We study the wildfire maps. Any road trip these days demands at least that much preparation. Wildfires are everywhere.

Look at today’s maps. Oddly, so far, Northern BC and the Yukon are still not too bad.

Wait a second.

The fact that I am saying the wildfires aren’t too bad right now is proof that the brainwashing propaganda machine that has tried to normalize wildfires the last few years has successfully lodged itself somewhere in my brain. I have to shake it off. The truth is, this is terrible!

About the best comment I’ve heard about the wildfires was something like, “I never had to stay indoors as a kid because of wildfire smoke.” Neither did I.

A few years ago, we drove to our friend’s place north of Kenora, Ontario from BC. Just east of Calgary, the smoke started. It was so thick in places it was like fog. You’ve heard it all before. The car was covered in ash. The smoke lasted for over 700 km. Luckily, I had a small portable air filter in the car. And luckily, if there’s one thing I always have, it’s masks.

We’ve all heard how Toronto had the worst air quality in the world this week. AND, it was outrageously hot. A bad combo. Doomy people say this is the future, but guess what? It’s the present. The future is here. Meanwhile, drill baby drill and let’s build another pipeline! We all have ringside seats to the end of the world.

I wonder: Since the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of folks have spent a lot of time gaslighting us all into believing we don’t need to do anything about air quality. More normalization of terrible things. Imagine if we had spent the past six + years actually improving indoor air quality, upgrading HVAC, adding HEPA filters. It would have paid off not only in protecting us from disease, but also in helping us deal with wildfire smoke. Now there’s a project of National Interest for Mr. Carney that I could get behind.

Instead, we have this pervasive idea now that air quality is not something we can do anything about, or that we can afford to do anything about. To do something about it would be to admit there is a problem, and we can’t do that. We’ve invested too much in our denial, at least most of us have. We’ve created the perfect conditions for maximum denial—don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t test. We can’t even mention COVID. No one has it anymore. They all have something else. (Reader, lots of people have COVID. Check the wastewater data.)

Anyway, we can do something about air quality.

Filter your air! Build yourself a Corsi-Rosenthal box. It’s easy and cheap to clean your air at home. Build a second one for your kids’ daycare or classroom. Ask the owners of the public buildings you frequent about their HVAC systems. Just ask the question. Get them to think about air quality. On a larger scale, make the link between climate change, pipelines and wildfires. Do it in casual conversation, at the office, in the grocery store, at the dinner table. Do it for people who think we can continue to extract without killing the entire planet. Canada is more than a site for resource extraction.

Talk about air quality. Talk about it now while it is an undeniable problem and there may be some motivation to change someone’s ideas.