The Bootleg Fire in Oregon isn't just an Oregon problem. Canadian wildfire smoke doesn't just stay in Canada. And Siberian blazes are visible on other continents.
In New York City, residents woke up Tuesday morning to find the sky hazy and the skyline obscured because of smoke generated from blazes as far as 3,000 miles away. When they can be seen, the sun and moon appear to be blood red in locations far removed from the fire. These effects might seem cool or pretty, but all that fire pollution has prompted health alerts in distant cities like Toronto and Philadelphia. A map published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association shows haze from the fire reaching to all but a few states, located in the far southeast United States.
"By the time that smoke gets to the eastern portion of the country where it's usually thinned out, there's just so much smoke in the atmosphere from all these fires that it's still pretty thick," a meteorologist with the National Weather Service told The Guardian.
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My colleague Samuel Goldman argues today that the notion of "the common good" is all but dead, killed off by different notions of what that good is and how to achieve it. That doesn't negate the existence of common threats, however. The climate doesn't care about our political and philosophical differences, just like the coronavirus didn't. Sooner or later, the smoke will find us all.
