curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’
For years, I approached wildfire smoke as a health professional: caring for patients with smoke-related illness, writing advisories as a health officer, and researching its health impacts. But as a dad, all that boiled down to one urgent question: when the skies fill with smoke, how do we keep the air we breathe as clean as possible?
I went deep into air filtration. My son’s exposure may be more extreme, but the lessons are increasingly relevant for all of us. This is what I learned.
Yes, wildfires are increasing.
When I’m not writing with Katelyn for YLE, I work with climate scientists to model the health impacts of climate change. Our report will be out in December (stay tuned), but here’s a teaser—the increased burden of wildfires we’re feeling isn’t a one-summer fluke. Even the best-case scenarios show an upward trend in wildfire size, frequency, and intensity until we can slow global warming.
This doesn’t just matter for those of us with houses in dry areas. Wildfire smoke risk isn’t limited to “fire county.” Our most fire-prone states are in the West, and prevailing winds blow east. In late July, smoke from the fire my son was fighting in Oregon reached Florida.
(Matt Willis @ Your Local Epidemiologist more…)
I’ve been in northern New Mexico for more than two weeks, in what is normally the monsoon season, but there has been no rain beyond a brief, quickly evaporated spatter of drops three times so far. The plants are parched, and the usual green regeneration of monsoon season I was looking forward to has not happened. The animals seem thirsty too, and we think the deer that come down among the houses are hungry and thirsty. I saw one try some juniper, which does not seem like its usual food, and because of this desperation, I’ve seen deer closer than almost ever before, and seen that they are missing patches of fur and look beat up in contrast to the elegance I admire from afar.
Too, there is a fire burning not far away, the Frijoles Fire, started by a lightning strike on August 5th, and steadily growing since to reach more than 12,000 acres to date. That’s not big by modern wildfire standards, but it’s impactful locally. When the wind sends it our way, the smoke has been intense, and often I can smell the campfire scent of burning trees before I check the AQI (air quality index). On Tuesday, August 11th, the early morning AQI reached horrific levels, the 400s and one reading over 500, and the morning light was somehow dingy, dirty, the light I saw so much of during north/central California’s huge fires in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. …
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