Growing up in a household where both parents were heavy smokers, I can attest directly to the lifetime impacts of second-hand smoke. Both of my sister's boys later experienced challenges with asthma and my younger daughter still needs occasional assistance with her brittle asthma. My youngest sister, as an adult, has also developed late-onset asthma.
We lost our mother last year, due to a multitude of health challenges and complications, but most of those born from more than 50+ years of smoking. Our Dad thankfully is still with us, as some cardiac and earlier health episodes caused him to give up the cancer sticks nearly two decades ago. Both of my paternal grandparents left the world due to emphysema as well as related cardiac and respiratory failure. I was holding my grandfather Bud Crane's hand as he painfully struggled to gasp his last breaths...his lungs filling with fluid and drowning him, which is the way those in the final stages of emphysema get to say goodbye.
Last week took me to Washington, D.C., and an expert panel on public health issues, and particularly inequities in healthcare across our system and nation. I had the opportunity to meet a four-star Admiral and the U.S. Under Secretary for Health & Human Services, Dr. Rachel Levine. The air quality in D.C. during both days of my stay was horrible, the skies were a slight shade of purple, and a Code Red Advisory had been issued suggesting anyone with any breathing issues or concerns simply stay indoors until the air quality improved.
The Assistant Secretary for Health & Human Services repeatedly referenced the outdoor air quality as more proof of the problems of climate change and global warming, admonishing that this was as clear as the ash and smoke-filled air blanketing much of our east coast, northern Midwest, and our Canadian border.
Forest management practices long in place across most of the American South, routinely include controlled burnings of the forest floor, and removing or burning off fallen dead trees, limbs, leaves and pine straw, broken bark, etc...each of which a lightning strike or sparks from aging utility infrastructure can quickly turn into a blazing inferno. Managed forest floors can also be raked or scraped for this debris, though that method is certainly more labor-intensive and expensive.
Though most of the 30 million residents of Canada live along the U.S. border, and our shared Great Lakes and waterways, there are now 490 fires burning across north and northwest Canada, most in the heavily forested northern provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan. Of those blazes, 255, more than half are burning out of control. The Canadian Inter-agency Forest Fire Centre reports that since January 1, 2023, 29,393 square miles of timberland have burned across Canada. Putting that land mass in perspective, that charred forest land would be larger than the entire state of South Carolina.
And all those forest fires are creating plumes, and clouds of thick ash and smoke, now blanketing Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis as well the Twin Cities of Minnesota, and now reaching as far south as Washington, D.C., St. Louis, Missouri, and Kentucky. The heat in that smoke is also causing the ashen air not to move and to stay in the upper atmosphere, where it will continue to linger and likely cause poor air quality for the rest of the summer.
California led much of the nation away from forest management practices during the 1980s and 1990s. Controlled burnings can and do impact insects and small animals whose natural habitats include nesting within all that debris, dead wood, and fire accelerant material.
I am guessing that Admiral Levine and I may never quite see eye to eye on this one, and though drought and climate change have made things worse, these fires and the carbon dioxide they emit will affect millions of people, as well as accelerate global warming, while many of these fires were also entirely preventable.
As I have many a Yankee relative in upstate New York, where all this ash lands does directly concern me. Neither the Admiral nor our best trading partner and neighbors in Canada need to agree with all our politics, but if you 'follow the science and the data,' forest management is a proven and cost-effective fire prevention methodology. If the objective is to cool a fast-warming planet, structured, small, and controlled burns are part of the solution, not part of the fast-burning forest fires control problem.
