Americans across the Northeast and Midwest suffered through one of the long-predicted impacts of climate change in mid-July. Both regions of the United States were smothered under an eerie orange haze originating from wildfires burning hundreds of miles away in Canada.

While a mortal threat to the most vulnerable, the smoky air, which triggered air-quality alerts across the country, was mostly a nuisance in the United States. But up north, the fires represented an existential catastrophe for some small communities of First Nations people.

One of the glaring ironies of global warming is that its worst effects often land the hardest on the people least responsible for contributing to the problem—a phenomenon identified by Pope Francis in “Laudato Si’.” In Ontario that meant this time the people of Namaygoosisagagun First Nation north of Thunder Bay and other tribal towns and outposts. The entire community was burned out on July 13.

‘A war zone’

Community members evacuated by boat as the fire advanced with what belongings they could carry, seconds ahead of the fire with no assistance from emergency responders. First Nations people make up roughly 5 percent of Canada’s population, but they have represented about 42 percent of wildfire-related evacuations, according to an analysis from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre of the Norwegian Refugee Council.

Linda Debassige, the grand council chief of the Anishinabek Nation, told America on July 23 that a chief who visited the site in the aftermath of the inferno reported to her that the devastation was complete. “It looked like a war zone,” she said, with nothing but ashes left for community members to sift through. (The Anishinabek Nation is coordinating an emergency response for rebuilding the Namaygoosisagagun First Nation community.)

She criticized the response of both the Ontario provincial and Canadian federal governments in fire suppression efforts and emergency evacuation as the fires approached. The First Nations people were essentially abandoned, she charged, and had no choice but to self-evacuate.

Long-range Transport of 2026 Canadian Wildfire Smoke into the United States (July 14-19, 2026)
Long-range Transport of 2026 Canadian Wildfire Smoke into the United States (July 14-19, 2026) Credit: NASA/GSFC/Joseph V. Ardizzone,

“It should have never come to that.”

“Right now there’s multiple communities evacuated in the northwest,” she said. “They have been displaced to different parts of Ontario, some to Niagara Falls, Toronto, Barry, Sudbury, Thunder Bay, so really all scattered across the province with the support of host communities.” She hastened to add that the fires have also dislocated people from non-First Nations communities as well.

“There hasn’t been a determination of cause at this point in time with respect to the multiple fires, but what we’re seeing, I think, is really a direct impact of climate change,” she said. According to Ms. Debassige, northwestern Ontario “has never seen fires like this before.”

“Over the course of multiple years, we’ve been seeing fire activity increase,” she said. The region “hasn’t been used to this type of dry, high heat conditions really ever, and it’s getting warmer and warmer and drier and drier and not a lot of rain.”

According to government researchers, Canada has experienced more than 4,030 fires so far in 2026, about 500 more than it experienced at this time in 2025. At the provincial level, Ontario is experiencing a record year. Canadian media reports that fires have burned through more than 7,250 square kilometers of Ontario forest this summer, already surpassing the previous record set in 2021.

As bad as those numbers sound and as detrimental as the impact on air quality across North America has been, overall the Canadian fires in 2026 so far are running at about an average rate, affecting about 2.5 million hectares of forest—nowhere near the calamity of 2023, when almost 15 million hectares burned across Canada.

As members of the Namaygoosisagagun First Nation begin to contemplate the challenges ahead in restoring their community, the fire crisis shows no sign of abating this week. According to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, on July 24, 908 fires were blazing across Canada, with 217 in Canada’s Northwest Territories, 177 in Ontario, 154 in Manitoba and 125 in Quebec.

The problem is hardly limited to Canada, however. In the United States, 564 fires, primarily in the Pacific Northwest, were clearing woodlands the same day. U.S. forestry experts blame the same drying conditions experienced in Canada for the increasing ferocity and number of fires south of the border.

“Right now we’re seeing cooling temperatures,” Ms. Debassige said, hoping that could mean rain may follow that will help suppress the fires. She urged prayers for the people affected so far and for those who may still be at risk in the vast Canadian woodlands where the fires are spreading. She expressed her gratitude to church groups from multiple denominations in Canada that have been reaching out to see how they can help rebuild what has been so completely lost.

Prioritizing fire risk

In the United States, President Donald Trump has made a point of denying the reality of the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on the global climate. That denial continued as Canada burned this month, even as the evidence literally passed before his eyes. Mr. Trump laid the blame for the wildfires entirely on poor forest management.

“We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!” he wrote in his Truth Social account on July 17.

But researchers point out that most of the wildfires in Canada are burning in forests that are unreachable by any roadway and far from human population sites—forests that have never been managed by humankind in any way. It is the excessively dry conditions that are leading to the fires, which have been started primarily by lightning strikes, not because of human negligence or malfeasance.

While Ms. Debassige lays the primary blame for the current crisis on higher temperatures and more arid conditions in Ontario, she did join Mr. Trump in some criticism of provincial and national leadership and budget priorities that may have shortchanged forestry management and emergency response. “What we’ve experienced is really a lack of coordination by both levels of government to…address the fire situation and to support the coordination of evacuees.” She said “boots on the ground” were missing in both areas.

“There was a lack of water bombers to address the situation before it got really out of control,” she said, adding that commitments to create fire buffers around remote communities have been left unfulfilled. She blamed “a lack of preparedness” by the government on “major cuts to emergency management and major cuts to the Ministry of Natural Resources.”

In recent years, Canada has been experiencing record-breaking wildfire seasons. The Canadian Climate Institute reports: “Accelerating climate change, largely from the burning of fossil fuels, makes wildfires bigger, hotter, and more destructive (Climate Atlas of Canada n.d.). With Canada warming twice as fast as the global average (Government of Canada 2019), and home to more than a quarter of the world’s boreal forests, the country is experiencing this consequence of global heating firsthand.”

The institute finds that fire seasons are starting earlier and lasting longer. So-called zombie fires even smolder through the winter. According to the C.C.I., rainfall is becoming erratic and winter snow cover is diminishing while an “overheating climate is making Canadian summers hotter and drier.” Contributing to the threat, climate change has extended “burning hours” by “weakening the natural day-night temperature cycle that once slowed wildfires, allowing them to burn more intensely overnight and spread faster.” These are massive, hemispheric changes that are not likely to be resolved by more thorough “forest raking,” as Mr. Trump once suggested, speaking of California wildfires.

It’s clear that the president intends to persist in not paying attention to the matter of climate change—many of his administration’s current energy policies seem to even relish exacerbating the problem.

Listening to Mother Nature

Dan Misleh, the executive director of the Catholic Climate Covenant, argued in an email to America that the most appropriate response to the erratic climate conditions “is to not blame the weather, but to blame our own carelessness at not heeding the calls of scientists; calls which go back to the turn of the last century.”

“They theorized then that dumping CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will warm the planet,” he wrote. “Now we see their prediction impacting every community around the world.”

Mr. Misleh suggests that the U.S. Catholic community must respond to the crisis in a number of ways.

“We need to reemphasize in—our preaching, education, and our actions—that we are a part of God’s good creation, that we are dependent on a healthy planet for our own health,” he wrote.

“We must use this acknowledgment to generate real, concrete actions that demonstrate our love of God the Creator, of our neighbor, and of creation itself.”

And as the crisis begins to have real, no longer theoretical effects, “We must deploy our pastoral resources to care for those who are most impacted by our neglect, namely, the poor and the vulnerable—and in this case North America’s First Nations—who suffer the most from our neglect and the impacts of climate change.”

He urged U.S. Catholics and people of good will to initiate conversations about the climate crisis “with our families, our friends, our neighbors, and in our workplaces.”

Those conversations must ultimately include policymakers in Washington, he wrote. “They are charged with promoting the common good but are not adequately responding to the cries of our common home. We must hold them accountable to their basic duties as our elected representatives.”

“A couple of years ago the world was on fire,” Ms. Debassige said, recalling the unprecedented fires in 2023 across North America, Europe, Indonesia and Africa.

The people of many of Canada’s First Nation communities remain deeply tied to creation, she said, living by fishing and hunting. They have observed declining fish stocks and the displacement of deer and moose populations as warming conditions drive them out of their normal ranges.

She notes that both the U.S. and Canadian governments remain overly reliant on the burning, extraction and export of fossil fuels as a source of energy and national incomes. They have yet to set policy as if the climate crisis really mattered, a strategy that poses a threat to First Nation members in Canada now and everyone else in time.

“The world, the planet, Mother Earth, she’s telling us something,” Ms. Debassige said, “and I don’t think our governments are in the business of listening to that reality because their sole focus is on money.”

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Kevin Clarke is America’s chief correspondent and the author of Oscar Romero: Love Must Win Out (Liturgical Press).