“When it comes to our health, wildfire smoke may be the most injurious form of air pollution,” DhruvKhullar writes. It’s also likely to become more common.
years, New Yorkers donned them outdoors and slid them off when they stepped inside. As smoke from hundreds of Canadian wildfires drifted across the northern U.S. border, engulfing much of the eastern seaboard in an orange miasma, it sent New York’s air quality to the worst levels on record, and, at one point, the worst in the world. Planes were grounded, outdoor activities were cancelled, and patients with asthma and other respiratory conditions filled emergency rooms.
When it comes to our health, wildfire smoke may be the most injurious form of air pollution; according to one study, it can be ten times as toxic as other forms of pollution, including car exhaust. Wildfires release enormous amounts of fine particulate matter known as PM2.5—toxins up to 2.5 microns in size, or roughly one-twentieth the diameter of a human hair.
This may not be surprising, considering that air pollution is, by and large, a slow and invisible killer, and many corporations profit from the continued burning of fossil fuels. Yet it’s possible to imagine that the salience of smog—obscuring our vision and offending our nasal passages—could catalyze a response, in much the way that the acid rain of the nineteen-eighties motivated major improvements to the Clean Air Act.
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