I\u2019d momentarily forgotten. For four days in a row this month, we, like millions of Americans across the Midwest and Northeast, had been living under a haze of poor air quality. For four days, the sky was an undifferentiated gray and the sun stayed blurry behind a film of smog. And for four days, every breath we took outside felt ever so slightly chalky, coating the inside of our mouths with a touch of residue.<\/p>\n
Get The Gavel<\/p>\n
A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr.<\/p>\n
That is the residue of forests located thousands of miles away, burned up in the massive wildfires raging across Canada this summer. The sheer scale of these conflagrations is hard to wrap your head around: Over 16.3 million acres<\/a> have burned in 2025. Hundreds of millions of trees and countless animals have gone up in the smoke that has covered our skies, filled our air, and penetrated our lungs, causing imminent health threats for many and possibly contributing to long-term damage to the health of millions more. <\/p>\n On Aug. 4, for example, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection issued an alert<\/a> that the state\u2019s \u201cair is unhealthy for sensitive children and adults, such as those with asthma, lung or heart disease, and older adults. Sensitive children and adults should limit prolonged outdoor activity.\u201d According to Glenn Keith, MassDEP\u2019s director of air and climate programs, Massachusetts used to experience, at most, one bad air quality day due to wildfire smoke a year, and often none. Since 2021, that number has risen<\/a> to at least four days, on average, which the state has already reached this year. As UMass Lowell environmental health professor Joel Tickner described<\/a> the air quality during the first week of August, \u201cThe level of danger is real, and you want to prevent exposure if you can.\u201d<\/p>\n These fires are not natural disasters. They\u2019re a predictable consequence of climate change, caused by the burning of fossil fuels. As Mike Flannigan, the research chair for fire science at Thompson Rivers University, said<\/a> in The Guardian, \u201cThis is our new reality \u2026 The warmer it gets, the more fires we see.\u201d And the unrelenting physics of this crisis means these are climate disasters in more ways than one. Canada\u2019s 2023 wildfires released 3 billion tons<\/a> of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, or nearly four times<\/a> the carbon emissions of the global aviation sector. And 2025 is<\/a> on track to match this record.<\/p>\n None of this is breaking news. But that is what has been scaring me the most this summer. Two years ago, when the smoke from the Canadian wildfires was this intense, it was a huge story. And I don\u2019t just mean in the media, where the image of New York City\u2019s hazy orange skyline<\/a> became ubiquitous. Where I live, in Providence, the madness of the wildfires came up in every conversation. And no wonder. Our world was filled with carcinogenic smoke from wildfires so mind-meltingly massive they were affecting us from thousands of miles away. It was eerie, it was unsettling, and it was not something any of us could accept as normal.<\/p>\n But it turns out we can, in fact, accept these smoke-filled skies as normal. This time around, people have barely mentioned the air quality around us. Yes, it\u2019s been unpleasant \u2014 in fact, the experience for my family has been harder this summer. We have a 3-month-old now, and it\u2019s been an extra challenge to be cooped up with him inside all day, unable to take him on a stroller walk to help him fall asleep. But it\u2019s unpleasant in a way that already is becoming just \u201cthe way things are.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s a viral post that gets reshared<\/a> during every extreme weather event: \u201cClimate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you\u2019re the one filming it.\u201d As I stood in the doorway of my home earlier this month, debating with my wife whether or not we would let our child join his 6-year-old neighbors waiting patiently on our porch, ready to jump and laugh and race each other down our block, it occurred to me that climate change is manifesting in another insidious way: enshittification<\/a>, a term coined by author Cory Doctorow<\/a> to describe how online platforms decline in quality over time as tech corporations degrade their services, little by little, to maximize their profits.<\/p>\n Just as our experiences online are being steadily enshittified by Big Tech companies, our time on this earth is being steadily enshittified by Big Oil companies and their climate-denying allies in the federal government. <\/p>\n They are driving both the increasingly common extreme weather disasters happening across the country and the smaller but still saddening degradations to our lives: summers filled with weeks too hot to enjoy; winters with fewer snow days; walks in the woods marred by more ticks; and, yes, increasingly frequent negotiations between parents and kids about the safety of going outside to play. <\/p>\n Humans are incredibly adaptable. But our ability to just keep trucking while the world around us gets shittier and shittier, while the water comes closer and closer to a boil, as the frog knows, has its downsides.<\/p>\n Ultimately, we let our son join his friends. But we allowed for just 20 minutes of play before I went to retrieve him. As we were walking, hand in hand, back up the road to our house, he looked up at the hazy sky and said, \u201cThe sun is less shiny today. But it\u2019s still pretty.\u201d I looked up, too. \u201cYeah, I guess it is,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019d momentarily forgotten. For four days in a row this month, we, like millions of Americans across the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":91875,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[192,79],"class_list":{"0":"post-91874","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91874\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}