We awoke this morning to thick, thick smoke. It looked like the more typical fog that often engulfs us in the early morning, but the faint whiff of smoke even inside with windows closed was unmistakable. One step outside and the smoke was overwhelming – like sitting next to a large campfire with the wind blowing the smoke in my direction. As I was starting to cough, I put the baby in his highchair and headed to the basement to get the air purifier. As soon as I plugged it in the indicator light turned red, meaning very dirty air. Fortunately, it quickly cleared the air, but any time we opened a door the light immediately turned purple.
At the moment, in this land of clean water and clear skies, we are experiencing some of the worst air quality anywhere in the world. The Air Quality Index (AQI) on my EPA app says 834, far higher than the threshold for “Hazardous” air, which is 301. Actually the “Hazardous” range only goes to 500, so what does it even mean for it to be so much higher than that – deadly? Hazardous air is considered an emergency for everyone, not just sensitive groups. Wildfire smoke is filled with pollutants – carbon monoxide, methane, VOCs, bacteria and fungi – but the main concern is the fine particulate matter.
PM2.5 particles (EPA website)
Fine particulate matter from wildfires -- smaller than a grain of sand and 30 times smaller in diameter than a human hair (see illustration) -- can infiltrate the lungs and bloodstream, causing inflammation and damage to internal organs. The AQI measures a variety of pollutants – carbon monoxide, ozone, lead, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and particulate matter – both larger PM10 particles (dust, mold, pollen) and smaller PM2.5, the fine particles that are particularly dangerous. The PM2.5 number is the EPA’s shorthand for micrograms per cubic meter. 100 is the standard for public health that the EPA sets for each pollutant. The posted AQI means the concentration of PM2.5. particles in the air, and when the AQI reads 834, it means the concentration of PM2.5 particles in the air is over eight times the limit of acceptable air quality.
According to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, with this level of pollution everyone should stay indoors, assuming one’s house is sufficiently sealed to keep out all the smoke. But what of all of those who are unable to go indoors, those who have no shelter, or work outdoors – the park rangers, construction workers, road crews, gardeners and landscapers, farmers and farm stand workers, camp counselors, not to mention fire fighters.
Our poor pups, who after days of temperatures so high they couldn’t get out for a walk, are now even more housebound because the air is not safe for them to breathe, and I can’t give them an N95 mask. And what of all the wild animals? Where are they supposed to go? The smoke is especially hazardous for infants, so what of the baby foxes, deer, and rabbits, the veeries, robins, and sapsuckers? What will happen to their tiny, fragile lungs? They are all the innocent victims of the damage we are doing to the planet, for the forests are burning due to human-caused climate change.
It never used to be like this. The smoky summers only began less than ten years ago. I remember the first one well. It was the summer of 2018. I was in a training led by indigenous elders from British Columbia. They had been looking forward to breathing clearer air in Duluth and were dismayed that the smoke from wildfires in British Columbia had followed them all the way here. The wind had brought the plumes of smoke nearly two thousand miles.
Now the smoky summers are a regular occurrence. For a few years most of the smoke was coming from fires in Canada or the Pacific Northwest or Montana. Now they are in our own backyard – hence the hazardous air quality. The fires are close. The entire Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness one hundred miles to the north of us has been evacuated and closed. Currently seventeen active fires are burning in the nearby Superior National Forest, with five of them being in the BWCAW itself. Some have estimated that despite best efforts to douse the flames, the fires will continue to burn until it snows.
A few years ago, Duluth was being touted as a climate refuge city and a growing number residents from California and Colorado began arriving to escape what had become long annual fire seasons there. A refuge it is no more. We can’t evade climate change by changing geographical locations. For some the crisis manifests in fire, for others it is floods, or massive hurricanes, or tornadoes, rising sea levels, melting glaciers, drought, inescapable heat, or blistering cold. It is planetary. I sometimes think that’s something those who continue to act as if we’re not in an emergency don’t get. We can’t outrun it or buy our way out of it. We are destroying our one precious home and it affects everyone – some more than others to be sure. Wealth and certain locations do provide a bit of a buffer, but fire and flood, wind and wild weather happen everywhere.
We can take action to slow its spread, stop it even, reverse it maybe. The contributors to Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility and What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures inspire me with possibility, ways we can get it right, but we do need people who care in political office, corporate offices, the military, to make sweeping policy changes and actions, and the past two years have been increasingly unbearable for that reason. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” the saying goes. Well, we have the ways. We just need the will. I applaud the efforts of those communities taking the necessary steps not just to adapt to climate change – for that’s what we’re being told to do – but to do what they can to avert it – New York putting a moratorium on AI data centers, San Franciso that gets 90% of its energy from renewables, the Native communities investing in solar energy, the entire country of Iceland that fuels 100% of its energy needs with renewable largely from its vast supply of geothermal energy.
In the time I’ve been writing this the AQI has gotten better – from 834 to 697 – still hazardous, still well above the 301 threshold, so it seems absurd to feel some relief. I know it’s just a matter of heat and wind shift. The fires are still burning. It is my hope against hope that we will have a drenching rain, but the forecast is for sunny skies, at least if the sun can make its way through, which remarkably it is doing right now even through this thick smoke.
When I looked out the window this morning, all I could think of is that we are living in Octavia Butler’s dystopia, Parable of the Sower, with fires and smoke surrounding us. Referring to the myth of the phoenix, Butler wrote, “In order to rise from its own ashes a phoenix first must burn.” Is that what we are now, a phoenix burning? Is this what it will take for us to die to our old consumptive ways and change course? Will we rise from these ashes?
Sources
Butler, Octavia. Parable of the Sower. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2019.
Johnson, Ayana Elizabeth. What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures. New York: One World, Penguin Random House, 2024.
Solnit, Rebecca & Thelma Young Lutunatabua. Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2023.
What Does Air Quality Mean? AQI Levels Explained - ScienceInsights