I have spent much of my career studying boreal forests and I know fire is part of how they renew themselves. That knowledge did nothing for the lump in my throat last week as wildfires closed in on my community in northwestern Ontario.

Over 150 fires were burning in the region almost at once, displacing at least 1,800 people from more than a dozen communities, most of them Indigenous. Namaygoosisagagun First Nation burned to the ground, its residents narrowly escaping by boat.

Thunder Bay, the regional hub for evacuees, ran out of hotel rooms. The Red Cross arrived to set up cots in hockey arenas. Living rurally just northwest of Thunder Bay, I joined my neighbors to watch the sky turn black and wondered how quickly we could move our livestock. If even breathing was extremely hazardous, with toxic air readings beyond the scales used to report them, where would we be safe?

As the smoke drifted south, the loudest response from the Trump administration was a threat to sanction Canadian officials until these forests are “cleaned up”. But there is no “raking” our way out of this problem. We are living in a new era of fire where smoke is reshaping air‑quality across Canada and the United States.

Yet this future is not hopeless. We can lower the threats to communities and to our lungs. In looking for answers and solutions, our best path lies in addressing three things we keep refusing to face.

The first is to acknowledge that climate change has almost certainly made extreme fire weather — the hot, dry, windy conditions that allow fires to ignite and spread — more common and more intense in many parts of the world.

Northern Ontario hit a record 40........

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