We’re Watching the Sky as We Know It Disappear

MINNEAPOLIS — The first day in early June when my 5-year-old and I camped in Minnesota’s lake country was the usual heaven — perfect calm for canoeing, an osprey overhead as we braved a swim in the cold spring water and a clear blue sky.

But the second day the sky was smoke, the sun a ruby disk. I yearned for the blue and wondered how long the smoke would stay. The winds eventually shifted, but the smoke returned last week, and the Twin Cities’ air quality index on Wednesday climbed high into the Environmental Protection Agency’s “very unhealthy” level. I worry about how often it will return this summer and fall.

For more than a decade, I have been writing about the intangible costs of losing the natural night sky to light pollution and the rapid growth in the number of low-Earth-orbit satellites disrupting our view of the heavens. But lately, there are troubling changes to our daytime sky.

New research suggests that wind patterns and cloud formation are growing increasingly erratic. In some places we have too much rain; in others, too little. Huge wildfire smoke events are becoming more common. The list of changes occurring above us, spurred on in part by burning fossil fuels, is long and getting longer. It means we must now contemplate the more frequent loss of our blue skies.

When the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term “solastalgia” about two decades ago to describe a form of grief he later defined as the “lived experience of the desolation of a much-loved landscape,” he wasn’t thinking specifically about the sky, but he might as well have been. Already many of us are experiencing something previously unimaginable: We are homesick for the sky.

There have always been wildfires in North American forests, but the fires in Canada that sent the plumes over my Minnesota home are burning earlier than what’s normal for Canada. What’s happening there mirrors what’s happening in the Western United States, where the average annual number of wildfires has more than tripled since 1970. Some 37 percent of the cumulative areas burned by forest fires in the Western United States and southwestern Canada between 1986 and 2021 have been influenced by human-caused climate change.