Why the Canadian fires aren't being put out: Large parts of the United States are still being plagued by dense clouds of smoke that are causing air quality alerts to be issued

Large parts of the United States are currently being plagued by dense clouds of smoke that are causing air quality alerts to be issued. A lot of people are walking around wearing masks, making it look like we’re back in the days of the pandemic. As you’ve likely already heard, the smoke is blowing down from Canada, where there are now more than 500 wildfires raging, with 262 of them being listed as “out of control” by the Canadian government. But despite volunteer firefighters from ten countries having deployed to Canada to help, the majority of those fires aren’t being fought in any fashion. Most of the provinces in Canada are just letting them burn unless they are approaching densely populated areas. Why are they doing this? CNN sought to offer some answers this weekend, and while the reasons may not seem satisfactory to some of us, they do sort of make sense. But that’s not doing anything for the affected people in the United States.

Obviously, the usual suspects want to blame this on climate change, along with everything else. And CNN jumps on the bandwagon, mentioning climate change three times in the opening paragraphs, including in the first sentence. But Canada has faced large wildfires nearly every year for all of living memory. We’re just dealing with some unusual jet stream conditions this summer that are causing the prevailing winds to blow south more often.

The primary reason that Canada isn’t fighting most of these fires is that they simply don’t have the resources to do so, even with international help being available. Canada is the second largest country in the world measured by area. But they are 39th in terms of population, having nearly 300 million fewer people than the United States. A lot of Canada is empty of people or even roads. And most of it is covered in boreal forests. During the dry season, that’s going to lead to huge fires. A few of the fires are suspected to have been started by arsonists, but the vast majority began naturally, generally from lightning strikes.

Rather than climate change, even CNN was forced to admit that these fires are part of nature’s own housekeeping. Fires are natural and in fact necessary for the environment. One scientist with Canada’s Fire Service is quoted as saying, “There’s always been fires Canadian fire managers don’t fight. It’s expensive to do so, ecologically undesirable, and kind of just messing with nature.”

The floors of large forests tend to quickly accumulate natural debris, including needles, dead leaves, and branches. They note that fires restore soil nutrients and help germinate plants. Further, they point out that many species in the forest have evolved in the presence of fire, and fire “is an essential process for conserving biodiversity.”

So while wildfires can be a nuisance in terms of air quality, they really aren’t that big of a deal. As long as they can be kept away from the populated areas, they’re just one of those necessary evils that we have to live with.

In Canada there are no “national forests” and forestry is entirely a provincial responsibility. The federal government sometimes gets involved if military resources are useful in fighting fires near urban areas. This is most likely to be the case in BC and Alberta. Further east, most of the forests are a lot further away from settlements generally speaking, and in this particular case, the fires spread so far and wide early in the season (in May) that now there is little hope of putting them out, imagine if all of Minnesota and northern Wisconsin was on fire, what strategy would you employ?

I agree with those who speculate as to possible arson as at least a partial cause. There is a very limited road network in central Quebec but a lot of the fires could be seen at similar stages of early development in patterns that suggested human rather than natural causes. Canadian cities are similar to Portland and Seattle in being hotbeds of radical far left militant politics. It may not involve very many people and they are quite secretive, but our political culture is not conducive to discussion or investigation of this aspect (as I think could fairly be said about western U.S. states as well, if not the entire country with a few local exceptions nowadays).

Quebec does not normally have extended dry spells as part of its climate and I think there has been an expectation that if normal weather patterns resume the fires will quickly be brought down to less critical levels. Even then they are so remote and on such a vast scale that I don’t see who is going to put them out, but they won’t last through the coming winter season.

This is just one part of a much larger political problem which could be described as follows — nowadays, so many crazy public policies are accepted as “normal” by such a large number of people, with the full backing of the media, that people trying to push back are being overwhelmed by a problem similar to the fires — the scale of the problem is too vast for a solution. We’re in this boat together, it’s very similar to the southern border problems, to some of us, it seems obvious and self-evident that there is a problem and a possible solution, but to many, it is not viewed as a problem or if it is, there is no solution.

We have had several years like this in western regions of North America (2018 and 2021 were particularly bad) so now you in the east are seeing what that’s like. It could be said also that “back in the day” huge forest fires were quite normal in eastern North America, there were numerous infamous conflagrations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in the “north woods” — well now the north woods are further north, as we have more managed forests where those fires used to run amok. In 1916 a good portion of northern Ontario burned down and entire towns were wiped out. I believe there were similar events in Wisconsin, Minnesota and going further back, New England. I may have posted this before, but May 19, 1780 was known as the “dark day” when forest fire smoke brought pitch black darkness at mid-day to New England and parts of NY and NJ. Those fires were probably in eastern Ontario or southern Quebec and maybe even in the Adirondacks or Vermont.

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