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The smoky, all-day gray skies earlier this month were among the strangest skies I had seen in my life. As Canada's eastern forests burned, the smoke covered not just our northern neighbors, but much of the eastern United States. That eastern Canada was now ablaze, too, came as an unwelcome change.
When wildfires burn unrelentingly in the dryer climates of the west, many of us sadly accept the tragedy as one of the things that will happen in arid places. Even if a warming planet increases the odds of such nightmarish events, it has been limited to those places plagued by light rainfall.
And then 2023 happened.
Under the frequent influence of North Atlantic maritime air masses, Nova Scotia, especially, can be a cool, rainy place, averaging 52 inches of precipitation annually. Even inland, rainfall, similar to what we get here in Altoona. Barrie, Ontario, on the edge of the wildfire-plagued part of the province, gets just under 40 inches of rain annually. By contrast, most of Alberta (north of Montana if your mental map, fuzzy) gets less than 20 inches.
It makes sense that the more moderate temperatures and higher average rainfall in eastern Canada usually result in smaller fires than those seen in western provinces. This year however, warmer and drier spring weather set the table for a higher fire risk and larger fires in those eastern provinces of Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Ontario.
And the numbers are staggering. While Alberta (654 fires this year) and British Columbia (434) still overshadow the east, the numbers in the eastern provinces are similarly unprecedented in the last century.
There were still 121 active fires in Quebec alone as of last week and all three provinces have surpassed 200 wildfires for 2023, according to their Ministries of Natural Resources and Forestry. This marks a ten-fold increase in Quebec over their annual average, according to a report from Nathan Rott of National Public Radio. Ontario has had four times the number of fires and acres consumed over all of last year.
On top of the devastation, loss of life and property, particulate pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions, it has been overwhelming logistically as well. "[We] simply don't have enough firefighting resources on hand to handle this much fire all at once," Quebec's firefighting agency noted in an interview with NPR's Rott last week.
Much as in the U.S., the concerns over, and political ramifications of, climate change and its role in these latest disasters became part of the story, too. Ontario's New Democratic Party Leader Marit Stiles voiced climate change concerns, calling this summer "probably the most severe fire season our province has ever experienced."
In response, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, said he was "shocked the opposition party would politicize wildfires." Stiles asked if Ford would "show some leadership today and act on the climate emergency?" But Ford responded by discounting any climate change connection, noting that half the fires were caused by lightning strikes, while the other 50% were started by campfires.
As the pall of fine particulate smoke hung over northern North America, perhaps we should have asked how the conditions came to be for such fires to be possible, rather than wonder who struck the match.
John Frederick (www.johnjfrederick.com) writes about nature and the environment for the Mirror.