John’s Day Vaillant’s new book on wildfires in Canada, Burning Weather: A True Story from a Hotter Worldbroke out in the US, wildfires in Canada became a temporary American obsession.
The sky over the northeastern United States turned orange, opaque, and dangerous due to more than 400 infers in Canada’s vast boreal forests in early June. New York City’s air quality worsened. world, choking on smoke from Quebec. Philadelphia urges residents to stay indoors. Fire weather, really. Great publicity for Vaillant, but Therefore bleak—such as the release of a book on the pandemic in March 2020 or the history of terrorist attacks in September 2001.
fire weather is the account of an earlier wildfire in Canada, which started burning in May 2016 and stopped completely until a year later. Originally named Fire 009 but eventually called Fort McMurray fire, it is named after the city it devastated in northern Alberta. It forced 100,000 people to evacuate in one day. And even though there were miraculously no casualties, the damage to the land was still catastrophic. Vaillant writes: “Whole neighborhoods burned to the bottom beneath a towering cloud of pyrocumulus commonly found on erupting volcanoes. Overall, the fire burned more than 2,500 structures across 2,300 square miles of forest.
Until last week, it was most costly disaster in Canadian history. Although the specific fires that have produced smoke blowing into the United States are not explicitly linked directly for climate crises like those that often occur in Western Canada (or California, for that matter), they still flare up at a time when planet warming is increasing the frequency and intensity of these events. forest fire.
Vaillant’s book provides important context for how the world’s forests have become more combustible. fire weather zoom in, fold in on the rapid history of white settlement in northern Alberta, asphalt production and climate denialism to explain more than just what happened when Fort McMurray burned (“The hottest, driest May percent fire weather conditions in recorded history, following a two-year drought in a city suddenly filled with twenty-five thousand boxes gasoline”) but also Why this exact set of conditions arose in the first place.
Understanding this particular fire requires understanding the city it burned. Almost all of its inhabitants work in oil. Like similar urban booms in North Dakota and Texas, Fort McMurray attracts hard workers willing to endure long hours, fast pace, and isolated lifestyles in exchange for high wages. The median household income is close to $200,000. One resident told Vaillant that the city hardly ever has any funerals, as people leave before they get old. Fort McMurray lies in the middle of the Athabasca Tar Sands, a vast reservoir of natural asphalt—a sticky, semi-solid petroleum that is also known as asphalt—now considered the focal point of the lucrative oil and gas industry. of Canada.
Bitumen mining is a complex, resource-intensive process, but major corporations such as Syncrude, Suncor, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Sinopec have all established extremely expensive operations to profit from the rocky land. and this tar. “Fort McMurray has become the centerpiece of the largest, most expensive and most energy-intensive hydrocarbon recovery project on Earth. Vaillant writes: “The rough estimate of the investment to date is half a trillion dollars. And when the fire broke out in May 2016, all these mining projects had to come to an abrupt halt.
I should note: This is not a simple disaster story, nor is it a character-driven story. Vaillant introduces the residents of Fort McMurray and describes how they survived the fire, but in rather sketchy sketches—after completing the book, there is no sense of actually knowing them. There is much depth in characterization that one can get from watching a short interview on television. Instead, there’s an entire chapter on the basic nature of fire. Sample line: “The essence of fire is to strive upwards—in other words, to desire, literally ‘breathing desire in’ and ‘rising up’ as well.” Heaven is lost And Macbeth is quoted.
Vaillant’s stories of depth and literary flourish are largely captivating, though I might not have done it without a curious footnote linking the national obesity rate and the use of gas. I really wish he’d described some of the individual residents he’d outlined in more depth, especially since Fort McMurray attracts such a specific, intense, and often compelling type of person.
