Last week, for a brief, beautiful span of days, all three of our young-adult daughters were immersed in nature, reveling in the delicious freedom of summertime. One, a camp counselor, was leading a group on a two-week trek through Yellowstone National Park. She sent us photos of the mountains, campfires, sweaty, grinning campers, a herd of bison they encountered by the side of the road. The other two sisters were on a canoe trip in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. They paddled from lake to lake, fell asleep to the sound of loons, woke up early to plunge in the crystal clear water.

Just as all three girls were ending their trips, more than a dozen wildfires swept through the Superior National Forest, prompting the Forest Service to close all entry points to the Boundary Waters. Some visitors were stranded. Eight Forest Service rangers paddled in to rescue people throughout the 150-mile stretch of wilderness on the U.S.-Canadian border. Our daughter who led the trip to Yellowstone returned to her base camp in Grand Marais, Minnesota, to learn that further trips have been canceled. A group of campers who were stuck in the Boundary Waters had to be rescued by helicopter. The smoke was chokingly thick. “It feels like the apocalypse,” she texted.

In Madison we woke up Thursday morning to the stinging haze of wildfire smoke blanketing the city, drifting down on us from the same forest fires.

The abrupt end of summer’s idyll is a heartache, not just for the immediate shock, but for what it means — a world on fire, a feeling of dread of the losses to come. There is no escape from the rapidly accelerating disasters caused by climate change. All of us are touched by it in our interconnected world. Yet somehow, we can’t get our act together to respond. As a country, we seem determined to kid ourselves about what we are seeing with our own eyes. Wisconsin U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the Republican candidate for governor, has called warnings about extreme weather triggered by climate change “doomsaying, sky-is-falling rhetoric.”

Last summer, Tiffany and fellow Wisconsin Republican U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman, along with three of their Republican colleagues from Minnesota wrote a letter to the Canadian embassy to complain that wildfire smoke was ruining summer across the Midwest.

“In our neck of the woods, summer months are the best time of the year to spend time outdoors recreating, enjoying time with family, and creating new memories, but this wildfire smoke makes it difficult to do all those things,” Tiffany and his colleagues wrote, demanding to know what the Canadians planned to do about it. Tens of thousands of Canadians were being displaced by raging fires at the time. “With all the technology that we have at our disposal, both in preventing and fighting wildfires, this worrisome trend can be reversed if proper action is taken,” Tiffany and his colleagues wrote.

Wildfires are getting worse because of climate change. The problem is particularly acute for Canada, where the Arctic region is rapidly warming and hotter, drier summers are turning forest land into a tinderbox, where a stray lightning strike can start a conflagration. The same thing is happening in the Superior National Forest this summer, where the fires are caused by lightning and the hot, dry conditions that are not letting up.

Instead of working to mitigate the threat, the Trump administration has dismantled the arm of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that researches wildfires and other climate-related threats, as well as the Forest Service’s firefighting teams. In 2025, the Forest Service lost nearly 6,000 employees. Trump’s fiscal year 2027 budget aims to cut the Forest Service budget by 75%. 

Tiffany’s scolding letter to Canada aside, the policies he has supported under Trump have directly increased fire hazards. To the eight rangers now searching the Boundary Waters for people trapped by the fires, the Forest Service office in Minnesota is hoping to add back some of the staff they’ve lost to Trump’s ill-advised reorganization and cuts. 

“We are actively trying through our existing staff to reach out to former staff that have retired or moved to another position off-forest that still have firefighting skills and credentials,” Forest Service spokesperson Christine Kolinski told the Minnesota Star Tribune. 

This summer’s fires are more than just a wake-up call. They are a five-alarm emergency alert. We are losing so much so fast. We all have a stake in facing it and acting now. It does no good to pretend the disaster isn’t happening or to blame our neighbors, as if they could fix things for us by getting out their rakes. The least we can demand of our political leaders is that they stop dismantling the only tools we have to fight the incineration of our world. We owe that much to every kid who looks forward to every future summer.