Shawn Vestal: Enjoy these blue skies, but don’t take them for granted

This summer has been a literal breath of fresh air.

Day upon day of blue skies. Kids can play soccer and no one needs a mask and the moon isn’t orange.

Just the way summer ought to be – and hasn’t been lately.

Yet we shouldn’t breathe too easy, for September is coming and September has brought us some of the smokiest days of the past couple of years.

And whatever happens in September, the long-range factors that have driven wildfire season and our recent smoke-choking summers have not changed. Though our air has remained mostly clear this year, there are more wildfires burning more acres around the West than we’ve seen in five years, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

It’s just that we’ve been lucky to miss out on the smoke.

The conditions that are fueling a steep rise in wildfires year after year remain in place: patterns of drought and warming temperatures that are driving bigger, hotter fires.

These blissfully blue skies should not make us forget that. They should, instead, remind us of the urgent need to protect ourselves from the consequences of climate change, to do what we can, late as it is. What the climate emergency is calling on us to protect is precious.

After all, our ability to ignore the threat of the warming planet – to say nothing of the ability of some to deny it completely – is prodigious. We’ve put ourselves deep, deep into this crisis and done so little in response that we’ve reached this pass: blue skies in summer feel like a kind of miracle.

So far this year, we haven’t had a single day below the “moderate” range for air quality – and we’ve only had two of those, according to the monitoring done by the Spokane Regional Clean Air Agency. The rest of our summer air has been “good,” which means at or below the standard of 35 micrograms per cubic meter of fine-particle pollution over a 24-hour period.

(There was a pretty smoky day in early August, but the worst pollution came late at night and was thus split between two 24-hour air quality index values.)

Over the previous decade, our air quality fell below that federal standard for healthy breathing 59 times during wildfire seasons. Forty-four of those days came in the past five years, including four days where the air quality was deemed “very unhealthy” and five days where it was deemed hazardous.

It’s not hard to remember the feeling of those days – they were a misery, and especially so when combined with high heat. The experience of feeling the climate emergency in your lungs is impossible to ignore.

“Air is one of our most precious resources,” said Lisa Woodard, communications/outreach manager for the clean-air agency. “We’re breathing 25,000 breaths of air a day.

“We don’t often think about things we can’t see. With wildfire smoke, you can see it. … It really hits home that the air can be dirty and that makes you appreciate the clean air days.”

The reasons for our easy-breathing summer are not mysterious. Chiefly, as Mark Rowe, the monitoring section manager for the agency, noted, we had a cool wet spring that lasted into July. It wasn’t until mid-July that hotter weather showed up, and the forest fuels – the stuff that burns – began to dry out.

And we’ve also had a lack of “triggering events” in Washington, meaning thunderstorms and other combinations of hot, dry, windy weather that helps produce more fires.

“So far,” Rowe emphasized. “So far. We still have several weeks to go.”

Our recent Septembers have included some of our worst smoke days, including a four-day stretch of “hazardous” air in 2020.

“In terms of single-day air quality, those were the worst we have on record,” Rowe said.

As of Thursday, only two large fires were burning in Washington state, covering a little more than 2,000 acres. Both are in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, according to the fire center.

And yet, across the West, this is not a light fire season. As of Thursday, there were just under 44,000 separate large fires burning around the country, almost all in the West. That’s the most in the past decade.

The total acreage burning is more than 6 million, the most since 2018.

Idaho has 11 active fires, including several major ones in the Salmon-Challis National Forest.

But the biggest blazes aren’t near us, and the weather patterns aren’t bringing us the smoke, as they have in past years.

Which has been a blessing. We should appreciate the blue skies and easy breathing, and understand that part of the urgency around climate actions involves the very air that we breathe.

Unfortunately, we can’t take these kind of summers for granted any longer.