Last week took me to Washington, D.C., and an expert panel on public health issues, particularly inequities in healthcare across our system and nation. I had the opportunity to meet Dr. Rachel Levine there, a four-star admiral and U.S. Under Secretary for Health & Human Services.
The air quality in D.C. during both days of my stay was horrible, the skies 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.
Levine 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, and so on, each of which a lightning strike or sparks from aging utility infrastructure can quickly turn into a blazing inferno.
Managed forest floors also can be raked or scraped for this debris, though that method is certainly more labor-intensive and expensive.
Most of Canada’s nearly- 40-million residents live within 100 miles of the U.S. border, and nearby our shared Great Lakes and waterways.
Farther north and west, there are currently 490 fires burning across Canada, most in the heavily forested western provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan, as well as northern Quebec. So far this year, more than 3,000 Canadian wildfires have officially been reported.
Of the current blazes, more than half are burning out of control. The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre reports that since January 1st, 29,393 square miles of timberland have burned across Canada. Putting that land mass of charred forest land in perspective, it 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, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, New York, and the Twin Cities of Minnesota. The smoke is going as far south as Washington, D.C., Missouri, and Kentucky, and reportedly it has reached Europe, too. The heat in that smoke is also causing the ashen air not to move and to remain 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 living in upstate New York, where this ash eventually touches down 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 data,” forest management is a proven and cost-effective fire prevention methodology.
If the objective is to cool a fast-warming planet, then small, structured, and controlled burns are part of the solution, not part of the out-of-control forest fires problem.