Thirteen years ago, I traded a shoe-box apartment on the east side of Manhattan for a cabin in the woods on the west coast of Canada. Like so many would-be Thoreauvians before me, I moved here in part because I craved an escape from the city’s pollution and noise. In that time, however, I have begun to feel the city — which is to say, the whole tangled system of advanced technology, industrial agriculture and hypercapitalism — crowding in on this little forest from afar.

Each wildfire season, the sky outside my cabin now turns a shade of nicotine yellow I associate with Los Angeles in the 1970s. On the smokiest days, news headlines declare that our air quality is “worse than New Delhi’s,” which is to say, worse than in one of the most polluted cities on earth. The inverse is true, as well. One hot day this July, as clouds of smoke oozed south from Ontario, I drove through New York City and saw the buildings washed in the same sallow light I’m used to seeing during wildfire season back home.

As the climate continues warming, this spooky entanglement between the urban and the sylvan will only deepen. In doing so, it has revealed to me what is normally hidden from view: We all live under the same vengeful sky. A lifelong, bone-deep atheist, I didn’t use to view the earth’s climate as some kind of god to be feared and placated. In fact, I tended to look askance at people who used religious language to make sense of the essential chaos of natural disasters.

Often, the places hardest hit by catastrophic droughts, floods and storms are rural communities in nations where the average person’s carbon footprint is minuscule, like Nepal and the Philippines. Here in Canada, Indigenous people make up just 5 percent of the overall population, but in 2025 they made up more than 50 percent of wildfire evacuees. Such is the nature of what the climatologist Friederike Otto calls “climate injustice.” So when the smoke descends upon us each summer, I can’t find much wisdom in talk of “ecological sin” or “climate karma,” which presumes a tidy logic of personal comeuppance.