Smoke from Canadian wild fires

[Crispina]

Hope everyone, including Canadians, are coping with the air pollution from the fires. Pretty bad here the last couple of days - Northeast Ohio.   Suppose to start dissipating before midnight tonight.   

[guidoLaMoto]

Here in WI the air is finally clearing after a morning rain. For the past four days it's been smokier than the back room at the Chicago Democrat Convention. Yesterday the sun appeared as a dull red ball easily stared at without scorching your retina from about 5 PM until sunset.

The air reminds me of southern Italy in the fall-- the farmers there have traditionally burned their terraced fields each year. There is so little organic matter to burn because they do it annually, the fires remain confined to a small, slowly advancing front that never reaches temps high enough to get out of control...(Verbum sapienti.. to the Californian & Canadian Smokey Bear advocates). When I saw that in Italy fifty years ago, I understood how Dante got his inspiration- smoke & fires burning in all directions as far as you could see. Impressive and memorable.

[caesar novus]

On 7/20/2026 at 9:13 AM, guidoLaMoto said:

the farmers there have traditionally burned their terraced fields each year

I happen to follow several U.S. farming and land prep channels, and they do a considerable amount of stealth burning of piles of downed trees and brush. Sometimes at night or ideally waiting for cloudy drizzly days that hide smoke. It's burned unattended in the wet to avoid spreading, and while wood and stumps are green which maximizes smoke.

They do this because landfills charge so much and folks are uninterested in even free donations of pulpwood, firewood, or sawmill wood, especially if they have to expensively haul it. Burning remains free (well, they do squander a 5 gal bucket of diesel brute-force starting it) while alternative disposals costs more and more. Whatever happened to power plants efficiently using chips of dry waste wood - banished by the carbon hysteria?

Anecdotally the source of so much smoke-prone wood is 1) field expansion (often to milk gov't subsidies of corn to be inefficiently burned as ethanol), 2) field trimback of bordering forest leaning into the field to seek sunshine, 3) clearing for new residences or rural bnb cottages (escaping urban regulation), 4) elaborate recreation ponds pretending to be for water mgt, or 5) just plain odd construction probably for vanity / tax deduction, like for show horse barns and prancing tracks. 

Edited July 22 by caesar novus

[guidoLaMoto]

11 hours ago, caesar novus said:

I happen to follow several U.S. farming and land prep channels....

I'm a "homesteader." I produce about 75% of my own food, from beef to eggs, potatoes, corn, peas, carrots et cetera. (Dairy & wheat/flour/ bakery is way too time consuming & labor intensive to be efficient on a small scale if the Piggley Wiggley is at all conveniently located.)....We heat with wood with a system using gassification- virtually no soot produced....I burn all flammable trash. Kitchen scraps get recycled thru the chickens.The county gives us each a 50 gal trash can to be picked up up once a week-- but it takes us 4 weeks to fill that can up.....We should be burning spent plastic (essentially a petroleum product) at power plants instead wringing our hands and moaning about the plastics fouling our oceans or ineptly recycling it......Wood ash is all the K, P and trace minerals that were extracted from the soil growing the plant, and it makes an excellent fertilizer.

Burning green (wet) wood produces no more soot than burning dry wood. The extra "smoke"is just water vapor.

Those ancient Europeans were able to leave still fertile fields to their descendents despite continuous cultivation for 2000 years because they recycled those minerals by annual burns...but Davey Crocket & Daniel Boone had to move farther west every few years because they didn't burn/recycle and played the land out.

[caesar novus]

1 hour ago, guidoLaMoto said:

Wood ash is all the K, P and trace minerals that were extracted from the soil growing the plant, and it makes an excellent fertilizer.

Burning green (wet) wood produces no more soot than burning dry wood. The extra "smoke"is just water vapor.

I was talking about forest-clearing piles generating smoke and ashes, the latter then buried a dozen or so feet deep in a natural or manmade hole and covered so tractors etc won't sink there. Crop fires or wild fires can leave ash in place to fertilize, but to make wet wood burn they form massive dense heaps which leave ash too messy and floaty to distribute.

We had a log cabin in remote N. Maine woods and if you put green wood into our Jotul stove it would puke out creosote and risk a chimney fire. Anyway I was just surprised how lightly or stealthily rural practices are vs the clean air party line. The same party line that can unwisely forbid controlled forest burns. And surprised  how much deforestation seems to be happening with no energy or lumber payoffs.