Climate Change

“Enough Smoke to Blot Out the Stars”: Watching the World Burn in British Columbia

For weeks, the Canadian forests burned—and climate activist Naomi Klein was caught in the thick of a disaster irrevocably linked to climate change.

By Naomi Klein

September 17, 2019

A firefighter positions a hose at a home burning in Glen Ellen California in 2017.

The news from the natural world these days is mostly about water, and understandably so. We heard about the record-setting amounts of water that Hurricane Harvey dumped on Houston and other Gulf cities and towns, mixing with petrochemicals to pollute and poison on an unfathomable scale. We heard too about the epic floods that displaced hundreds of thousands of people from Bangladesh to Nigeria (though we didn’t hear enough). And we witnessed, yet again, the fearsome force of water and wind as Hurricane Irma, one of the most powerful storms ever recorded, left devastation behind in the Caribbean and Florida.

Yet, for large parts of North America, Europe, and Africa, the summer of 2017 was not about water at all. In fact, it was about its absence; about land so dry and heat so oppressive that forested mountains exploded into smoke like volcanoes. It was about fires fierce enough to jump the Columbia River; fast enough to light up the outskirts of Los Angeles like an invading army; and pervasive enough to threaten natural treasures like the tallest and most ancient sequoia trees and Glacier National Park.

For millions of people from California to Greenland, Oregon to Portugal, British Columbia to Montana, Siberia to South Africa, the summer of 2017 was the summer of fire. And more than anything else, it was the summer of ubiquitous, inescapable smoke.

For years, climate scientists have warned us that a warming world is an extreme world, one in which humanity is buffeted by both brutalizing excesses and stifling absences of the core elements that have kept fragile life in equilibrium for millennia. The end of the summer of 2017, with major cities submerged in water and others licked by flames, was Exhibit A.

I had checked the forecast before coming to British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast, a ragged strip of coastline marked by dark evergreen forests that butt up against rocky cliffs and beaches strewn with driftwood, the charming flotsam from decades of sloppy logging operations. Reachable only by ferry or floatplane, this is the part of the world where my parents live, where my son was born, and where my grandparents are buried. Though it still feels like home, we now get here for only a few weeks a year.

The government of Canada weather site had predicted that the next week would be glorious: an uninterrupted block of sun, clear skies, and higher-than-average temperatures. I pictured hot afternoons paddling in the Pacific and still, starry nights.

But when we arrived in early August, a murky blanket of white had engulfed the coast, and the temperature was cool enough for a sweater. Forecasts are often wrong, but this was more complicated. Somewhere up there, above the muck, the sky was clear of clouds. The sun was particularly hot. Yet intervening in those truths was a factor the forecasters did not account for: huge quantities of smoke, blown up to four hundred miles from the province’s interior, where about 130 wildfires were burning out of control.

Enough smoke had descended to turn the sky from periwinkle blue to this low, unbroken white. Enough smoke to reflect a good portion of the sun’s heat back into space, artificially pushing temperatures down. Enough smoke to transform the sun itself into an angry pinpoint of red fire surrounded by a strange halo, unable to burn through the relentless haze. Enough smoke to blot out the stars. Enough smoke to absorb any possible sunsets. At the end of the day, the red ball abruptly disappeared, only to be replaced by a strange burnt-orange moon.

The smoke had created its own weather system, one powerful enough to transform the climate not just where we were, but in a stretch of territory that appears to cover roughly a hundred thousand square miles. And the smoke, a giant smudge on the satellite images, respected no borders: Not only was about a third of British Columbia choked, but so were large parts of the Pacific Northwest, including Seattle, Bellingham, and Portland, Oregon. In the age of #FakeNews, this was #FakeWeather, a mess in the sky created, in large part, by toxic ignorance and political malpractice.

Up and down the coast, the government had issued air-quality warnings, urging people to avoid strenuous activity. Beyond a certain threshold, fine particulate matter in the air is officially unsafe, bad enough to cause health problems. The air in parts of Vancouver was three times above that safe threshold, with some smaller communities on the coast significantly worse off. Elderly people and other sensitive populations were being urged to stay inside—or, better yet, to go somewhere with a decent air-filtration system. One local official recommended a trip to the mall.

At the epicenter of the disaster, where the flames were closing in, the air quality was far worse. Anything over 25 micrograms of fine particulates per cubic meter is considered unsafe. Kamloops, the city that was housing many of the evacuees, averaged 684.5 micrograms per cubic meter. That rivaled Beijing on some of its very worst days. Airlines canceled flights, and people suffering from breathing problems packed emergency rooms.

Since the disaster began, some 840 separate fires had ignited, forcing, at that point, some 50,000 people to evacuate their homes, according to the Red Cross. In early July, the government had declared a rare state of emergency, and by the time we arrived, it had already been extended twice. Hundreds of structures had been razed, and some whole communities, including Indigenous reserves, had been reduced mostly to ash.

So far, roughly 1,800 square miles of forest, farm, and grassland had burned. That made this the second-largest fire disaster in British Columbia’s history—and it was still going strong, putting the all-time record within grasp.

I called a friend in Kamloops. “Everyone who can is taking their kids far away, especially little ones.” Which put things into perspective for us on the coast. It may have been smoky, but we were damn lucky.

From Simon & Schuster.

Since the New Year, and the new U.S. administration, I hadn’t taken a day off, let alone a weekend. Like so many others, I’d attended way too many meetings and marched until my feet blistered. I’d written a book in a blur, then toured with it. And my husband, Avi, and I had helped start the Leap, a new political organization. Throughout the winter and spring, “B.C. in August” had been our family mantra. It was the finish line (albeit a temporary one), and we had fully planned to collapse on it. It has also been the way we kept our five-year-old son, Toma, in the game. On cold nights in the east, we had mapped out the forested walks we would take, the canoe trips, the swims. We’d imagined the blackberries we would pick, the crumbles we would bake; we had listed the grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and old friends we would visit.

This break (“self-care” in the parlance of my younger coworkers) had taken on mythic qualities in our home. Which may be why I was a bit slow to clue in to the seriousness of the fires—and the smoke. For the first week, I greeted each day hopefully, convinced that the drab light peeking through the curtains was just morning mist. Every day, I was wrong.

The placid weather forecast that had seemed so promising before we traveled turns out to be a curse. Sunny, windless days meant that the smoke, once it was upon us, parked over our heads like an immovable outdoor ceiling. Day after day after day.

My allergies were going nuts. I bathed my eyes in drops and popped antihistamines well beyond the recommended dosage. Toma broke out in hives so severe he needed steroids. I kept taking my glasses off and cleaning them, rubbing them first with my shirt, then a microfiber cloth, then proper glass cleaner. Nothing helped. Nothing made the smudge disappear.

Warmer and drier weather was not the only factor at play. Another was the perennially hubristic attempt to reengineer natural forces far more powerful than we are. Fire is a crucial part of the forest cycle: Left to their own devices, forests burn periodically, clearing the way for new growth and reducing the amount of highly flammable underbrush and old wood (“fuel” in firefighter parlance). Many Indigenous cultures have long used fire as a key part of land care. But in North America, modern forest management has systematically suppressed cyclical fires in order to protect profitable trees that were headed for sawmills, and out of fear that small fires could spread to inhabited areas (and there are more and more inhabited areas).

Without regular natural burns, forests are chock-full of fuel, provoking fires to burn out of control. And there’s a hell of a lot more fuel as a result of bark beetle infestations, which have left behind huge stands of dry and brittle dead trees. There is compelling evidence that the bark beetle epidemic has been exacerbated by climate change–related heat and drought.

Overlying it all is the uncomplicated fact that hotter, drier weather (which is directly linked to climate change) create optimal conditions for wildfires. Indeed, these forces have conspired to turn forests into perfectly laid campfires, with the dry earth acting like balled-up newspaper, the dead trees serving as kindling, and the added heat providing the match. Mike Flannigan, a University of Alberta wildfire expert, was blunt. “The increase in area burned in Canada is a direct result of human-caused climate change. Individual events get a little more tricky to connect, but the area burned has doubled in Canada since the 1970s as a result of warming temperatures.” And according to a 2010 study, fire occurrence in Canada is projected to increase by 75% by the end of the century.

Here’s the really alarming thing: 2017 was not even an El Niño year, the cyclical natural warming phenomenon that was commonly cited as a key factor in the huge fires that raged in Southern California and Northern Alberta last year. With no El Niño to blame, some media outlets were willing to drop the hedging. To quote Germany’s Deutsche Welle: “Climate change sets the world on fire.”

Almost two full weeks into the smoke-out, something shifted. I heard it first, and then I saw branches moving: wind. A sudden temperature drop. And by noon, actual patches of blue, separated by clouds. I had forgotten how distinct they are from haze—higher, for starters, and with all kinds of delicate shapes and movement.

The smoke hadn’t cleared entirely, but enough of it had blown away to suddenly make the world look sharp. Crisp. You know that elation when a long fever finally breaks? I felt like that.

The next day brought rain; not a lot, but enough to hope for some relief for the 2,400 exhausted and overworked firefighters. My allergies cleared up.

But the news from the interior was disastrous. The same wind that finally pried loose the blanket of smoke on the coast had been fanning the flames at the epicenter of the fires. The stillness that trapped the smoke here for so long turned out to have been the only bright spot for the fire brigades. Once that was over, there was not nearly enough rain.

Over the next week, British Columbia blazed through the record books. By mid-August, the fires had broken the provincial record for the most land burned in one year: 3,453 square miles. Within days, several different fires combined forces to create the largest single fire in British Columbia’s history.

Over Labor Day weekend 2017, more than 160 fires were still burning in British Columbia. Extremely hot, dry, and windy weather had conspired to create the conditions for a slew of large, new wildfires to ignite and for old ones to expand exponentially. Authorities announced new evacuations daily; at last count, some 60,000 displaced people had registered as evacuees with the Red Cross over the course of the summer. The state of emergency had been extended for the fourth time.

But even in Canada, it was impossible for this news to compete with the devastating fallout from Hurricane Harvey; the scores dead and millions impacted by record flooding in South Asia and Nigeria; and, later that August, the fury of Hurricane Irma. Then there were the headline-grabbing blazes in Los Angeles, the state of emergency in Washington State, and new evacuations ordered, from Glacier National Park to Northern Manitoba. A satellite image from early September showed the entire length of the continent blanketed in smoke, #FakeWeather from the Pacific to the storm-churning Atlantic.

I could barely keep track of the nonstop convulsions, and it’s my job to do so. I do know this: Our collective house is on fire, with every alarm going off simultaneously, clanging desperately for our attention. Will we keep stumbling and wheezing through the low light, acting as if the emergency is not already upon us? Or will the warnings be enough to force many more of us to listen? Those were the questions still hanging in the air at the end of the summer of smoke.