Where There's Smoke...
Attuning to 'the new normal' with our noses and beyond
Smoke is back, back again
When the first wave of smoke this season hit my nostrils, I felt an immediate pang of recognition, followed by alertness, fear, and finally something like grief. This smell has become the telltale odour of summer in the Canadian prairies, and what it signals is the forest fires raging through Northern Turtle Island as dry conditions and extreme weather patterns brought on by the climate crisis intensify.
The smokey smell of forest fires doesn’t have the same quality as the smoke from a tangible source like a candle, fire pit, or smudge stick. It is all-encompassing, environmental; to me, it creates a persistent static in my olfactory system, a dusty film that I can’t scrub off, often accompanied by a metallic or even papery smell that seems chemical.
This season, the smell has transported me back to June of 2023 when I was writing my Master’s thesis in Montreal during what happened to be a period of the worst forest fires in Canadian history. These fires resulted in prolonged and extreme air quality warnings across much of the eastern seaboard and even in Europe. I remember the near-constant haze of smoke, wearing an N95 to run errands on my bike, and not daring to open the windows of my 4th floor apartment despite the stuffy Montreal heat.
All of this was coincidentally on-topic for my thesis, in which I was exploring the role smell played in social understandings of air pollution and how those understandings might impact public policy. My launching point was a case study of how residents of Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood had successfully lobbied for a city-wide ban on the wood-burning ovens used by local bakeries and restaurants, citing health concerns caused by the smelly, localized smoke.
What I found in my research was that, although the overall amount of air pollution caused by that wood smoke was many orders of magnitude smaller than the city’s main polluters (vehicles and petrochemical refining), its noticeable smell, combined with its obvious source made it an easy policy target. Thus the by-law was passed.
As I found out though, that was not the full story. The most common retrofit proprietors chose to make their wood burning ovens compliant with the new bylaw was to hook them up to natural gas. Natural gas is a fossil fuel, and while it might burn cleaner1 at the consumer end than wood, it is still a nasty and polluting substance to extract, refine and transport.
Some of this refining and transport in fact happens on the island of Montreal. In my fieldwork, I did a lot of smellwalking2 in the vicinities of the city’s 11 air quality monitoring stations and discovered a region in which odours of fossil fuel pollution on the air were significant. The borough of Montréal Nord is known for its industrial scapes along the St. Lawrence, including the Molson brewery, the Port of Montreal, and the large Suncor petroleum refinery. The borough consistently reports some of the city’s worst air quality numbers. It also contains many of the neighbourhoods with the highest proportion of low-income residents and residents of colour. It would be hard to imagine, should these residents start complaining about the pollution and stench around them, the city taking their complaints as seriously as the mostly-white and affluent Mile Enders.
By zooming out from the wood-burning bylaw, it became clear that the pollution and health risks had not been eliminated but rather displaced— onto those people and communities, such as Montréal Nord residents, for whom suffering the damages of pollution, is naturalized or expected. Therefore, I concluded, if we are to make effective air pollution policies, policy makers and activists need to attune ourselves to more than just directly sensible phenomena like odour and rather to the wider infrastructural, economic, and cultural systems that manufacture environmental threats for some people, while safeguarding others.
Today I pick back up my tools in an attempt to figure out what’s happening beyond the smokey scenes of the climate crisis and attune to more than just I can see, smell, or feel from my one body, my coordinate in space.
Necropolitical new normals
This year, in Winnipeg, I’ve been thinking about this season’s forest fires and what the intermittent haze of smoke might simultaneously be obscuring from my view and offering as a scent-trail to sniff out. In Manitoba in 2025, over 237 fires have burned 10,079,72 hectares of land and have displaced over 22,800 people. These are very high numbers.
Dr. Virginia Iglesias, an Environmental Data Scientist who spoke to CBC Manitoba in early June, warned however that fire seasons like this year’s should be considered the new normal— conditions we need to prepare for, not wait until the last minute to react to with emergency measures. “Fires are here to stay,” she said, “we need to learn to live with fire, and for that we need to shift from emergency response, from careful data-informed planning.”
Despite this, the response to the fires by various levels of governments has fallen more on the side of emergency response than planning. On May 30th, Premier Wab Kinew activated the Emergency Measures Act to put the province under a State of Emergency and issue evacuation orders to dozens of communities that lay in the path of the fires. While these evacuations were necessary, what Iglesias is asking is: what are we doing to protect these communities from the inevitable fires in times of non-emergency? The answer is basically nothing— which makes the use of emergency measures all that much more worthy of some side-eye.
While pieces of legislation like Manitoba’s Emergency Measures Act officially exist to remove regulatory hurdles that could delay time-critical disaster responses and save lives, philosopher Giorgio Agamben argues in his 2004 book State of Exception that they can also be used by those in power to exploit emergencies, exempting themselves from the democratic checks and balances that exist during ‘normal’ times. From this view, disasters3 and emergencies become desirable opportunities for profiteering and undemocratic backroom dealing.
Tracing the history of these ‘states of exception’ as he calls them, ranging from the Nazi party to the Patriot Act post 9-11, Agamben proposes that these suspensions of the normal rule of law have now become, rather than periodical occurences, the dominant paradigm of government— in other words, the new normal.
The phrase ‘the new normal’ has become an ominous shorthand many of us use for making sense of the experience of living through crisis after crisis. On one hand, the phrase can describe objective changes in the world around us and serve to manage the overwhelm we might feel about these changes— it’s normal now so I don’t have to worry, we say to ourselves. But by leaning heavily on concept of normalcy, the phrase can also perform rhetorical work, often aimed at suppressing public outrage and abdicating government responsibility. ‘Normal’ can help recast the consequences of negligence as inevitable.
The near-global cessation of public health measures despite the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic is a good example of this; we’ve been told we must ‘adapt to the new normal’, which is to let more people die. In this way, the new normal within escalating crises amounts to what philosopher Achille Mbembe calls necropolitics— a term that describes systems that function by setting some people up to suffer and die in order for the powerful to live comfortably.
In structural terms, necropolitics is what I observed in the case study of the wood-burning law in Montreal’s Mile End. The fact that the communities being evacuated in Manitoba were by and large Indigenous exemplifies Mbembe’s assertion that states of exception are key instruments of the necropolitical agenda of colonization.
Attuning to conspiracy
There have been several theories circulating on Facebook groups this season about the fires, some of which add local flavour to widespread online conspiracies. These include one theory that connects the wildfire evacuations in Manitoba to a United Nations ploy to consolidate populations to heavily-surveilled “smart cities”. Other theories express the more straightforward belief that the fires were started intentionally, or regardless of their ignition source, are being exploited as an opportunity to grab land and push forward resource projects without communities ability to stop it.
Even these latter theories have been dismissed due to the unverifiability of their exact claims. But I think such wholesale dismissal is lacking in moral imagination. Taken in context of history, throughout which Indigenous communities have been repeatedly done dirty by two-faced governments, the interpretation that being ordered off their land might leave that land vulnerable is not exactly an unwarranted or paranoid thought.
Perhaps the problem is in the details. A literal read of the situation, and indeed, a conspiracy theorist’s version of events, would have us taking Agamben’s concept literally: to suppose the Manitoba government enacted the State of Emergency as part of a series of premeditated steps part of a master plan to accomplish X Y Z.
From what I can find on record, the State of Emergency was only used to issue evacuation orders which were at face value more than justified. But if we are to (again) zoom out, we can quickly see how the emergency of the forest fires are but part of a patchwork of crises that interlock to create a nation-wide sense of urgency and overwhelm, and amidst which politicians across Canada have been pushing through hasty and even unconstitutional pieces of legislation.
The Carney Liberals have successfully used Trump’s trade war with Canada as the exceptional grounds to fast-track Bill C-5, a so-called national economic unification policy that seeks to bulldoze many of the checks and balances that are currently required before massive resource extraction projects can take place— important steps4 like environmental impact studies and getting consent from Indigenous communities.
The urgency and speed with which C-5 has been pushed through, and which it promises to effect for development projects, has been successfully spun as a matter of national necessity, not serious recklessness. The Bill was first read in the House of Commons on June 6th and given a seven-day window for review by Provincial, Territorial and First Nations government leaders. The Senate voted to approve C-5 into law on June 26th, just under three weeks later— an unimaginably short time for a legislative process that usually takes many months.
Furthermore, when C-5 was announced for review, the First Nations around northern Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Ontario were busy dealing with the forest fires5. Chief David Monias of Pimicikamak Cree Nation told APTN that when he got the notification, he was tied up with evacuation efforts: “I was too busy trying to help my people at the same time,” he said. While it would be hard to prove that C-5 was timed to take advantage of the forest fires, the effect is the same; my sympathy for the so-called conspiracists is high.
At the provincial level, similar accelerated economic development bills like Ontario’s Bill 5, and BC’s Bill 14 use phrases like “unleashing” and “streamlining” in their common language titles. Here in Manitoba, Premier Wab Kinew’s recent about-face on pipelines in proposing the development of a new mega pipeline to Churchill after promising when elected to never to build more pipelines in Manitoba is yet another unsettling example of how states of exception push the boundaries of what new ‘new normal’ people will tolerate.
This kind of all-out scrambling of the normal rule of law, and all the normal checks and balances it entails is the state of exception as Agamben articulated it post-9-11: constant, diffuse and as omnipresent as the smoke from the forest fires. In the haze, all manners of chaotic dealings are cloaked and hurried through. Dr. Iglesias’s expert call for more data-informed planning echoes in an empty room.
Sensing solidarity
The nature of forest fire smoke’s sensory impression is, to me, indicative of the disembodied and yet visceral nature of the climate crisis. It feels abstract until it hits the body, and then its sensory impact is impossible to ignore— even if only a distant scent on the air.
I am aware that talking about something as minor as smell in context of a situation like this is at risk of sounding frivolous6. But, to close, I want to argue the case for olfactory attunement as part of a strategy for public resistance to the necropolitical states of exception briefly outlined thus far.
First, the sense of urgency being manufactured and exploited by governments works best by keeping us in a frenzied mode of reaction and defence, rather than sustained, watchful awareness. As the sense we most often overlook, smelling provides a gentle cue to pay a slower kind of attention— when it’s possible and reasonable to do so, of course. Once you start, you quickly find that there is more to sniff out than you’d previously noticed7. No longer do we register only the amygdala-triggers of “smoke! danger!”; there are subtleties to detect, curiosities that arise. Is that a whiff of diesel? Where did it come from, I wonder? You can follow your nose to the larger questions that follow.
Second, paying attention to what you can smell is an important onramp to paying attention to what you can’t. As the study of the Mile End versus Montréal Nord shows, governments have a strong incentive to render public ‘bads’ like air pollution imperceptible to the most enfranchised populations. In its odorous omnipresence, wildfire smoke disorders this imperceptibility and therefore this power: it makes pollution— and risk— perceptible to those of us who aren’t otherwise willing or regularly forced to notice. However, to stop paying sensory attention at the edges of our backyards only passes on the permission to pollute somebody else’s.
And so, there must be a larger perceptive strategy at play that takes us beyond what we can perceive from our own little coordinates in space. While I love sensory studies, the embodied senses are not enough; they must work in tandem with what we might call the moral senses— a sense of justice, a sense of solidarity. Essayist Elaine Scarry writes about how the pain of others is the origin of doubt. The point I take from this is that believing others’ suffering is difficult as long as they remain others; that is to say, when we believe we are categorically exempt from their experiences.
But as Edmonton-based artist Christina Battle explores in her work on odour and air pollution, everyone’s bodies are intertwined and interconnected through the air we breathe. This is not to say we all breathe the exact same air, of course: smelling forest fire smoke hundreds of kilometres away comes with a different degree of risk than having fire at your doorstep.
Employed with a moral imagination, the subtle act of smelling can sensitize us to what’s on the air, and what’s coming for all of us. Through it, we might ask: how many more ‘new normals’ are we going to take before we stop choking and start to scream together? See you next time.
A Note
After this issue, I’ll be taking a little pause on WG. After 15 of these essays (or whatever it’s been) my well has been running a bit dry, and I need to take a bit of time to read, research, think, daydream, and generally replenish.
See you in your inboxes later this summer, I expect. xo
This fact about natural gas burning ‘clean’ at the consumer end is actually very debatable as more science comes in.
Read more about smellwalking in my last Waxing Gibbous post!
This is also talked about by Naomi Klein in Shock Doctrine
As Pam Palmater said on a recent episode of The Breach Show, environmental studies and Indigenous consent processes are not “red tape”, which is how they are cast by the finance fuck-os that run things— these are democratic, data-informed processes.
Still, despite the frantic timeline, C-5 received significant organized pushback from First Nations leaders and the environmental sector for being illegal in its contravention of UNDRIP’s stipulation of free, prior, and informed consent for development projects, which is now enshrined in Canadian law.
As the reaction to poor Dr. Ally Louks proved.
You can read my thesis methods section if you want to nerd out a bit more about how to smell and notice things! I also have a more imagination-based exercise I like to do that involves tuning into the air passing through my nose and into my lungs and imagining how its contents— particles, pollen, chemicals, volatiles— have travelled from far away to mix and absorb within my own body, possibly doing harm there. This contemplation makes it easier to imagine the concentrations of all these airborne substances at their sources— and the ways that my comfort comes at the expense of the death and debility of those who live at those sources.