In Alberta we put up with the grim grey of November, the deep frigid cold of January, the mucky mess of March, because we know that summer is coming. Our summers are a preview of paradise: dry, warm, blue skies that stay light late. We fill our summer days and nights with carnivals and festivals and rodeos, with public parties and backyard barbecues. Whether we’re hiking in the hoodoos, sitting at a sidewalk café, applauding buskers or canoeing down a river, we spend our Alberta summers outside, under open skies, breathing in the beauty all around us.
These last few summers, though, we haven’t been breathing easy. We’ve had summer after summer filled with smoke, even in cities far from the wildfires themselves. A haze that burns our eyes and throats and turns our sun a post-apocalyptic red. Days when people had to repurpose COVID masks, just to walk their dog or run errands. Days when outdoor events were cancelled because the air-quality warnings were too dire.
I had generally thought of those smoky days and nights as an irritation. Our summers are so precious and so fleeting. I begrudged a minute of them lost to smoke. And then I felt guilty. So many Albertans have had their homes destroyed or their lives upended by wildfire in recent years. Slave Lake and Waterton, Fort McMurray and Drayton Valley, Jasper and Little Red River: tens of thousands forced to evacuate, made refugees in their own country. Who was I to whine about a little smoke when others were dealing with disaster?
Many of us assume wildfire smoke is natural and somehow benign. We need to become more “smoke smart.”
Turns out, all that smoke may be far more than an annoyance.
Sarah Henderson is the scientific director for Environmental Health Services with the BC Centre for Disease Control, as well as the scientific director of the National Collaborating Centre for Environmental Health. A professor of epidemiology at UBC, she testified last November before the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry about her research into the health effects of wildfire smoke.
Her testimony took our breath away.
Henderson analyzed the effects of smoke exposure due to the massive 2017 BC wildfires, which blanketed much of western Canada in smoke. No one died directly from those fires, but Henderson estimates that as many as 2,700 excess deaths in Canada during and after the 2017 fire season could be attributable to that smoke exposure, particularly deaths of people with conditions such as asthma or COPD. But that was just the opening of her testimony.
“So far, when we look at wildfire smoke, we know it’s associated with severe birth outcomes, like preterm birth, low birth weight and stillbirth, and there’s mounting evidence for pregnancy loss in very early pregnancy,” she told us. “We know that the children who were exposed to smoke in the womb have more respiratory infections in early life and are more prone to developing asthma and other chronic diseases.”
Nor it is just babies who are vulnerable. “One of the important things to know is some of those very small particles are small enough to translocate across the lung into the bloodstream, and then cross the blood brain barrier,” Henderson testified. “Smoke can have a direct impact on the brain. We know that children do not perform as well in school on smoky days. We know there is an attention deficit on smoky days. We know these early life exposures do seem to be associated with the development of conditions such as ADHD and autism spectrum disorder.”
Is living with our sporadic episodes of intense air pollution as dangerous to health as living in a chronically polluted city such as New Delhi or Beijing? “Wildfire smoke might have less impact, because there are these periods of reprieve between exposures,” Henderson told the committee. “On the other hand, the exposures are far more extreme in many cases, and they are far more complex.”
I think many people—myself among them—have generally assumed wildfire smoke is natural and hence somehow benign. We’ve become habituated to it, resigned to it as part of our summer weather. We might believe that closing our doors and windows will keep us safe, or safe enough. But Sarah Henderson says Canadians must become more “smoke smart.”
That might mean creating special smoke alerts for expectant mothers, teaching people how to use masks properly to protect themselves, creating cool, clean-air shelters in our cities, even changing the National Building Code of Canada to ensure new homes are more smoke-resistant.
As another Alberta summer begins, and we hold our breath, waiting to see what this wildfire season will bring, I keep remembering Henderson’s final warning to our committee: “You can’t stop breathing. So you need to be thinking at all times about ways to reduce your exposure wherever you are breathing.”
A sober thought as we all strive to keep our families safe from consequences of climate change we never quite imagined.
Paula Simons is an independent senator and the host of the podcast Alberta Unbound. She lives in Edmonton.
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Read more from the archive “Alberta Is Burning” April 2024.
