SPECIAL EDITION: Pollution is Downstream of Policy

With the right approach, unfettered wildfires are preventable.

By Evan Riggs, Director of Operations at the Bull Moose Project

On an ordinary day, the world’s dirtiest air is over places like Delhi or Dhaka, not Detroit and DC. This past weekend, however, smoke had drifted down from the 900-some Canadian wildfires, which are currently burning out of control across the country.

For me, it was strange to see a familiar old haze creep into America’s capital city. I’ve only ever experienced something similar in the camps I used to spend my summers in, working as a firefighter across northern Canada to pay my way through university. Back then, it didn’t seem like our work would be upstream of international politics and very real personal health concerns; it was just a fun way to sidestep student debt.

But in the years since, wildfires across North America have become an ever-greater hazard, one that is currently affecting over 100 million people from the Great Lakes to the East Coast and will require commensurate political will and funding to address. Even the President agrees, in his way: as the smoke settled over Washington, Trump took to Truth Social to accuse Canada of “Willful Negligence,” blaming its refusal “to engage in basic Forest Management” for the filthy air and threatening to add the cost to Canada’s tariffs. The President is right that under-investment in forest management produces exactly this, which makes it strange that his administration is cutting support for the people who do that work, right when we need them most.

In back-to-back budget requests, the administration has proposed zeroing out the Forest Service’s entire research program, its restoration grants, and the State, Private, and Tribal Forestry account, which helps fund essential state and volunteer fire departments, while shifting firefighting itself to a new agency at Interior. Congress rejected these cuts last year; the White House simply asked for them again this year. And despite the passing of the much-needed firefighter pay fix in 2025, over 25% of Forest Service firefighting positions remained vacant as of last summer. Nearly 6,000 employees, or 16% of the total workforce, left the Forest Service last year due to layoffs, deferred resignations, and early retirement offers. Around 700 of those cut were wildfire support staff, some of whom work in “militia” type roles, jumping out of the office and onto the front lines when needed. Even those who never hit the line still help take care of America’s parks and wildlands — and in their absence, firefighters are now cleaning campsites and building trails instead of clearing decades worth of built-up fuel and cutting firebreaks. While administration officials claim that firefighters were not directly targeted and that recruitment is on par with stated goals, former Forest Service chiefs have called the layoffs “incompetence at best and mean-spirited at worst.” Reporting has shown that the recruitment goals are set well below the numbers needed to operate effectively.

There’s not just a recruitment crisis but an escalating retention issue. In my experience, the hardest thing about firefighting is not the long hours in the heat doing hard labor, but the unpredictability. At least in Canada, most firefighters work seasonally, starting around May and leaving by mid-September. During this time, they pray for fire, because all the money is in the overtime hours they work while on deployment, money they typically need to help support them until the next season. It’s hard on the body, and on relationships as well; your partner might be punted out to some remote forest for weeks on end, working in dangerous conditions with very few (if any) opportunities to call. Add to this the knowledge that the smoke and strain are all having real long-term effects on your physical and mental health, and it’s no wonder why so many churn out of firefighting after a few years, just like I did. It’s not that hard to find more stable, year-round jobs that don’t involve sucking in smoke.

The reason people stay in firefighting is that it is incredibly fun and meaningful work. There aren’t many other opportunities that can have you jumping in and out of helicopters as you fly through remote mountain ranges, digging trenches, felling trees, calling in (water) bombing runs, and building out campsites with your buddies all over the course of a couple of hours. There are millions of unemployed or underemployed young people across the US and Canada; you’d think selling them on some relatively well-paid adventure wouldn’t be too hard. In fact, much of the infrastructure built by young men during the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a program FDR created as part of his New Deal to address mass youth unemployment, is still in use. The parks, camps, trails, fire roads, and watchtowers they built could probably all use some rehabilitation. A new 21st-century CCC, driven by an ambitious administration that has already shown immense interest in revitalizing public monuments and restoring civic order, could be of great service here. Given that North America seems on course for some smoky summers for the foreseeable future, it might not be a bad idea to equip our younger generations with a prevention-and-suppression skill set.

Of course, American firefighters can’t do much about Canadian fires unless the two countries can cooperate.

Given that air pollution seems somewhat indifferent towards political borders, it might be in both countries’ best interests to work together on this one. While Washington and Ottawa renewed a long-standing wildfire cooperation agreement in 2023, and continue to work together in forecasting, monitoring, and mutual aid, the political posturing on both sides seems to be getting stranger. For years, American lawmakers have pressured Canadian politicians to do more when faced with the threat of out-of-control fires, and for years the Canadian government has responded that it is doing all it can. While this is not entirely true — there’s a lot more the Canadian government could do to drive up recruitment, training, and retention (personally, I think paying firefighters in a timely way would go far) — the reality is that the Canadian wilds are too vast to properly control, and once fires up there get big enough, it’s common to simply wait them out. I was once posted to a fire in the Yukon that was nearly as big as Nantucket… by myself. All I could do was block traffic on the one road it was burning over and tell annoyed travelers that yes, it would actually be very dangerous to drive through a firestorm.

But this doesn’t mean that America and Canada can’t work together on what can be controlled, and that’s quite a lot. The two countries will need to sort something out, as costs and casualties continue to rise. Nature has published a study estimating that the 2023 Canadian fires contributed to over 80,000 premature deaths worldwide, including some 33,000 in the US alone. Another study projects that annual smoke-related deaths across the US could rise by more than 70% by 2050. And this is just the smoke; fires are now frequently destroying huge swaths of towns and cities from Los Angeles to Lytton, British Columbia. These catastrophes cost lives, displace entire communities, and destroy capital investment. And yet, while we’ll never be able to completely stop them, we could be doing a lot more to prevent them. There is overwhelming evidence that fuel thinning plus prescribed burning can help reduce fire severity by over 60%. Not only that, but a Stanford analysis has found that prescribed fire appears to reduce overall net smoke emissions by 14%. Fire prevention is also much cheaper than direct suppression, with some estimates indicating that every dollar spent on preventing fires saves $3.75 down the line. When there are lives on the line, it’s not the time to be pointing fingers.

In 2023, the US sent around 2,800 firefighters to help Canada suppress its out-of-control wildfires. But this was only possible because America was having a below-normal fire season of its own; had it been otherwise, there would have been no spare bodies to ship north. Given that raging wildfires and impenetrable smoke now seem to be an annual affair, it’s a little frightening to think that the margins on deployable first responders can be measured by a couple thousand. Both countries need to come together to combat this problem by drafting new, collaborative policies on increasing prevention, recruitment, retention, and joint rapid response. Every year we wait brings more smoke — a lingering reminder that there is a very human cost to treating fire as someone else’s problem.

Evan Riggs is the Director of Operations at the Bull Moose Project. Before entering politics, he was a wildland firefighter in northern Canada. He writes at The Burn.