EDITORIAL: With wildfires, environmental lessons continue to accumulate

Jun. 9—THE Canadian wildfires which have left the air virtually unbreathable throughout the Northeastern United States, serve as a reminder that environmental disasters have no respect for national or state boundaries.

As if we needed another one after the East Palestine train derailment, the Keystone pipeline spill in Kansas, Fukushima nuclear meltdown in Japan, the Deepwater Horizon oil platform spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Exxon Valdez, Chernobyl and ... we could go on and on, but you get the point.

The Associated Press reported Thursday of more than 400 wildfires blazing in Canada as of Thursday, with more than one-third of that figure in Quebec, the province that sits directly upwind from the United States New England region.

The fires' effects are being felt along the Atlantic coast.

Major League Baseball postponed games this week in New York, Washington D.C. and Philadelphia, the National Women's Soccer League canceled a scheduled contest in New Jersey. Even as authorities were urging people to escape the smoke by staying indoors, the WNBA called off a game inside the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.

That's reasonable. Even though professional athletes are among the planet's physically healthiest people, they also consume extraordinary amounts of air to keep those finely tuned bodies moving. When that air is fouled, it affects them more acutely than it does the rest of us.

But the impact of these fires have extended well beyond the games we play.

The AP reported the smoky conditions affected people with asthma, postponed a scheduled White House Pride celebration and forced New York public school students into remote learning. A chain of retirement homes in central Pennsylvania barred residents from using outdoor recreation areas.

And we haven't even gotten to the scary part.

The scary part is that Canada's wildfire season is only beginning. And the infamous California-Far West wildfire season isn't far behind.

Canadian officials said the fires emerged from an unusually dry and warm spring, and expect no rain for several days.

Those conditions stem from what has become a common meterological lament — climate change.

Things might not get better soon — and "soon" doesn't mean days, weeks or even months, but years.

Justin Mankin, a Dartmouth College geography professor and climate scientist, told AP this week that wildfires and the air pollution they spew will become increasingly pervasive due to climate change.

"This is something that we, as the eastern side of the country, need to take quite seriously," Mankin said.

The Canadian wildfires, and the difficulty they pose for Americans, serve not just as another example that pollution does not respect man-made boundaries. It also serves as a reminder that addressing climate change must be a priority world wide.

Because we're not destroying the planet. Earth will continue, as Monty Python's Eric Idle sang in "The Galaxy Song," revolving at 900 miles an hour" and "orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned, the sun that is the source of all our power."

We're destroying the characteristics about this planet that allow us to continue living on it.

The lessons are accumulating. We need to heed them.

For links to sources, see this article at sharonherald.com