conditions, or compromised immune systems are especially at risk. So are kids. So are the elderly. So is basically everyone who breathes.
Orange Skies Are Not Normal and We Need to Stop Treating Them Like They Are
Cast your mind back to June 2023, when wildfire smoke from Canada turned the skies over New York City into something out of a disaster film. People posted photographs. Everyone called it surreal, apocalyptic, unprecedented. Cable news ran chyrons about hazardous air. Then it cleared up and most people filed it away as a weird thing that happened once.
Except it wasn't once. This is now a recurring seasonal feature of life in the eastern United States and Canada. The summer smoke season is real, it is getting worse, and describing it as a "stark reminder that the planet is changing," as Axios put it this week, is perhaps the most polite way to state what is actually happening.
The planet is on fire. Not metaphorically. Literally on fire in ways and at scales that keep rewriting the record books.
The Politics Underneath the Smoke
Here is something worth sitting with. The United States federal government is currently occupied by an administration that has spent the better part of two years dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency, rolling back emissions regulations, pulling climate scientists off federal payrolls, and cheerfully describing climate change as a hoax cooked up by enemies of the American economy.
And yet here is the smoke, drifting indifferently over Republican and Democratic zip codes alike, making no distinctions based on how anyone voted. Smoke does not care about your politics. Your lungs do not care about your politics. The wildfire burning in northern Minnesota did not check the electoral map before deciding where to spread.
The people breathing this air did not all vote for a government that would gut the agencies responsible for monitoring, responding to, and trying to prevent climate-driven disasters. But they are all breathing the same air anyway. That is the thing about collective problems. They collect.
What You Can Actually Do Right Now
If you are in one of the affected areas, the advice from officials is straightforward and unglamorous. Stay inside if you can. Keep windows and doors closed. Run your air conditioning if you have it, which, to state the obvious, not everyone does. If you need to go outside, an N95 or KN95 mask offers meaningful protection against the fine particulate matter in smoke. A cloth mask or a surgical mask does significantly less.
Axios notes it is too early to tie this specific smoke event to any single cause with scientific certainty, which is the careful and accurate way scientists talk about individual weather events in relation to long-term climate trends. The pattern, however, is not in dispute. Wildfire seasons are longer, more intense, and producing more smoke than they did twenty years ago. The data on that is not complicated.
Check your local air quality index before going outside. The AirNow website run by the EPA, assuming it still exists in functional form by the time you read this, will give you current readings for your area. Above 100 is unhealthy for sensitive groups. Above 150 is unhealthy for everyone. When the sky looks like the inside of a bar in 1987, do not assume it is fine.
The Dingo Take
We are going to keep having this conversation. Every summer, maybe a few times a summer now, the smoke is going to roll in from somewhere that is on fire, the sky is going to turn colors it should not turn, and officials are going to tell people to stay inside. Journalists will write that it is a stark reminder. Politicians will offer thoughts. Nothing structural will change. Then it will happen again.
The most darkly funny thing about all of this is that the people most aggressively blocking any meaningful response to climate change breathe air too. They have grandchildren. They live in houses that can burn. The cognitive dissonance required to watch the sky turn orange over your city and then go vote to gut environmental protections is genuinely staggering, and yet here we are, doing exactly that as a society, on a loop, while the smoke gets thicker.
Stay inside if you can. Wear a mask if you go out. And maybe, when the air clears and people stop posting orange sky photos, try to hold onto the memory of what it felt like a little longer than last time.
