Our Smoky Summer

The Fine Art of Schooling Our Canadian Neighbors

Chequamegon Bay, Lake Superior on July 12th, 2025

Sometime around 1980, young me was sitting in the Emergency Room at the University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor with a towel wrapped around my bloody hand. I had managed to insert it into a mechanical cheese grater in the restaurant where I worked as a prep cook, leaving a hunk of my finger in a tub of mozzarella. After what had to be at least 45 minutes of waiting on a bench while others got seen by an overworked medical staff on a Michigan football Saturday, the young man at the reception desk looked up, and as though he was a high-end store clerk telling me not to touch the merchandise, directed me not to bleed on the floor.

Although my bloody ER visit is not a perfect analogy for what’s happening between the U.S. and Canada in the world of fire, that experience 45 years ago was channeled for me when I read the letter that Wisconsin Congressman Tom Tiffany and five of his colleagues sent to Canada’s Ambassador to the United States earlier this month, complaining about the inconvenience experienced by their constituents in Wisconsin and Minnesota from Canadian wildfire smoke. Like, “Hey guys, can you stop bleeding on our nice clean floor here???”

Their letter to Ambassador Kirsten Hillman, while it was at least somewhat measured in tone, was off the rails in it’s misunderstanding of wildfires, how they’re caused and how they’re prevented. Their main complaint:

“In our neck of the woods, summer months are the best time of the year to spend time outdoors recreating, enjoying time with family, and creating new memories, but this wildfire smoke makes it difficult to do all those things.”

True enough. On the weekend of July 12th, wildfire smoke throughout Lake Superior region on what should have been a fine summer day had people's eyes burning, and boats using their horns to navigate safely. Air Quality Indices that exceeded 160 (very unhealthy) at times in the region, caused many people to stay indoors and aggravated life for those with existing respiratory issues. Wildfire smoke has become a regular part of summer at times across the northern U.S., as strong a signal as you could find for the impact of climate change in our day to day lives.

Rep. Tiffany and his colleagues go on to claim that, “While we know a key driver of this issue has been a lack of active forest management, we’ve also seen things like arson as another way multiple large wildfires have ignited in Canada. With all the technology that we have at our disposal, both in preventing and fighting wildfires, this worrisome trend can be reversed if proper action is taken.”

90% bullshit. Do they think that more Canadian Mounties patrolling the Taiga forests of Saskatchewan and Manitoba is the solution to mega fires that have ripped Canada for the last three years? These diligent truth-seekers seem to have based their claim about arson caused fires solely on false social media posts that conflate “human-caused” fires with arson. A single phone call could have straightened them out.

Although Provincial fire authorities have deemed the majority of Canada’s wildfire ignitions to be human caused (which is typically true in most fire seasons in the U.S. as well), those causes range from vehicles with defective mufflers or dragging chains, to incautious campers failing to douse cooking fires, to arcing electric lines. Arson rarely factors as a significant cause, and rarely needs to. They’d have known this if their research went anywhere beyond Truth Social.

All of those human activities that unintentionally cause ignitions are going on more or less continually during fire season - the real variable is the unprecedented extreme fire conditions that can turn any ignition into a mega fire. And it’s not just happening in Canada - it’s happening all over the world.

In a paper just released this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, authors of a global study of forest fire conclude that extreme forest-fire years are becoming more common because of climate change.

John Abatzoglou, a climate scientist at the University of California Merced interviewed for the New York Times noted that “Climate change is loading the dice for extreme fire seasons like we’ve seen,” said “There are going to be more fires like this.”

In Canada, as of mid‑July, over 5.5 million hectares (≈ 13.6 million acres) have burned in at least 3,333 separate fires—making 2025 Canada’s second-worst wildfire season on record, trailing only 2023. Over 40,000 Canadians, including many indigenous communities, have been displaced. They didn’t need a letter from us to tell them they’re having a natural disaster in Canada.

Locations of fires in Canada classified by status, July 19th, 2025.

The other absurdity of Rep. Tiffany’s letter is the assertion that “lack of active forest management” is a primary cause of excessive fires, which could be “easily reversed”.

That claim betrays a deep lack of knowledge about Canada’s forests. The bulk of fires currently burning in northern Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan are in the northern boreal forests in regions that are undeveloped, un-roaded, and dominated by sparse conifer forests, much of which are interspersed with vast wetlands.

There’s a reason these areas are roadless and inaccessible - the forests here simply don’t support the kind of timber that can be harvested and used economically. If they were they would have been.

The map below of Canadian softwood sawmills shows the trend - lots of wood industry in the coastal BC, the Canadian Rockies, and the Maritimes - but there’s simply not enough money to be made in the far northern boreal forests to stand up wood-based industries.

Locations of softwood sawmills in Canada, classified by capacity.

That makes most the kind of forest management via timber harvesting these Congressman imagine to be the easy solution to be a practical impossibility - especially in a landscape where logs cannot be moved, and where moving people in many areas still relies on boats and aircraft.

Canadians are by no means unaware of a crisis that is upending life in rural and indigenous communities and threatening the character and condition of one of the world’s greatest intact forests. In June the Canadian government announced major investments to improve resilience against wildfires.

The Canadian Wildfire Prevention and Mitigation Strategy calls for a “Whole of Society” approach to managing the growing threat of wildfire, that would include more investment in fuels treatment, prescribed fire, and cultural management in remote areas, deeper engagement and partnerships with indigenous communities, more coordination across provincial and local governments, more training in Traditional Ecological Knowledge and climate-smart forest management, and a focus on community preparedness and fire-wise management around human developments.

All of this work at the scale needed to achieve results across hundreds of millions of acres in northern Canada will be astronomically expensive and will be challenging to pull off on multiple fronts.

But to sum it up, six U.S. Congressman have just told our Canadian neighbors to do what it takes to keep the smoke away from our barbeques - an achievement that would cost of many billions of dollars if it were possible at all - after just having voted here at home to gut the budgets of the U.S. Forest Service and our other natural resource agencies responsible for fire prevention and management. I’m certain that most profound irony is not a bit lost on the Canadians, even if it seems to be completely lost on our elected leaders.

An even bigger irony is the impact of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions on our global climate and it’s contribution to global climate stresses that include, but are in no way limited to, severe fires.

Under the leadership of Prime Minister Mark Carney, Canada remains a signatory to the Paris Climate Accords, and has been and continues to be committed to reducing national greenhouse gas emissions by 45-50% below 2005 levels by 2035.

Meanwhile, on the day of his inauguration in January 2025, President Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord. Through subsequent orders and the actions of his appointees, the Trump Administration has initiated an all guns blazing effort to dismantle almost all U.S. climate programs and commitments, as well as renewable energy initiatives that were just beginning to trigger a national energy transformation.

What we seem to be witnessing here is what we could call the J.D. Vance doctrine of diplomacy. Fuck everything up at home, then go abroad to tell our neighbors what a bad job they’re doing.

Then they’ll sit back and wonder where our friends all went when we needed them. The only thing certain is that the tables will turn and we’ll be in need of the good grace of our neighbors in the north for our own climate emergencies again soon. If the one-two punches of absurd insults and pointless trade wars hasn’t ruined our relationship entirely, they still might just be there for us.