The most compelling, timely, and terrifying book I’ve read in a long time

Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World is the 45^th book I’ve read this year, and the one that offers the heftiest gut punch.

Today is Independence Day in the United States, and as I write this, it’s about 95º and windy outside my rural Oregon home (and I just received an alert that a brush fire has erupted a few roads north of us—there’s a Red Flag Warning for dangerous fire conditions).

I despise July 4^th more and more every year, as it is famously celebrated with an orgy of incendiaries that for years tortured my beloved dogs, but now also perennially provokes (or amplifies) the fear and likelihood of yet another devastating wildfire season.

And yet, we will, once again, collectively just blow things up to celebrate this country’s exuberant “fuck you” to the crown and virtually every other limit to our “freedom” (including and especially environmental limits) to do absolutely whatever we want.¹

This morning I walked outside my house and was greeted once again with wildfire smoke. There’s a wildfire burning nearby in Washington State, just across the Columbia River, but most of the smoke is from the Canada wildfires, whose historic fire season has blanketed in smoke much of North America, extending all the way to Europe.

We seem to say “historic” about wildfire seasons every single year now.

For me and my family, the beginning of a true understanding of what wildfire season will feel like in the midst of fossil-fuel driven climate change was the year 2020. Up until that wildly tumultuous year, my wife and I had lived in rural Oregon for over 15 years and never experienced a wildfire that came close to requiring our evacuation (others in Oregon, and obviously California, were already well familiar).

But after a mandatory evacuation from our house during the 2020 Labor Day fires, we have been nearly evacuated by wildfires two more times in the less than three years since.

Fire Weather

All of this is to say that John Vaillant’s brilliant book about the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire feels even more relevant and vsiceral than it might have in 2016, and offers those experiencing for the first time the toxic smoke of Canada’s climate-change-fueled wildfires a more immediate understanding of just how doomed we really are by our historic actions (and, more importantly, inactions).

Having so many options for unprecedented wildfires to choose from, it serves Vaillant’s purposes to focus primarily on the Fort McMurray fire for several reasons, chief among them the town’s deep ties to the fossil-fuel industry, serving as it does as North America’s largest and dirtiest bitumen (tar sands) producer, with the world’s third largest oil reserve (such as it is).

Vaillant uses this irony to investigate and convey the deeply symbiotic relationship between humans and fire, and to describe in detail wildfire behavior in the 21^st Century, the history of petroleum extraction in Canada (and specifically, the difficulty, inefficiency, and prodigious pollution of bitumen extraction and processing), and the vast historical record of those who raised alarm about the potential for coal- and fossil-fuel emissions to dangerously warm the planet (including Eunice Newton Foote—an American scientist, inventor, and suffragist—whose study (in 1856!) demonstrated that rising CO₂ levels would change the atmosphere and result in a greenhouse effect leading to climate change).

The power of Vaillant’s book isn’t just in the subject matter, but also in his prose. His style is both revelatory and dramatic, a quality of prose that’s largely successful at its task of being commensurate with the apocalyptic stakes he’s describing.

As Americans everywhere drive their massive trucks to retrieve small bombs to belligerently ignite on this, our Independence Day, I hope they will consider taking some time to read this book.

Scientists, it could be said, are the designated drivers of our society: sober, responsible, and vigilant, their job is to tell us when we’ve had enough, and try to get us safely home. Since the 1950s, when Gilbert Plass and Roger Revelle were telling anyone who would listen that business as usual would have catastrophic consequences, climate scientists have been waving at us from the wings, politely saying, “Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” Nature, in its way, has been waving, too: where there’s fire there’s smoke, and where there’s smoke there’s carbon dioxide. Our civilization, our engines, and our markets are not the only things that have been supercharged by fossil fuels. Our atmosphere is a weather engine, and it has been supercharged, too.

It’s terrifying that even now, with the consequences so evident, our politics, our will, and even our attention, are nowhere close to being able to collectively address the perilous world we’ve made.

In summary of Vaillant’s brilliant book, we seem to be so obsessed with all forms of fire—among them internal combustion and, yes, fireworks—that we’re unable do what’s necessary to avoid burning ourselves alive, even if we know exactly what needs to be done (and have for some time).