air quality – Feminism and Religion

Smoke by Beth Bartlett

Perhaps we all are standing on the borderlands – left standing in the debris of our consumptive and violent past, walking toward a future we cannot see but can feel in every cell of our bodies as this global fever is creating a world on fire that is reaching each one of us. How do we find our way home? What will it take to change us and, in so doing, change society?

-Terry Tempest Williams

We awoke Wednesday morning to thick, thick smoke. It looked like the more typical fog that often engulfs us in the early morning, but the faint whiff of smoke even inside with windows closed was unmistakable. One step outside and the smoke was overwhelming – like sitting next to a large campfire with the wind blowing the smoke in my direction. As I was starting to cough, I put the baby in his highchair and headed to the basement to get the air purifier. As soon as I plugged it in the indicator light turned red, meaning very dirty air. Fortunately, it quickly cleared the air, but any time we opened a door the light immediately turned purple.

At the moment, in this land of clean water and clear skies, we are experiencing some of the worst air quality anywhere in the world. In the past few days, the Air Quality Index (AQI) on my EPA app has registered over 1100, far higher than the threshold for “Hazardous” air, which is 301. The entire east coast and Midwest have been under air quality alerts from the fires in Canada, but where I live — Duluth, Minnesota — has had the worst air from the fires just a hundred miles to our north. Oddly, the air here is actually worse than in the towns that have been evacuated due to the fires. It’s the worst air ever experienced here. Even inside, the air purifiers are struggling to keep up.

Fire and Ice by Beth Bartlett

As I paddled the lake this morning, I found myself thinking this is what the end of the world looks like. The sun was rising red through smoke from Canadian wildfires and a smoky haze engulfed the lake to the point I could barely see the not-too-distant opposite shore. I was paddling by the state forest, where the March ice storm had stripped the tall pines of their upper branches, bent the birches, and uprooted and sent out to sea the largest of the trees. The camping spot at the spring was inaccessible so covered was it by downed trees and branches. All was bent, broken, and dying and the forest itself appeared to be weeping. Adding to the surreal aspect of this moment was the plethora of motorboats pulling skiers and jet skis bouncing along on what would otherwise be a quiet, calm lake – oblivious to or simply not caring that they were frivolously burning the very fossil fuels that had fueled this environmental crisis and catastrophe. It was as if I were watching an Octavia Butler dystopia play out with the rich and privileged burning up the last of the fossil fuels with disregard for the earth and disdain for earth’s advocates.

I began going to this lake in northern Michigan when I was two. Every year my mother would comment on how blue the sky was, how clear the air – such a contrast to northeast Ohio where we lived with its rubber factories, making the sky a hazy gray, even on the sunniest of days. We would marvel at the depth of the blue. This visit I never once saw a blue sky, nor even across the lake. I have hundreds of photos of the beautiful vista from the hill upon which our cabin sits, simply because of the stunning blues, but this year I took not a one.

Fire by Beth Bartlett

The nature and meaning of fire have been appearing in several disparate aspects of my life lately – in the fire of Celtic spring rituals; in books I’ve been reading[i]; in the fireflies of summer nights and the fireworks of the 4^th of July; even as a clue in a game; and most ubiquitous of all – the smoke from Canadian wildfires. So persistent a theme begs pondering. It first appeared in a Rewilding course as the sacred element of spring in the Celtic wheel of the year. Spring is the time of new beginnings, of the sunrise – the element of fire in the sacred direction of east, of the fires of passion and creativity, and the celebration of Beltane.