> Researchers say that laws intended to combat air pollution don’t address increasingly important sources, such as wildfires and dust.

Yes, because wildfires are so good at obeying laws passed to regulate them...

We talk about "fire season" out here now (Treasure Valley, southwest Idaho) as a distinct season - often overlapping with summer and fall, but sometimes doing other things. It's the time when the air ranges from "a bit gross" to "quite human-toxic." It sucks, and really wasn't a thing before about 7-8 years ago. You'd have the occasional "smoke day," but it wasn't a distinct season.

Some years, it's not bad - 2022 wasn't bad, we had some days that were bad, a couple weeks of "Eh, this isn't great to be in..." - but that was about it. Last year, from June to somewhere in October was just vile to be out in.

I've started trying to more deliberately manage indoor and personal air quality (which, yes, is slightly at odds with my winter kerosene lantern habits, but different things for different seasons). We have a "box filter" sort of arrangement on a fan in one of the rooms in the house that's gone from being a seasonal thing to "always on, fan speed varies based on how bad the air is." Indoor PM in the winter is quite low, and even when it's vile outside in the summer, I can usually keep indoor air quality more or less acceptable. Though CO2 levels climb due to the lack of venting... pick your poisons, literally.

My social circle has largely settled on 3M half face painter's masks with P100 filters for outdoor work during smoke season (and they're handy the rest of the year too if you're mowing or trimming - it keeps the pollen and dust out of your lungs too). The newer "white with pink stripes" filters breathe better than the old pink ones, and while I wouldn't really want to go running in them, you certainly could. A few of us are looking at how to do something more PAPR-like with a face mask, for less than the cost of the "certified" solutions. Tired of my eyes burning when outside...

My office has a HEPA filter I run basically all day in the summer, which helps with PM levels in my shoffice (shed office). Again, you can kind of trade CO2 and PM and a few other things, though I'm seriously considering an algae based absorber...

There's no great solution, unfortunately. The jokes about "being out of forest to burn" run squarely into the reality of "Most of the western US forest hasn't burned yet," and we're far from out of areas that can burn given incentive. The last 80 years of forest management of "not letting it burn" has caught up to us, and until it's all burned back down to a sustainable level, this is likely to be the future. Unfortunately, decades of debris buildup means that when a forest (not if, when) lights, you get incredibly destructive crowning fires that just sterilize an area, not the lower burns that leave stronger pines intact (consider that many pines require fire for their cones to open - that requires a pine cone left behind after the fire has gone through).

But a couple years on a set of furnace filters for indoor air cleaning, wrapped around a box fan, is well worth doing at this point. As is a P100 mask of some variety for outdoor use in these conditions. Neil Stephenson's "Earthsuits" are a concept whose time, unfortunately, seems to be coming.