When you step outside and this air is hazy and smells like smoke it makes you think about the times when it was clear, kind of like when you have a cold and you realize you didn’t appreciate all the times you could breathe out of your nose without stuffiness.

As smoke from wildfires in Canada moves into our area, and much of the country, the skies have turned dark and hazy and the air quality has jumped to strikingly high numbers. Those who are at risk with health conditions such as asthma, or those who are pregnant, young, or elderly, should limit time outdoors as much as possible (see more information from our Public Health Department on page 1A).

But what about those whose livelihood depends on being outside? They must make a difficult choice, or have no choice at all but to keep working. Think of the farmers, construction workers and others who are inhaling the smoke.

The air quality concern comes at the same time as brutal heat, making being outside nearly unbearable.

While smoke from Canadian wildfires has reached other parts of the country in the past, it has become more frequent and more severe in recent years.

Most of us can remember the record-breaking Quebec fires in the summer of 2023 that produced the most severe surface smoke event in decades for New York City and much of the Northeast.

Seeing the air so hazy is a reminder that clean air is essential to a healthy society and to life. The same is to be said for water, which has a history of being threatened in the U.S.

Today, data centers bring a renewed threat to water. Not only do data centers require a ton of water to cool the systems to operate, but some places where data centers have been built are experiencing brown water coming from the taps in homes.

This week, New York enacted a one-year moratorium on new data centers, the first state in the country to do so.

Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order relating to the moratorium, which also included provisions for future data center development, such as studying the environmental impacts, requiring data center operators to pay for their own energy supply, and providing guidance to local entities (see article on page 1A).

We hope that this is a step that will provide protection to our resources down the line.

If we don’t have clean air and clean water, then what do we have?