Getting Fired Up: Objective Realities….

 Ok, I’m going to go there.  I didn’t enjoy the recent smoke out we had over the last few days any more than anyone else did, but some objective realities need to be recognized.

Canada population, 41.5 million; US Population: 348.7 million.

Canada total land mass: 3,511,023 square miles; US total land mass: 3,531,905 square miles.

Canada population density: 12.4/square mile; US population density: 93/sq mile.

Canada forested acreage: 1.3 BILLION acres; US forested acreage: 823 million acres.

Canada GDP: $2 trillion; US GDP: $38 trillion.

Does anyone else see the problem here?

Canada simply doesn’t have either the manpower or money to clear all the brush or control their wildfires, most of which are in remote areas where few people live and firefighter response is nearly impossible. And the complicating factor? Much of remote Canada, unlike the US, is covered in muskeg and peat bogs. Once fires get into those areas, they will continue to burn until they exhaust available fuel. During the winters, the fires go dormant; there is no VISIBLE flame, but the embers continue to smolder under the snowpack until conditions are favorable in the summer - and they reignite. These fires could be burning for the next DECADE or more - and there isn’t thing one the Canadians can do about it, any more than WE can do anything about the coal fire in Pennsylvania that has been burning since 1962.

And let’s not forget that the US currently has nearly 500 wildfires of its own burning right now; year to date we have had over EIGHTY THOUSAND fires and burned over THREE MILLION ACRES right here in the US (source: National Interagency Fire Center, a federal agency under the Bureau of Land Management). The smoke we experienced recently didn’t just come from Canada, part of it also came from uncontrolled wildfires in the Boundary Waters area of Minnesota, some of which, BTW, has crossed over into Canada. OK, so prevailing winds are supposed to change from northerly to west/southwest. What do you suppose THAT’S going to do? Uh huh, bring smoke from wildfires in those areas to us in the midwest/northeast; that was in the forecast today. 

Perhaps not as heavy, but affecting us nonetheless.

So let’s stop and think about what is actually happening here. I have actually spent time in some of these parts of Canada.  Most of them are nearly inaccessible. This isn’t incompetence or maliciousness on the part of Canada; at the end if the day, man is finding out just how little control he actually has over nature.

And frankly, I am tired of Trump peddling the notion that Canada, a country that has sent AND LOST people and equipment over the years assisting the US fighting wildfires, is somehow responsible for natural disasters and their effect on the US as a means of turning sentiment against Canada and building support for his notion that we should annex Canada.