Smoke season is not normal. Stop pretending it is.

As another plume of wildfire smoke blanketed Calgary a week after writing this column, the Air Quality Health Index climbed into the “very high risk” category. Government advisories told us to stay indoors, avoid strenuous activity and check on vulnerable loved ones.

For many, it’s a now familiar drill. Just another day in Canada’s new climate rhythm: check the air quality index like the weather, cancel soccer practice if the air is thick, shrug and say, “I guess this is summer now.”

But this normalization terrifies me.

I’m a physician, a father of two young children and someone who used to love biking to work. When I woke up recently and saw the haze, I hesitated. I’d biked the day before and enjoyed the exercise, the fresh(ish) air, the chance to feel like I was doing something positive. But biking through wildfire smoke just didn’t feel worth it. I drove instead.

When I arrived, I saw two of my colleagues — both climate-conscious, clean-energy champions — rolling in on their road bikes, smiling, sweaty, unbothered. I joked that they were “brave.” But inside, I felt something closer to heartbreak.

It wasn’t jealousy. It wasn’t about individual decisions. What unsettled me was what their cycling symbolized: how quickly we’re adapting to disaster. How even those who understand the science — the urgency, the injustice — are adjusting to this as if it’s just part of life.

This isn’t a callout of them. We all make trade-offs. I’ve made my own imperfect choices — some far less healthy or sustainable than biking in the smoke.

But I’m haunted by how easily we move on.

We treat smoke like weather. We build apps to manage it. We compare it to last year’s average. We forget that just a decade ago, this level of smoke wasn’t “summer.”

What we’re experiencing is a shifting baseline — a gradual recalibration of what counts as “normal.” And in that shift, we risk something more than comfort: we risk forgetting who’s responsible.

Because this was not inevitable.

Fossil fuel companies knew as early as the 1970s that their products would destabilize the climate. Instead of changing course, they buried the evidence, seeded doubt and lobbied against clean alternatives. They weren’t just complicit — they were deliberate.

To normalize the smoke season is to absolve them. To say this is “just the way things are,” is to let decades of deception and greed fade into the rearview mirror. And I’m not ready to do that.

Nor should we.

There’s a term in mental health called “moral injury”— the psychic toll of witnessing or participating in actions that violate one’s sense of right and wrong. For me, living through wildfire smoke with young children — knowing it was preventable — feels like a kind of slow-motion moral injury. We’re expected to just carry on. But I can’t shake the grief. And I’m not sure that I want to.

Grief, after all, is a form of remembering.

And remembering is resistance.

So what do we do with this grief?

We speak it. We refuse to let the smoke become background noise. We push governments to hold polluters accountable — not just through carbon pricing and net-zero timelines, but by naming the historical role of deception.

We challenge the narrative that everything is under control because we have apps and filters and advisories. Those are bandages. We need transformation.

We raise our kids with both honesty and hope — not pretending things are fine, but showing them what courage looks like in an age of collapse: community, accountability and clarity.

And maybe we allow ourselves the pause. The decision not to bike when the air burns. The permission to grieve. Because pretending we’re okay when we’re not isn’t resilience — it’s resignation.

And I’m not ready to resign.

Andrew Szava‑Kovats is a Calgary‑based physician and father of two. He writes about the intersection of climate, health, and justice.