A Not-So-Hazy Connection

As I saw reports this week of Midwestern skies filling with smoke from the Canadian wildfires, I experienced the feeling of returning to that area in my mind.

Having spent five years teaching at the University of South Dakota, I remember when wildfire smoke turned the skies of Vermillion, South Dakota, orange-pink in the spring of 2016. That smoke was also from Canada though I think it was from the western part of the country. I remember thinking how wildfire smoke can provide a strong connection between people as we deal with the impacts of global warming.

This year's Canadian wildfires have been sending smoke far and wide for months. In early May, I looked out my window in western Washington and saw that familiar yet strange tint of orange-pink in the evening light. As it turned out, that color was courtesy of smoke from western Canada. Later, smoke from eastern Canada darkened skies on the East Coast of the United States.

When the smoke zeroed in on the Midwest, I felt like I was back in South Dakota. I could see myself looking up into the open, hazy sky of Vermillion. It was a powerful feeling.

Through its impacts on air quality and our senses and health, wildfire smoke provides tangible connections to global warming and between people who are hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Red (Sky) Means Go on Carbon Regulation

Judging by the sun, I can tell it's time for the regulation of carbon emissions.

Smoke from wildfires turning the morning sun
an eerie red on August 22 in Washington state.

Once a rare sight, sunlight turned hazy red from wildfire smoke has become a consistent feature of Pacific Northwest summers in the last decade. This year, it colored much of August in Washington state, bringing with it hazardous air quality and oppressively low visibility. Suffocating and disorienting, the smoke and the hellish scene it created set off a flight mechanism in the back of my mind. It didn't feel safe, and I wanted to get out of it.

Besides suggesting a need to flee, the flashing red light of smoke-filtered sun carries another message for Washington residents in 2018: Go! And by that, I mean it's a sign to go forward on the regulation of carbon emissions by enacting Initiative 1631.

As I've blogged about before, I-1631 regulates carbon emissions by placing a fee on the big polluters responsible for the majority of those emissions, disincentivizing the use of fossil fuels. It also funds renewable energy and prepares Washington's communities for the effects of global warming, effects like increasingly difficult wildfire seasons and the smoke that accompanies them.

When we're filling out our ballots for this November's election, let's remember the red skies of August and go enact I-1631.