I have spent much of my career studying boreal forests and I know fire is part of how they renew themselves. That knowledge did nothing for the lump in my throat last week as wildfires closed in on my community in northwestern Ontario.
Over 150 fires were burning in the region almost at once, displacing at least 1,800 people from more than a dozen communities, most of them Indigenous. Namaygoosisagagun First Nation burned to the ground, its residents narrowly escaping by boat.
Thunder Bay, the regional hub for evacuees, ran out of hotel rooms. The Red Cross arrived to set up cots in hockey arenas. Living rurally just northwest of Thunder Bay, I joined my neighbors to watch the sky turn black and wondered how quickly we could move our livestock. If even breathing was extremely hazardous, with toxic air readings beyond the scales used to report them, where would we be safe?
As the smoke drifted south, the loudest response from the Trump administration was a threat to sanction Canadian officials until these forests are “cleaned up”. But there is no “raking” our way out of this problem. We are living in a new era of fire where smoke is reshaping air‑quality across Canada and the United States.
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Yet this future is not hopeless. We can lower the threats to communities and to our lungs. In looking for answers and solutions, our best path lies in addressing three things we keep refusing to face.
The first is to acknowledge that climate change has almost certainly made extreme fire weather — the hot, dry, windy conditions that allow fires to ignite and spread — more common and more intense in many parts of the world.
Northern Ontario hit a record 40 degrees Celsius, that’s 104 degrees Fahrenheit, this summer after weeks with almost no rain. This is a part of the world where few, until recently, owned air conditioners. Add a series of “dry” thunderstorms — minimal rain but abundant lightning — and high winds, and our region ignited almost at once. Under these conditions, Trump is pointing his finger in the wrong direction.
The United States emits roughly 6 billion tons of greenhouse gases a year. A study published in Nature this spring put the global economic damage from US emissions since 1990 at $10tn, with a quarter of those losses inside the United States itself.
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The Trump administration is also actively working to make the climate crisis worse, taking at least 97 actions that weaken or eliminate curbs on carbon pollution or undercut the USA’s ability to cope with the consequences. This ranges from gutting tailpipe pollution standards to rolling back the phase down of climate super pollutants used in refrigeration. For an administration glib about the genuine risks from a changing climate, the smoke crossing our shared border is not an export. It is a receipt.
Canada has also been recently downplaying the impacts of expanding oil and gas exports, putting short term gains over long term costs. Our per‑capita greenhouse‑gas emissions are roughly three times the world average, yet, federal and provincial governments have made several recent commitments to new pipelines that, if built, will further increase our emissions.
The second is to acknowledge what is and isn’t within our control when it comes to managing forests. Everyone who lives or works in the boreal knows that humility is required. It stretches across roughly 750 million acres — more than 400 million soccer fields — and its sheer scale lays clear that we will never engineer our way out of fire.
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But that doesn’t mean forest management is irrelevant. In forests near communities, management can focus on planting swaths of deciduous trees – natural speed bumps for fire – and clearing brush and thinning dense stands around homes and evacuation routes.
Intensive management in these near-community forests could help to slow fires down and give people more time in wildfire emergencies. In forests far from communities, there can be opportunities to rebuild the forest’s natural resilience by enhancing tree diversity with more fire resistant species, protecting areas least likely to sustain high‑intensity fire, and supporting Indigenous nations whose cultural burning practices have shaped these landscapes for millennia.
These actions won’t stop all fires, nor would we want them to as fire is a necessary part of forest renewal, but they can help to shape where forests burn and how much smoke reaches the places where people live.
The third is that, while the fires grow across Canada and the US, governments on both sides of the border need to do more preparing and less reacting. In Canada, Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government has been criticized over its insufficient wildfire budgets, forcing emergency overspending, limiting preparedness, and contributing to slow or insufficient support for vulnerable communities — especially First Nations.
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In 2026, his government allocated $150m to wildland firefighting, far short of the $271m it actually spent responding to last year’s fires.
While Ford claims that his government “won’t spare a penny” fighting fires now, firefighters have described logistical failures — too few helicopters, delayed resource acquisition, and inability to act preemptively — all tied to inadequate upfront funding.
On the US side, the Trump Administration is dismantling the very public agencies Americans need to study and mitigate wildfires and instead investing in industrial activities that worsen the problem.
The US Forest Service lost nearly 6,000 employees in 2025, about 16% of its workforce, according to the USDA’s inspector general. Its latest budget request would cut the agency’s discretionary funding by roughly 75% and eliminate major firefighting programs.
The agency plans to close 57 of its 77 research facilities, the source of much research on how homes ignite and forests respond to a hotter world. Fewer firefighters, fewer scientists, more smoke. That is a choice, and it is the wrong one at the worst moment.
When the rain finally came to our region, small as it was, people danced with relief. For the moment, some respite is here and the rebuilding will soon begin. But every year more communities, everywhere, are impacted. We must do more. Prepare our communities, cut the emissions, fund the people who fight and study these fires. The smoke is telling us where the real work is. It is at our doorsteps, and in our climate policy, not deep in the woods.
