Photo of the Day: Two Kinds of Toxic Environment

I took the image accompanying this post a week ago while I was still on vacation at the Chautauqua Institution, a lovely enclosed upstate New York community with numerous Victorian cottages that have helped make this picturesque place a National Historic Landmark.

As much as its cultural and intellectual atmosphere, habitual visitors glory in its physical environment. For the 30-odd years that I have come up here, I have made it a point, as long as the rain is holding off, to take daily brisk walks by Chautauqua Lake.

Until the last three days of this vacation, that is.

In the background, a particle-laden, milky uniformity had replaced sunlight streaks of the morning horizon. Never mind a wide view of what lay upon the waters: as you can observe in this image, nothing could be seen beyond the boats lined up at the marina.

Probably at no time, I suspect, since the height of COVID-19 up here, masks were being distributed and gratefully worn by many visitors on the grounds.

The first day of the wildfire, the designation was “Dangerous for Certain Groups”; the following day, the label became simply “Dangerous”: and by the third, the bad air quality had turned sufficiently dreadful to earn the term “Hazardous.”

This photo renders in literal terms a toxic physical environment. But it symbolizes what has increasingly become a toxic diplomatic one, as well.

At this moment, Donald Trump has chosen to do what he does best: make a bad situation worse. He’s taking literally the satirical South Park song “Blame Canada,” but without an iota of logic. Our nation up north is responsible for not maintaining its forests properly, he claims.

That’s pretty rich, coming from a President who has already laid off thousands of U.S. Forest Service workers and whose 2027 budget includes cuts of more than 70% to the agency. But his rationale would be hideous in any case because he refuses to accept the reality of human-caused climate change.

Super-hot temperatures in the areas around the wildfires, together with dry vegetation, resulted in “functioned like a chimney, a super long chimney shooting smoke into the upper atmosphere and then the jet stream” and then found its way to the US, according to Ava Berger’s NPR report last week.

This is a situation that calls for international cooperation to address causes, not finger-pointing—unless you’re Trump. Then he tells citizens of a country that he has not-so-jokingly called to be annexed into the U.S. that he’s going to levy “a big tariff” on their nation for the wildfires crossing the border.

Trump has turned the Ugly American stereotype of the Vietnam War era into an actuality. His default reflex—to blow smoke every time he finds himself in a difficult situation—has become literal this time, and it’s losing the U.S. a neighbor and friend it could always count on.

The smoky air has cleared from beautiful Chautauqua Lake, as well as other areas affected in the northern part of the U.S. last week. But before the end of this second Trump term, you can count on it coming back, perhaps at more hazardous levels.

And Americans had better accept that it’s going to take longer before the effects of Trump’s careless, toxic rhetoric dissipate.

From now on, traditional allies like Canada are entitled to wonder what got into Americans that they put in the White House a charlatan like Trump twice—and whether the Republican Party he has remolded in his image will nominate as his successor someone equally wedded to his agenda of environmental callousness and diplomatic exploitation.