I think we can all agree that the sky looked pretty scary this last weekend. The smoke was thick and haunting and looked almost like an old sepia photograph. As I know you know, that smoke traveled hundreds of miles from wildfires burning in Ontario and northern Minnesota, drifting down to us until we couldn’t see all the way across probably any of the lakes and the air smelled like a chemical campfire.
Leelanau County hit the “unhealthy for everyone” category on the air quality index causing events and businesses to be canceled and closed here and across the state. A newly released report from Anderson Economic Group put Michigan’s total losses from the smoke at more than $4 billion, among the hardest hit states in the country.
Even in recent years when we’ve gotten some smoke drift, it’s been easy to think of the wildfires as some distant tragedy. Trees and animals and houses hundreds of miles away, none of it touching us directly, none of it changing our daily lives. Until this year.
(And I know I’m speaking in generalizations from my own view point - I’m sure this smoke has absolutely affected people in the area in very real ways before this year.)
Because it wasn’t just wild nature that took a hit. People dug out their old stash of face masks, dealt with sore throats and tight lungs and rubbed itchy eyes as they looked up to watch small flakes of ash float to the ground. We forget that we are a part of nature too. Not separate from it, not above it, just another species trying to breathe well. When the air turns bad enough to block out the sun and close a golf course on a hot July day, that’s no longer an abstraction of our changing reality.
In Lansing this last week, Michigan’s own environmental regulators approved key permits for Enbridge’s Line 5 tunnel project under the Straits of Mackinac, a reversal that put Whitmer’s administration at odds with the position she ran on in 2018. Many longtime supporters and environmental advocates have said they feel betrayed and have accused the administration of choosing industry over the Great Lakes - the very water millions of us rely on and love while tribal nations, who’ve fought the project for years over sovereignty and treaty rights in the Straits, say their concerns keep getting sidelined.
Two systems, one physical and one political, moving in the same direction. That’s not a coincidence that can be dismissed.
None of this needs to be a partisan issue. Clean air and clean water shouldn’t be a red or blue position, they’re baseline conditions every one of us needs to survive, regardless of who we voted for. What happened this weekend wasn’t a policy debate, it was smoke in your throat and ash on your windshield. It was real and it was scary and it’s really starting to feel like this is becoming a new summer routine.
So what do we do now? Well, we gotta keep asking the uncomfortable questions. Is this the new normal for the Great Lakes region? What does it mean for our summers and tourism if this happens year after year? And when protections for the land and water around us get rolled back at the same moment we’re breathing in the consequences of a warming world, what exactly are we willing to change and are we capable of looking beyond the divide in order to actually do something?
I don’t have tidy answers and I’m not sure anyone does. But I know I won’t be forgetting what the sky looked like this weekend anytime soon.
