Smoke events like these aren’t exactly unheard-of on the Eastern Seaboard, though there aren’t too many people still alive to remember the “Great Smoke Pall” from the Chinchaga fire of 1950, for instance.
But again and again, with environmental disarray, what we tell ourselves is still rare, even in a world wracked by warming, is becoming more and more common. That is true of thousand-year floods in the Texas Hill Country, which claimed the lives of 139 people last summer, including 27 girls drowned at Camp Mystic — and just struck again 12 months later. It is true of European heat waves that have historically come once every 26,000 years but have grown a 100 times more likely over the last couple of decades. And it is true of oppressive smoke events blanketing the East Coast: However unusual the weather patterns that carry ash and particulates from Canadian megafires to American megalopolises to the southeast have been in the past, those fires are going to be common enough that we’ll have to get used to encountering them in our eyes, our throats and our lungs. Our emergency rooms, too.
For now, exposure events like these tend to last a few days at most — the length of less ominous-seeming weather events, like thunderstorms or extreme heat, which we take mostly in stride. Perhaps, in time, we will relate to smoke the same way as we do thunderstorms, with some measure of adaptation and some acclimatization and somewhat less rune-reading and hair-rending about the future of life outside.
But adapting even to the future of life indoors has proved maddeningly slow. By rights, smoke events like these should be pushing us headlong into campaigns to mass-retrofit buildings to make the air inside them, at least, more breathable — particularly because smoke can so easily penetrate American homes that indoor monitors sometimes register similar concentrations of particulate matter during toxic air events as outdoor ones. There was a brief window of enthusiasm for this kind of work, just a few years ago, when a respiratory pathogen killed more than a million Americans. Billions of dollars were allocated to retrofit our homes and schools and offices but little was actually accomplished. American homes need effective air filters just as European homes need air-conditioning, but when heat waves strike Paris and London, Americans lecture their European friends for their resistance to obvious solutions without realizing we are forgoing obvious ones, as well.
More harrowingly, we may have to get used to more fire too — not just across the continent, but closer to our doorstep. Last year, 49 percent of American wildfires began in the East, believe it or not, and if you draw a line from Minnesota down to Texas, more than two-thirds of last year’s fires burned to the east of that. Most of them were pretty small, as Jeva Lange wrote in an eye-opening survey of the future of fire in the American East this year. But the number of large fires there has grown tenfold over the last 40 years.
Source:
www.nytimes.com
