Editor’s Note: Wildfire Days and Minds

It wasn’t only the Canadian wildfires prompting people to look up at the sky Saturday. 

One of our coworkers, Sharon Anderson (who is responsible for the amazing design of this section of the paper, week in and week out), had docked in Fish Creek and noticed ash falling from the sky. She had learned previously about the brush fire burning in Gibraltar behind the Settlement Shops (see page 2 of this paper) on top of the bluff off Highway 42. It’s about a mile south of downtown Fish Creek, but still, she said she remembered thinking the distance was too far to blow whole bits of ash around the dock.

And, thank goodness, that was only 10 acres that burned.

As I wrote this on Wednesday, June 28, Natural Resources Canada had tallied 483 active fires burning in Canada from coast to coast. From those wildfires, we’ve been breathing fine particulate matter that’s 2.5 microns or less in width.

The Wisconsin air has been overly laden with particle pollution, pushing advisories into the unhealthy range over the past week and flirting with the hazardous zone the day before in parts of the state. We’ve been living with haze, fumes, copper skies and poor-air-quality alerts for the past week, rotating bad-air days with the rest of the country as winds shift. 

“Beautiful” and “magnificent” are some of the adjectives used to describe our sunrises and sunsets beneath wildfire skies. I find them still, stuck, choked, erie – a silent ember burning in the sky like some omen of the future. 

Not everyone shares this perspective, of course. Air-pollution deniers have been out there for awhile now, telling us that soot and other fine particulate matter are not bad for our lungs, hearts and minds. These deniers are no doubt enjoying a resurgence, dusting off their head game as our northern neighbors’ forests burn.