In Western Canada, fire season comes early by American standards — beginning, usually, right around now. In Alberta, by today’s date, only about 1,000 acres have burned in recent years. This season so far, the total is already more than 1.5 million — which would make it the province’s third-worst annual result, just a few weeks into May, with months more of wildfire season still to burn.
In the United States, by contrast, those who live in fear of wildfire are probably breathing a bit easier. Last year was a relatively light one, with fewer than eight million acres burning across the country — close to the two-decade average and well below the damage of several especially scarring recent seasons. This year looks potentially even milder, thanks to the onslaught of “atmospheric rivers” along the West Coast, which many Californians experienced as extreme weather whiplash but which also supercharged the state’s depleted snowpack, turned millions of drought-browned acres a verdant green and at least for a time managed to substitute the fear of flooding, in California’s quasi-apocalyptic ecological imagination, for fear of fire. For now there may be out-of-control blazes burning in Alberta, 2,000 miles away, but to most on the American side of the border, they are out of sight and out of mind.
But a new lesson from the evolving science of wildfire is about how far its toxic smoke spreads and how widely its noxious impacts are distributed. You may think of fire in terms of scorched homes and go bags sitting ready for sudden evacuation. But distance is no cordon sanitaire for smoke. In fact, according to one not-yet-published study led by Stanford researchers exploring the distribution of wildfire smoke, an estimated 60 percent of the smoke impact of American wildfire is experienced by those living outside the states where the trees are in flames. Eighty-seven percent of the impact is experienced by those living outside the county of the original fire. And the problem is getting much worse.
In recent years, a new generation of California fires have taught us their own new vocabulary: “gigafires,” for fires burning a million or more acres; “fire tornadoes,” for blazes burning intensely enough to create their own dramatic weather systems; the “pyrocene age,” for the current global era defined by fires. Perhaps more memorably, we are now haunted by a new visual vocabulary, too: a town called Paradise incinerated in hours, amber urban skyscapes and whole cities navigating darkness at noon, dashcam evacuations through walls of flame.