Spirits West

Canada’s boreal forest — the source of much of the wildfire smoke drifting into the U.S. — isn’t like our managed forests in the lower 48. It’s the largest intact forest ecosystem on Earth: roughly 1.3 billion acres (about 78 times larger than Alaska’s Tongass, our biggest national forest, and 7 times larger than all 154 U.S. National Forests combined). It stretches in an almost continuous belt from the Yukon to Newfoundland. Why can’t they just do controlled burns like we do here? Because most of it is remote, roadless wilderness. • Less than 9% of Canada’s population lives in the boreal region. • Less than 1% of the forest itself is developed. • Vast areas have no roads and are only accessible by aircraft or winter roads. You can’t send crews in to do prescribed burns across a billion+ acres of inaccessible terrain the way we can in populated areas near roads and communities in the U.S. Wildfire has been nature’s primary management tool in these ecosystems for thousands of years. Smoke reaching the Northeast isn’t new either. It happened in 1950, 1988, 1995, 2002, 2017, 2021, 2023, 2025, and now 2026. Weather (especially upper-level wind patterns) determines where the smoke goes, not just where the fires are burning. Blaming Canada’s government for “not controlling” these fires is political theater. The scale and inaccessibility make large-scale suppression or prevention across that wilderness fundamentally different — and in many places, practically impossible — from managing forests near U.S. population centers. Nature runs that forest. Politicians don’t. Let’s stop pretending otherwise.