Hello, Reader

The sky turned a strange, hazy orange as we drove to Charlottesville this week. Not from anything happening here. Wildfire smoke, drifting all the way down from Canada, the same haze that's been sitting over Toronto, Boston, and New York this month. The kids kept asking why the sun looked like that. I didn't have a simple answer for them.

So I looked up the actual numbers for the US. As of this morning, there are:

• 487 active wildfires burning across the US, covering 1.4 million acres.
• Utah and Oregon are carrying the heaviest acreage right now, with Colorado and Washington close behind.
• The map isn't just a western story either, there's a real cluster working through the Southeast too and of course the Candianian wildfires causing the smoke we experienced.

Here's what I'm learning. The fires themselves aren't new, lightning and human activity have always started wildfires. What's changed is how dry the land already is when that spark lands.

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A lot of that comes down to snowpack, the layer of snow that builds up over winter in the mountains and slowly melts through spring and summer, feeding streams and soil long after winter ends.

When we did our family cross-country road trip in 2019, I remember how struck I was that California's Mt. Shasta remained snow-capped despite the fact that down on the road we were well into the 100s.
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But snowpack across parts of the west has been at some of its lowest levels in 50 to 75 years. Warmer temperatures are melting it earlier, so by the time fire season starts, the land is already primed to burn. Researchers have been tracking this for years.​

It doesn't stay out there, either. It shows up right here in our gardens too, in drier springs, earlier heat stress, and water sources that used to be reliable, less so.

So what can we actually do about it?

1. Notice the patterns this year.
   What are the temperatures actually doing where you live? How often are the wildfire alerts or the haze coming through?
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   Observe and notice, that's step one toward understanding for yourself how the climate is shifting in your own area, rather than simply relying on a summarized news report.
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2. Join next week's Climate Change webinar. Go a little deeper into the education behind what's happening, so we can talk through what it actually means in our own garden context and what we can do about it. Register here.

We keep coming back to this: Tending the soil in front of us is one small, faithful way of responding to a much bigger story we can't control on our own.
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If you are in the areas of wildfire, keep cool and safe this week, Reader,
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Nicky (& Dave)