yellow smoke

We have had rather a smoky week here in the Northwest, thanks to wildfires in Eastern Washington and British Columbia. It was comical to see that the air quality index showed the air in New Delhi as being healthier than that in Seattle. I'm sure the difference lies in the type of pollutant, because I wasn't affected at all by the smoke, as far as I can tell. Unless I'm high now and don't know it.

Unlike the fires in California, these were started by lightning strikes (at least the ones in Eastern Washington) and cannot be imputed to the stupidity of humans; however, the fact that "fire season" is becoming increasingly common in Washington State speaks, among other things, to how pressing a problem climate change is, even when you don't own an ostentatious beach-front mansion in Palm Beach, and the failure in this country to prevent massive fires by allowing smaller fires to burn away the debris. Unfortunately, "climate change" is a dirty word to this EPA and to the countless supporters of Senor Donald who can barely spell it. I have to hope that once these insecure ageing cretins go extinct the world will develop more sense about climate change. The right-wing nutjobs will get more extreme, but their numbers will decline, so that they will be consigned to the fringe, where one pass of a steam roller will complete the job. Then the next great battle will be anti-vaxxers, who are, unfortunately, a mostly liberal problem, but one battle at a time.

The smoke has mostly cleared up now, but the fires are still burning. On an unrelated note, I find Seattle's epithet, the "Emerald City", to be rather irritating, because the city itself is like one conspicuous patch of concrete in an otherwise respectably forested corner of the state. Unless the name is ironic and I'm not aware, it ought to be called the "City of Emerald Suburbs". I am in an unusually optimistic mood, so I will say that what most futurists get wrong when they depict cities and buildings of the future as being made of nothing but concrete, metal, and glass is that there will probably be more trees in the future. Cities will be greener, because our thinking about the environment will be more evolved. That's the kind of city I would like to live in, and, like I said, I'm being uncharacteristically optimistic. Alternatively, I won't mind if humans go extinct by 2035.