Brooks: Blame Canada? Minnesota lawmakers pen stern letter about wildfire smoke

Their neighbor’s house was on fire. They complained about the smoke.

The smoke was terrible. Over the weekend, it blew in yellow and orange, coiling around cities and towns and playgrounds. Any attempt at summer fun — a splash in the pool, a walk in the woods, a backyard barbecue — left Minnesotans with stinging eyes and lungfuls of air that tasted like old pennies. If you kept your windows open at night, you woke with a headache from whatever was burning hundreds of miles to your north.

Canada was burning and Minnesota was choking. Someone ought to do something about it. Last week, ahead of the latest air quality alert, half of Minnesota’s congressional delegation took action. They signed on to a sternly worded letter to Canada about the smoke that was ruining the summer fun.

“In our neck of the woods, summer months are the best time of the year to spend time outdoors recreating, enjoying time with the family, and creating new memories, but this wildfire smoke makes it difficult to do all those things,” Minnesota’s Republican congressional delegation wrote in a letter to the Canadian ambassador last week.

As U.S. Reps. Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach, Pete Stauber and Tom Emmer noted, wildfires have become more frequent and ferocious, and smoke-filled air has become an unwelcome, unwholesome feature of Minnesota summers.

In the letter, cosigned by two Wisconsin Republicans, they blamed Canada for “a lack of active forest management.” They blamed arsonists. They blamed everything but climate change.

The smoke is terrible. The fires are worse. The letter found Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew working to evacuate thousands of people — entire communities — from their homes ahead of the wildfires that have burned millions of acres of his province.

Most people, the premier noted, respond to a disaster by sending help, not the congressional equivalent of a one-star Yelp review. Firefighters have flooded into Manitoba to help battle the blaze — including 21 firefighters from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.

“I would challenge these ambulance chasers in the U.S. Congress to go and do the same, and to hear how much the American firefighting heroes who are here love our province,” Kinew said during a press conference on Thursday.

“This is what turns people off politics,” he added. “When you’ve got a group of congresspeople trying to trivialize and make hay out of a wildfire season where we’ve lost lives in our province.”

Wildfires, like many other natural disasters — from hurricanes to floods to tornadoes — have become more common and more severe due to climate change. Minnesota has warmed 3 degrees between 1895 and 2020, according to DNR recordkeeping. Warmer days and summer nights that don’t cool down like they used to can intensify wildfires.

Over the weekend, wildfires raged around the rim of the Grand Canyon, destroying a historic lodge that had stood watch over the North Rim for almost a century.

The National Interagency Fire Center counted 14 new, large wildfires that started in the Western United States on Monday, 36 more uncontained fires and 78 fires burning but being carefully managed. As of midday, there were more than 15,000 woodland firefighters and support personnel battling wildfires across the country. Everyone was keeping a wary eye on tinder-dry swaths of southern Utah, the Arizona Strip and Colorado’s western slope.

“This region is experiencing critically dry fuels, including grass, brush, and pinyon-juniper, and recent wildfires have shown intense fire behavior and rapid spread,” the center, which pools information from federal agencies and local first responders, reported. “These fuels are dry enough to ignite and carry fire easily, even from small sparks.”

In June, parts of northeastern Minnesota went up in flames. The most destructive, the Camp House wildfire, burned nearly 15,000 acres north of Duluth.

That was Stauber’s district. But who would try to politicize a wildfire?