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Miquette Thompson’s home in rural Mendocino county has been covered in smoke all week. There are the nearby Feliz and Woodside fires in northern California, which have burned more than 1,000 acres, as well as the wildfires devastating Oregon and Washington that are sending smoke their way, too.
“It’s become not unusual,” she said of walking outside and seeing a hazy sky.
The wildfire smoke means dangerous air quality for her under-resourced, “wee rural little area”, Thompson said. Wildfire smoke is potentially unsafe for all populations, but particularly for elderly people and those with respiratory conditions. Hospitalizations for asthma go up 10% on smoke days, according to a recent University of California study.
Having locally organized around safety amid airborne illness for years – distributing free personal protective equipment (PPE) to neighbors and Covid tests at farmers markets – Thompson said she watched as the local health department failed to distinguish which types of masks help with smoke issues (N95 masks are better at filtering out tiny particles; cloth or surgical masks are less effective). So with her fellow organizers at Mendo Clean Air Club, she began partnering with local businesses that offered to distribute masks, too.
Mendo Clean Air Club is one of over 40 clean air clubs around the world. Launched by Emily Dupree, a Chicago resident, the first club lent out air purifiers to touring musicians during Covid. Now, Clean Air Clubs and Mask Blocs – a mutual aid practice for sharing masks – are offering free masks and air purifiers from their “lending libraries” to help their local communities stay safe from wildfire smoke and monitor air quality. Mask Bloc Los Angeles, for example, handed out more than 300,000 masks in two weeks during the catastrophic January 2025 LA fires.
“Covid and climate change are two major pillars of collective denial in the last decade,” said Dupree. “So though our lending library was created in response to one kind of public failure – namely a failure of public health, which is still ongoing – it can serve as a solution in response to this second failure, of governments to adequately address the growing threat of climate change, of worsening wildfires and worsening air quality.”
When wildfire smoke was negatively affecting Chicago air quality in July, Dupree noticed that their lending library of 15 purifiers was not fully booked. “It just didn’t sit right with me,” she said. So they started encouraging people struggling with the smoke to reserve purifiers, which they could retrieve from a storage unit; within hours, the library was fully booked, she said.
“We are able to mobilize clean air resources extremely quickly because we are not dealing with bureaucracy or red tape,” Dupree said. “We just get the purifiers placed where they’re needed as quickly as possible.”
This speed and access are particularly helpful for populations with underlying health conditions. When then-president Joe Biden declared the Covid emergency “over” in 2023, Shannon Durkin, a Mask Bloc Delaware organizer – who is especially vulnerable due to her cystic fibrosis – thought her life was functionally over, too. Since the first US lockdown in March 2020, and the ensuing anti-public health backlash, she’s felt excised from participating in public life. She has faced discrimination when going out in her respirator, surrounded by collective denial that Covid and other viral illnesses are still dangerous.
In 2024, Durkin and her husband Jimmy helped launch Mask Bloc Delaware, distributing KN95 masks at protests and partnering with other organizing groups, such as the local Food Not Bombs and DSA chapters. In July, they walked around Wilmington, Delaware, as wildfire smoke from Canada permeated the east coast to distribute PPE. The Durkins said people were surprisingly enthusiastic about receiving it, not even realizing the possible health risks of the air quality. They were also able to drop masks off at various local businesses for distribution.
Organizers say the work of Clean Air Clubs and Mask Blocs feels more necessary than ever, as the current administration continues to cast doubt on the usefulness of masks and the severity of the Covid pandemic that in 2020 killed more than 350,000 Americans.
Thompson said she navigates any Covid hesitancy by explaining to residents how it can affect their health, their families and their livelihoods. “The big message that’s gotten through in a rural, underfunded region is that we can’t afford to get sick or to get long Covid,” said Thompson. “A lot of us are manual laborers or use our bodies for work in some way. We just don’t have the resources here to manage that.”
Awareness of Clean Air Clubs continues to grow; Dupree even created a Google doc breaking down how others can start their own. Organizers say being part of these mutual aid groups can offer hope in a time of hopelessness.
“A lot of people, when they’re looking at the various horrors of the world, can feel overwhelmed and then stuck regarding what they should do about it,” said Dupree. “But what this shows us is that even if you decide to focus on one problem, it turns out usually what you come up with is going to be able to pivot and solve other problems that you didn’t initially try to address. There’s a kind of freedom in that.”
