Yep, Canada's Still On Fire

     Canada is burning and I've picked up a chronic cough.  Y'know, a lot of that country was so damp that it didn't burn all that well.  Sure, they had wildfires.  Huge swathes of Canada (and Alaska) are forest and scrub, lightly populated if at all, and sometimes it just burns; that's been happening for as long as there have been forests.

     Don't think of this as the woods at, say, a state park or tucked into a corner of farmland.  Those are manicured in comparison.  It's wild forest.  Nobody's logging it.  No hogs or cattle are eating the low stuff.

     It's drying out up there.  Call it weather.  Call it climate.  Call it a drought.  Whatever it is, we've got to live with it.  These are fires too big to put out; they'll save the settled places, or try to, and let the rest burn.  The expert prediction, from firefighters to climatologists, is that Canada's going to burn all summer.

     If you compare a map of the active fires (see my "Canada is burning" link) with a map of population density, Canada's doing a remarkable job of prevention and control where people and fire risk overlap.  With less than the population of California in a country about the same size as the United States, that's as much as you could hope for.  The majority of Canada's population lives within a couple hundred miles of the U.S. border and that's the part that hasn't caught fire.  At least so far.

     For them, and for the rest of us who are downwind, a reminder that a Corsi-Rosenthal box is a cheap, high-volume indoor air purifier you can make with commonly-available odds and ends.  I'm not going to tell anyone to wear a mask outdoors when the air is gritty, but that same N95 so many people chafed at will stop the worst parts of border-sneaking woodsmoke before it gets to your lungs and you can make up your own mind about it.