There’s a certain kind of political mind that looks at a genuine crisis and asks not: “What caused this?” but rather “Who can I blame for it?” We’ve seen that mind at work once again this summer, as smoke from Canadian wildfires, mixed with smoke from major fires here in our own region, has poured across much of eastern North America, making the air unsafe for tens of millions of residents all the way to the East Coast
Rather than treat this as the shared North American problem it plainly is, some in Washington have decided the smart play is to threaten Canada — threatening retaliatory tariffs and generally talking about our northern neighbor as though Ottawa lit these fires on purpose out of spite. It would be almost comical if it weren’t so dangerous, and it is evidence of just how ignorant most of our leaders are when it comes to forest management and fighting wildfires.
First things first: Canada is not setting its own forests on fire to annoy the fools in our nation’s capital. The boreal forest that stretches from the Yukon to Labrador is burning because the climate has grown hotter and drier today than at any point in recorded history. That’s not a talking point. It’s what the data show, year after year now, and it’s what anyone who has spent time in the woods up here already knows. We didn’t used to have massive wildfires in July here in the North Country, and they didn’t have them north of the border, either. But that’s all changed as the climate regime now covering much of the northern half of North America is no longer consistent with the maintenance of the boreal forest. Massive wildfire is the inevitable result. As we have written before in these pages, frequent incursions of dense wildfire smoke are going to be part of our summers going forward, because we have failed thus far to heed the warnings of climate scientists. Climate change isn’t something that will affect us sometime in the distant future. It’s happening right now and it’s going to get worse.
You don’t fix our failure by punishing the country next door. You especially don’t fix it by imposing tariffs on Canadian goods, as President Trump has now announced.
Leaving aside the sheer pettiness of the idea, such an action will do nothing to change a single wind pattern or extinguish a single acre. What it will do is further raise prices on lumber, fertilizer, oil, and a hundred other things that flow across our shared border every day, hurting American consumers and businesses while doing precisely zero to clear the smoke out of our air.
If anything, an approach this backwards could strain the very cross-border cooperation — on firefighting resources, on air quality monitoring, on the mutual aid agreements— that has enabled our two countries to share equipment and personnel for generations. We’re going to need more of that, not less, as these fire seasons continue to intensify.
And here’s a detail that seems to escape the folks doing the loudest complaining: many of the largest fires burning in Canada this summer are nowhere near a road, a town, or anything resembling infrastructure. They’re deep in the boreal interior, often dozens or even hundreds of miles from the nearest fire crew’s staging area. The logistics of fighting fire in such locations are impossible.
It’s the same reason that American fire officials are mostly observing some of the biggest fires in the Boundary Waters right now. Just like in Canada, they’re wisely devoting their resources to structure protection, rather than pretending they can bring massive wildfires under control without significant help from Mother Nature. As our own fire officials have said repeatedly, it might take snowfall to eventually bring our own fires under control. It’s no different in Canada.
Canada, of course, is dealing with far worse, in areas even more remote than the Boundary Waters. And our politicians are ignorant enough to suggest that it just takes a little more willpower, or better forest management, to address the situation. These are people without a clue.
This is a climate problem, not a question of forest management. Canada has never “managed” forests it can’t reach, and yet we didn’t see these annual stifling incursions of smoke 20 years ago. It’s only in the past decade or so that the climate reached the tipping point that has exposed the boreal forests around the world to months-long fire seasons.
What’s more, the suggestion that what Canada or the Boundary Waters needs is just more logging (a popular opinion on social media), is grossly uninformed. Here is a fact that cannot be disputed: While responsible logging brings many benefits, reducing wildfire risk is not one of them. In most cases, logging increases the risk.
Anyone who has ever walked through a forest in the aftermath of a fire should recognize that reality. What you will find, even in the wake of the most intense forest fire, are the blackened trunks of the once-living trees, which are highly resistant to burning. It is the fine fuels that burn in a boreal forest fire, the smaller branches and needles of the conifers, the forest duff, the dead and downed material that has accumulated over time. Hiring loggers to conduct fuel treatments can make a difference, but that’s not the same as logging and it is applied in very limited situations, such as around campgrounds or cabins. Traditional logging removes the living trees, which are resistant to fire, and leaves behind the flammable finer fuels, exposing them to the drying sun and wind at the same time.
Finally, the rank hypocrisy here cannot be ignored. The same political voices demanding Canada somehow snap its fingers and stop these fires are, in many cases, the very ones who have spent years mocking climate science, gutting environmental regulations, and pulling the United States out of international climate agreements.
You cannot have it both ways. You cannot dismiss the underlying cause of worsening wildfires as a hoax on Tuesday and then demand angrily on Wednesday that someone else fix the consequences of that same phenomenon. If the smoke bothers you enough to threaten a trade war, it should bother you enough to support the kind of serious, sustained investment in emissions reduction that might actually shrink these fire seasons back down over time. Anything else is just theater — an attempt to look tough on an issue while refusing to touch the one lever that would actually help.
Sadly, we know the current reality in Washington, where we now pay companies to cancel energy projects that are part of the solution. Those who purport to be our leaders will continue to look for scapegoats in lieu of backing the collective action we truly need to address this growing catastrophe. That speaks volumes about the individuals currently running this country.