Over 100 wildfires are burning uncontrolled in Canada, and the smoke that blanketed the Midwest and Northeast yesterday is settling into Adams County now — the way it settled in last summer, and the summer before that. You close the shop doors. You keep the kids inside. The air smells like somebody’s burning a forest a thousand miles away, which is exactly what somebody is doing.
Wendell Berry wrote that we are members of a community of life, not conquerors of it. This is what happens when we forget the first part. The smoke is the membership reminding us.
The Canadian government reported the fires Wednesday. Winds drove the plume south across the Midwest and into the Northeast. The National Weather Service said expect it to get worse before it gets better — forecasters couldn’t say when it would lift, and the weekend outlook remained uncertain. EPA flagged fine particulate matter — small enough to get into your lungs — as the primary health threat and told people, especially children and the elderly, to limit their time outdoors. Authorities evacuated parts of northern Minnesota. New York City handed out masks.
Here in Adams County, the air hit the orange zone on the EPA map. The Dells saw it first. Then it moved down Highway 13.
The notebook I keep tracks this kind of thing. Not smoke — what’s behind the smoke. The ice-out on Lake Petenwell has shifted noticeably in my lifetime — better than a week, closer to two by my count. The deer rut runs two weeks off where it used to. The mosquitoes show up in March now, in a county where they used to show up in May. Wisconsin has warmed a couple degrees over the past century, and the pace is picking up. Precipitation has climbed significantly — recent years among the wettest on record. Warming winters, wetter springs, drier summers. The weather service calls it climate projections. The woods call it Tuesday.
The Canadian fires are what happens when boreal forests that Leopold would have recognized run out of wet seasons. More than 100 blazes burning at once. The fire season that used to run June through August now starts in April and doesn’t let up until October. The smoke drifting into our county is what that looks like from 600 miles south.
And in January, the Trump administration paused disbursements on the first serious federal climate and clean-energy investment the country had made in decades. Executive Order 14154, signed his first day in office, ordered agencies to immediately stop disbursing funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act. Then the One Big Beautiful Bill passed Congress and sealed it — rescinding what was left of the unspent clean energy money and opening the loan program to coal infrastructure.
We were building something. The IRA’s manufacturing credits had pulled more than $126 billion in clean-energy investment into the country, most of it in districts that voted against the bill that paid for it. In 2024, eighteen House Republicans wrote Speaker Johnson begging him not to repeal the credits that were putting factories in their own counties. The bill passed anyway.
The distance between Washington and Adams County is measured in smoke. The people making these decisions breathe the same air — or they would, if they spent time anywhere that isn’t air-conditioned and filtered. Adams County doesn’t have that luxury. When the smoke comes, it comes for everybody. It doesn’t check your voter registration at the county line.
Berry’s question was never whether we belong to the land. We do. The question is whether we act like it, or whether we keep pretending the invoice won’t come.
The smoke rolling in from Saskatchewan is the invoice. The people who started the fires that started the fires that started the smoke don’t know Adams County exists. The people who cut the funding that might have bought us a few more seasons before this got worse don’t spend much time here either. But the particulates find us just the same.
Twelve years of watching the woods change, and this is what they’re telling me now: the county is smaller than the sky above it, and the sky doesn’t answer to any county board. The question for my kids isn’t whether Adams County can survive one more smoke season. It’s whether anybody in a position to do something about it gives a damn before the next one.