Washington DC woke up on Tuesday to a high, thin skin of smoke from wildfires raging 4,800km away on the West Coast - as if to underline what is at stake when complex issues are reduced to oversimplified, binary and politically driven narratives.
Air quality in five major cities in Oregon was rated "hazardous" - the worst-ever recorded - in some cases literally off the scale altogether, as wildfires burnt a total of some 1.8 million hectares as of Tuesday, mostly in California and Oregon as well as Washington state and Idaho.
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