Every morning I walk outside. I have done it for over a decade, here in the hills of Northern Thailand. It is the non-negotiable part of my day — the light coming over the mountains, the mist in the valleys, and getting some much-needed steps in before planting myself in front of the laptop.
This week, I could not see the mountains.
I could not see the trees at the edge of my land. I could barely see across the field. The AQI reading at our house was sitting between 1,274 and 1,630. Way beyond the "hazardous" threshold — the level at which health authorities tell you to stay indoors — which is 300. I was breathing air that was more than five times that. My eyes were stinging before I had taken ten steps.
I went back inside.
Look at the two photographs in the header image. Both are taken from the same spot on my morning walk. The left is February 20. The right is March 30 — thirty-eight days later. I want you to sit with that for a moment, because no statistic I can give you will be as honest as those two images side by side.
This is not haze. This is not a bad week. This is an emergency.
On March 30, 2026, IQAir ranked Chiang Mai the world's most polluted city, with an AQI of 233. The next day, the NASA FIRMS satellite captured what you can see in the image below — South and Southeast Asia blanketed in fire, Thailand almost entirely red. According to the Bangkok Post, 4,291 fires were burning in Thailand alone that day, including 2,192 in protected forest areas and 1,591 in national forest reserves.
Almost all of them were deliberately set.
By the end of the month, seventeen northern provinces were forecast to see PM2.5 levels rise further, with PM2.5 concentrations reaching as high as 198.3 micrograms per cubic metre in some areas — against a WHO safe standard of 15. On March 31 alone, Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Nan, Phayao, Lamphun, Lampang, Phrae, and Mae Hong Son were all listed among Thailand's ten most PM2.5-affected provinces. Children in Chiang Rai were being hospitalized with nosebleeds. Hospitals were stockpiling supplies and distributing masks to bedridden patients who could not protect themselves.
This is the worst I have seen in more than a decade of living here. And I have seen some bad years.
What makes this one harder to bear is that it did not have to be this bad.
Earlier this year, there was real reason for hope. Government rhetoric around burning bans had sharpened. Enforcement patrols were increased. Under Thai law, anyone who starts a fire in a protected state forest can face fines from 400,000 to 2 million baht and prison terms of 4 to 20 years. Five suspects had been arrested since the January 1 ban came into force. Satellites were being used to track hotspots in real time. I allowed myself, cautiously, to think this year might be different.
It was not different. It was worse.
Local officials identified a pattern of fires breaking out in steep, remote areas during the evening, suggesting deliberate human activity. The fires kept coming. The smoke kept building. The temperature inversions that trap pollution in these mountain valleys did their work, as they do every year, and the air turned the colour of the photograph on the right.
I am not naive about why some people burn. Slash-and-burn agriculture is deeply embedded in how land is cleared and prepared across this region, and the economics of changing that behaviour are real and not simple. You cannot tell someone to stop burning without offering them something to burn differently for. But this week, many of the fires burning in these hills are not clearing crop waste — they are burning forest. The reasons are harder to know and harder to excuse.
Biochar Life and others are working on the agricultural side of this — converting agricultural waste into biochar instead of smoke, turning a pollutant into a carbon sink, giving farmers an income from doing things differently. We are one small part of a large and complicated answer. I say that plainly, not to promote ourselves, but because I believe it is true and because I think it matters that solutions exist. They do. They work. They are just not yet at the scale the problem demands. The forest fires are a harder problem still, and one that solutions like ours only marginally touch.
I chose to live here. I chose these hills, this valley, this air. I built a life and a mission around the belief that the burning could be stopped, that the skies could be cleared, that the farmers who set these fires could become the people who ended them. I still believe that. But on a morning when I cannot see twenty metres from my door, belief feels thin.
The people who bear the real cost of this are not the CEOs, not the policy makers, not the researchers writing about it from cities with clean air. They are the farmers whose children are breathing this. The elderly people in villages with no air purifiers and no way out. The communities where nosebleeds and chest pain have become seasonal facts of life, unremarked upon, absorbed.
From anyone who reads this and holds any influence over any part of this system, we need urgency proportional to the scale of what is happening. Not press releases. Not patrols that cannot reach remote hillsides at night. Not another year of good intentions that dissolve into smoke.
The NASA image shows what this looks like from space. Zoom in. Find Thailand. That is where I live. That is where 70 million people live. That is where, on the morning I am writing this, the air quality at my front door is still registering five times the hazardous threshold.
I would like to walk outside tomorrow and see the mountains again.