How Canadian Wildfires Are Disrupting the Magic of Midwestern Summers

Smoke drifting south from Canada's wildfires isn't just changing our skies. It's changing what summer in the Midwest feels and smells like.

Photo by Kevin Anderson

There are certain things you expect to come with a Midwestern summer.

Beaches, baseball, cookouts. Sure.

Muscles out, yams out, toes out. Why not.

Yesterday morning, I stepped outside expecting another humid July day. Instead, the sky was washed in a strange peach-colored haze, and a thin veil of static dusted the morning horizon.

… It smelled like ashtray.

It didn’t register at first. It was just an unmistakable, misplaced wrongness in the air.

Then the data caught up with my senses. The smoke had traveled more than 800 miles.

I grew up in Gary. I’ve spent the last decade living in Northwest Indiana and Chicago. I’ve experienced blistering heat waves, lake-effect snowstorms, polar vortices, flooding, tornado sirens, and enough Midwestern weather mood swings to know that summer can be unpredictable.

But this? This didn’t exist. At least, not like this.

I wasn’t planning to write about Canadian wildfires. I was deep into reporting another climate-related essay. But when youth baseball games started getting canceled, park programs shut down, outdoor concerts postponed, and public health officials ordered people to stay indoors because the air itself had become dangerous to breathe, I needed to know more.

Because somewhere along the way, smelling smoke from another country stopped being an oddity and quietly became part of summer.

And I don’t remember anyone telling us.

Chicago summers have always felt almost mythical. “Summertime Chi” is the stuff of legend.

After surviving months of gray skies and bitter cold, the city erupts into something entirely different. Early joggers claim the lakefront. Boats crowd Lake Michigan. The Riverwalk pulses late into the evening. Distinct neighborhoods celebrate their own flavor. Rooftops overflow. Sunlight ricochets off glass towers.

It may be America’s greatest summer city.

Now there are days when the skyline is cloaked behind smoke drifting in from thousands of fires burning across Canada.

I wanted to know how we got here.

The short version is this: record heat, prolonged drought, and repeated lightning strikes have transformed huge sections of Canadian forests into tinderboxes. Ontario and Quebec have experienced unusually dry conditions, allowing hundreds of wildfires to ignite and spread. When weather patterns shift, upper-level winds carry enormous plumes of smoke directly into the American Midwest.

That’s how the Manhattan skyline disappears into an apocalyptic orange fog.

That’s how Chicago has repeatedly found itself with the worst air quality in the world.

That’s how millions of Americans now check air quality forecasts before deciding whether it’s safe to take their children outside.

So I started asking a simple question: When did all this start?

The answer surprised me.

Smoke from Canadian wildfires has drifted into the United States for generations. There are documented cases dating back to the 1950s. But for decades, the smoke was usually too light and too infrequent to become a widespread public health crisis.

Then I came across the summer of 2023.

If you lived in Chicago, you probably remember the headlines.

CBS News Chicago put it bluntly: “Chicago has the worst air quality in the world due to Canadian wildfire smoke.”

This wasn’t a problem happening somewhere else. More than 350 million people across North America were exposed to hazardous wildfire smoke. Baseball games were canceled. Outdoor events were postponed. Schools kept children inside for recess. The smoke had become impossible to ignore.

But what caught my attention wasn’t just the headlines. It was the science.

A Columbia Climate School analysis of the research found that the summer of 2023 was Canada’s most significant wildfire and smoke season on record. Looking across roughly 70 years of data, researchers also found evidence that it was part of a longer-term shift toward smokier skies across North America.

They knew 2023 was not an exception. It was an introduction. The smoke has returned every summer since.

Looking back, you can see the story unfolding.

In 1950, smoke from Canadian wildfires spread so widely that some Americans feared a nuclear attack.