Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast

 

Wildfires live and die by the weather, but “the weather” doesn’t mean the same thing it did in 1990, or even a decade ago, and the reason the Fort McMurray Fire trended on newsfeeds around the world in May 2016 was not only because of its terrifying size and ferocity, but also because it was a direct hit — like Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans — on the epicenter of Canada’s multibillion-dollar petroleum industry. That industry and this fire represent supercharged expressions of two trends that have been marching in lockstep for the past century and a half. Together, they embody the spiraling synergy between the headlong rush to exploit hydrocarbons at all costs and the corresponding increase in heat-trapping greenhouse gases that is altering our atmosphere in real time. In the spring of 2016, halfway through the hottest year of the hottest decade in recorded history, a new kind of fire introduced itself to the world.

I’ve read John Vaillant before — I thought that The Tiger was the perfection of a multidisciplinary approach to nonfiction storytelling — and when I began Fire Weather and realised it was about the Fort Mac wildfire of 2016 (a national tragedy that mesmerised and horrified Canadians as it unfolded), I was 100% enthralled. As the human side of this fire was revealed — riveting and emotional stories from the firefighters and the city’s evacuees that display an amazing level of research and interviews on Vaillant’s part — my engagement was ramped up. And when the next section of the book turned to the science behind wildfires and discussed the undeniable evidence that human activity has caused the Earth to get hotter — that we have gone past the tipping point and entered feedback loops that will see hotter temperatures and more extreme wildfires worldwide going forward — I was dead horrified. But when the third section of the book went on to discuss bigger wildfires around the world — notably in Australia and California — that saw greater damage and loss of life, I had to wonder why Vaillant chose the relatively less impactful Canadian story to focus on. And then it dawned on me that it was because, as revealed in that opening quote, Vaillant was able to use the Fort McMurray tragedy as a rhetorical device to equate the greed and rapacity of a wildfire to the greed and rapacity of resource extraction — with the undeniable irony of “the epicenter of Canada’s petroleum industry” being ground zero for a disaster caused by the effects of that very industry — and although he stops short of writing that the tens of thousands of petrochemical workers who came to Fort Mac from across the country and around the world who lost everything in that fire had it coming, he does point out that these workers had a particular penchant for large pickup trucks and other gas-burning toys. And this realisation rubbed me the wrong way. Fire Weather is both an incredible cross-disciplinary account of our warming world and a timely warning about our future of untamable wildfires — interspersed with engaging human stories of how these infernos are experienced on the ground — but I found something so off-putting about Vaillant’s use of the Fort-McMurray-Fire-as-rhetorical-device that I can’t help but remove half a star, and find myself further wanting to round down to four. I still think everyone should read this well-researched, eye-opening work. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

A photo taken from an airplane window late on the night of May 3 shows a vast and luminous smoke cloud where the city had been while, high above, the northern lights blaze across the sky. In another age, this might have been an omen worthy of formal record, but that night, it was just one more illumination from the twenty-first century, captured in this smartphone-crowdsourced record of apocalyptic visions.

From the beginning I was wondering why Vaillant (born in the US but living and writing in Canada; opening here with a Canadian disaster and the efforts of this country’s first responders) was talking in miles and degrees Fahrenheit. When he writes that the “blue chip” outfits to work at in Fort McMurray were Syncrude and Suncor and then translates,“Working for these companies is the boreal equivalent to working for Exxon or Shell”, I had to wonder, “Who is he explaining this to? I don’t exactly know how cool 40°F is, but I know who Syncrude is.” When Vaillant gets to the second section, however, and the climate science (terrifying and undeniable) is followed by the discouraging history of alarm-ringing scientists appearing before (American) Congressional committees since the 1950s (turns out that the petrochemical industry has always known about the greenhouse effect and its world-burning endgame, but, money), I had to acknowledge that Fire Weather was meant for a larger (American) audience and our localised disaster was merely the opening rhetorical salvo. (And I suppose I would have been less annoyed if Vaillant hadn’t started this book with named individuals crying and praying in their Ford F150s as they attempted to flee Fort Mac at a crawl through a literal tunnel of flames; it feels icky to humanise only to generalise.)

The science of wildfires is fascinating and it was definitely frightening to learn that they are evolving in ways so unprecedented — as in the “fire tornado”, a phenomenon witnessed for the first time ever, outside Canberra in 2003 that was three miles high, one mile wide, and so hot that it literally vapourized houses as it moved over them — that we have no tools for fighting or containing them. Every country in Europe — including ice-covered Greenland — experienced a wildfire in 2022 (a phenomenon recorded for the first time ever); as the tundra melts and long-covered peat reserves begin to burn uncontrollably, Canada’s vast boreal forest can no longer be considered a net carbon sink; every time we live through the “hottest August ever recorded”, we should be acknowledging that it’s probably also the coolest August any of us will experience for the rest of our lives — and this hot air mixed with low humidity is a wildfire waiting to happen.

Factoids that blew my mind:

Fire, as far as we know, is unique to our planet.

If all of Alberta’s pipelines were lined up end to end, they would span the gap between Fort McMurray and the moon, with enough leftover to wrap the equator.

“Artist, inventor, citizen scientist and early suffragist” Eunice Newton Foote performed some simple experiments in 1856 that demonstrated the greenhouse effect; facts she then shared with the Annual Meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Science in Albany, NY. A hundred years later, director Frank Capra collaborated with Bell Telephone on some educational films and made The Unchained Goddess — about the links between pollution and climate change — which was shown in schools to millions of young baby boomers. We can’t say that we weren’t warned.

On the other hand, it’s hard to know what to make of the following:

By the early 1990s, Republican attitudes toward environmental action of virtually any kind had turned decidedly negative. Meanwhile, energy producers and manufacturers used this extraordinary turnabout as an opportunity to promote even more carbon-intensive products, including plastics (recall the sudden explosion of bottled water in the early 1990s, simultaneous with the first Gulf War).

Was the explosion of the bottled water industry really driven more by the petrochemical industry than by Nestle and Coca-Cola seeing a profit opportunity? Questioning that made me wonder about this: Near the end, Vaillant explains the many ways that the fossil fuel industry is under critical pressure — large insurers are dropping worksites and pipelines as customers; blue chip investment funds are divesting themselves of petrochemical companies; many class action lawsuits are being brought against specific companies for knowingly destroying the planet — and while that may seem like we are at the beginning of the end of burning greenhouse-gas-causing-fuels, and although Vaillant quotes Vaclav Smil (the world-leading expert on energy) several times throughout Fire Weather, Vaillant does not quote from Smil’s latest book (How the World Really Works), in which Smil explains why we simply cannot stop burning fossil fuels in the foreseeable future (or forego plastics; one of Smil’s “four pillars of the modern world”). Without in any way denying that burning fossil fuels has caused our current warming world — and acknowledging that we are in for ever longer and more intense “fire seasons” in the future — if we can’t stop releasing CO2, what should we actually be focussing on? Exploiting the Alberta oil sands might be an energy-intensive, environment-contaminating, low-return industry that has no business being in the centre of the increasingly-more-flammable boreal north, but is shipping Saudi oil across the oceans the better option? (Is carbon capture viable? Please?)

In 2016, people who raised the question of climate change in the context of Fort McMurray, or its fire, were ignored, accused of exploiting a tragedy or, worse, kicking a man when he was down. The province’s brief and contentious dalliance with a slightly more liberal government happened to overlap with the fire and ended abruptly afterward with a return to, and hardening of, the industry-friendly United Conservative Party, among whose devotees Donald Trump is considered an ally and, increasingly, a role model.

Again: I’m left feeling like Vaillant exploited the Fort McMurray tragedy here for rhetorical reasons — weirdly branding all Alberta conservatives as Trump fans for political reasons — and I found it off-putting. On the other hand: The writing — the science, the history, the human element — was so well done that this is closer to a five star read, would likely not be off-putting to most readers, and the message is so important that I hope it is widely read upon release.