On a Friday evening at the beginning of the month, I sat on a rooftop patio along a main street in Edmonton as ash floated down from the sky and into my friend’s beer.

Hours later, my phone blared with the third evacuation alert of that evening, notifying people in a nearby county to evacuate because of approaching wildfires. I returned home to discover I had left my windows open. When I crawled into my bed, it smelled like a campfire.

The next day, as tens of thousands of people were forced from their homes, Alberta’s premier Danielle Smith declared a state of emergency. Soon, more than a hundred wildfires were burning across Alberta.