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Fire Weather
February 12, 2025
 
As the old year ended, we celebrated part of the holiday season with close-by daughter and grandchildren and intermittently spent time online with more far-flung offspring. The new year began quietly, our Wisconsin and Florida daughters and their families settled into post-holiday employment and pre- and post-graduate schooling. Our son in California left home for a short Asian holiday, enjoyed wrestling events in Japan and wandered briefly in Taiwan. I didn't hear from them often but, as usual, I calmly checked up occasionally on whatever localities they were experiencing. It didn't take long to raise my continental anxiety level.
 
Big storms were predicted for coastal Florida—we'd experienced some in our most recent autumn visits there—and I scanned the news daily, mostly to relief. But then, barely a week into January, alarming news about fierce fires in familiar California locales sent me online several times a day to locate where they were emerging and how they were expanding. The fires were widespread, though when I found our son's neighborhood on whatever telecast maps I located, I was at least briefly reassured. I couldn't know how much he learned in Asia about the Los Angeles fires, which were still raging when he soon returned home, but he then reported that his neighborhood was safe. Until the fires were finally subdued, and rainstorms eventually reassured us of their unlikely resurgence, I still checked in daily, mostly calming whenever he told us what conditions were like nearer to him. His neighborhood avoided the most ferocious blazes of the multiple fires surrounding it, but even after he was confirmed safe, I couldn't stop thinking about them.
 
By chance, among end-of-year birthday/Christmas giftbooks, I'd received John Vaillant's recent Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World. Reviewer Robert Macfarlane describes it as "a landmark in nonfiction reportage on the Anthropocene, or what Vaillant here calls 'the Petrocene'—that epoch defined primarily by humanly enhanced combustion." In a recent book of my own, I'd tried to replace the familiar term 'Holocene' with the more appropriate 'Anthropocene' but Fire Weather soon convinced me that 'Petrocene' should be the more accurate term. I quickly became deeply immersed in the book.
 
For me, Fire Weather was a long read: 359 pages of text in small print in three parts, with nearly fifty additional pages of Notes and Bibliography. The narrative's primary setting is Fort McMurray, a once thriving oil industry community in Alberta Province, due north of Montana between British Columbia and Saskatchewan, In May 2015 a tremendous fire devastated the area, sweeping over a vast portion of Alberta and some of Saskatchewan for several days. Vaillant sets up the background of the oil industry there in Part One, provides a deeply detailed account of the fires throughout Part Two, and in Part Three gives us an expansive overview of the future the oil industry and Canada's climate will have to face. I confess I was alarmed throughout the book's first two sections, continually in suspense over the fire's expanding growth and consequences, and then, in the third section, constantly distressed over implications regarding the future we all face because of the approach to climate that we've been engineering throughout the Anthropocene Epoch we're living in.
 
In the past, I suspect, most of us who decided to read about some calamity or another tended to approach the event as something occurring distantly, something one-of-a-kind, notable for its power and its scale but essentially remote from the rest of the world—from the daily living most of us experience. Vaillant acknowledges that, until recently, such stories were seen "as glimpses of a frightening and aberrant event outside normal time, in a place safely far away." He now suggests that they were—and are—"in fact . . . messages from the near future and from very close to home" and asserts that "extraordinary changes have taken place across the entire climate file": atmosphere, energy, forestry, and especially "fire itself". He reports that "a host of states and countries"—he specifically names 32 places from South Africa to North America, from Europe to Australia—where people would find themselves living in a landscape susceptible to fire. "Since 2016, even places we never considered capable of burning"—he mentions the Arctic, the Amazon, the moors of Britain, Notre-Dame Cathedral, Boulder, Colorado—have caught fire and burned.
 
Reporting on the history of the "kind of disruption" occurring "in the context of drought and rainfall," Vaillant informs us that it is "now referred to as a 'phase shift': a dramatic, effectively irreversible change in a region's climate regime. There is abundant evidence that phase shifts are now under way across much of the planet." The example of fire behavior he offers comes from California: "in the 1950s, the state's fire season lasted about four months; today, it is effectively year-round, and the acreage burned during the most severe seasons (1950 versus 2020) has increased eightfold (to say nothing of lives and property lost)." "In New Mexico," he adds, "fire weather days have increased by 120 percent since 1973." His book was published before the January 2025 fires in California.
 
The most discouraging aspect of fire's increasing presence and possibility is that, from a historical perspective, there was a time when fire at such a scale did not take place and only the intervention of human industry and the exploitation of natural resources have brought us to a time in history when reversing the climate change that we persist in keeping in motion may be impossible. Even if we stopped the relentless development of industry, we've likely gone too far to change its potential impact. The Anthropocene, the period of Earth history overwhelmed by human exploitation of natural resources, has probably actually become the Petrocene; the chemical impact on the climate everywhere has overwhelmed the period when people had charge and could have made better choices. In America, as confirmation, the current president has vowed to concentrate on industry and has thoroughly dismissed climatology.
 
Despite how troubled I am by what it portends, Fire Weather is a book everyone should read. As my grandchildren set out into the world of grownups—one will graduate from university this year, one will become a college sophomore, one become a freshman in the fall—I try not to cast my imagination too often into the future of the world they—and their children and their grandchildren—will be living in. For a while still, that's where, attentively, I'll be also be living.
 
Notes:
O'Connor, M. R., "Line of Fire," The New Yorker February 3, 2025: 12-16. An Annals of Disaster essay.
 
Vaillant, John. Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2024: 252, 354-355.
 
 
 

Once a Writer . . .

A phrase that begins with "Once a . . ." tends to end with "always a . . ." repeating the same noun after each opening. If I open this post with "Once a Writer . . ."—and include those three periods to indicate that something follows it—I hope that most readers will automatically add "Always a Writer." At least, I suspect that any reader who is also a writer will think that way. I like the construction and hope that "Once a reader, always a reader" would also be a reliable assertion, probably for all writers and hopefully for all children who are taught to read at an early age. But as a title for this series of posts it seems particularly apt for me.

 

Because I'm at an age where, when synapses open unexpectedly, I can't be sure they'll stay open very long or predictably reopen at my request, I've been hoping to find ways of making myself pay stricter attention to unplanned connections that catch my attention. Writing has usually been one way to do that over the years. It may be, in fact, that my reliance on writing has weakened my habit of remembering, since I suspect that, if I can't remember something, I may find out I've jotted it down somewhere. The trick is to remember where.

 

It used to be that English teachers taught students about free-writing, the act of composing spontaneously, informally, to wrestle with ideas or feelings and open synapses that give you freer access to them and more potential for expressing them more clearly in more formal drafts. I have long been someone who has trouble responding to certain emails—I never get letters or even postcards anymore—and usually delay until I've had time to free-write and then revise a response. Often I take so long that I don't respond at all. Online at Facebook I tend to simply hit the "Like" button rather than comment and reacting to sad or troubling news is particularly hard—I don't want to "like" news of a death or divorce or illness but repeating standard expressions of condolences seems inadequate.

 

Over the years I've been in the habit of writing books and essays and at the moment I've been avoiding trying to publish the last two books I completed. (It's the writing I'm interested in—the publishing has always been an afterthought.) But I have no new project in mind, nothing on the scale of another book-length venture, and neither have I been teaching writing lately, as I've done almost continuously for fifty years. Somehow I was pretty productive while simultaneously writing and teaching; not teaching and not writing gives me too much time to think about what I'm not doing. Social distancing adds another level of remoteness and I've begun to think that I've been social-distancing from myself a lot lately.

 

Friends encouraged me to start a blog, as they have also done, give myself an informal place to think on the digital page and occasionally send it out into the world. I could write about writing, or write about reading, or write about thinking about writing or reading. The blog part of it makes it less fraught than an essay or an article; the online part of it makes it a little more of a communication (even if I won't know if anyone else has read it) than a journal entry destined for a box in the garage (where years of them are piled). And at least, my friends remind me, I'll be writing again.

 

As it happens, things surface unexpectedly in my daily life, mostly in my habitual reading at the breakfast table or in a book I'm reading aloud while my wife prepares dinner or in my bedtime reading before sleep—an idea or a sentence in an article or an essay or a scene in a novel, an image in an illustration or in a cartoon or a film or television series we've watched at night—and they haunt me long enough that I feel the need to respond to them in words, mostly to find out why they haunt me, why they made me react the way I did, why I can't get them out of my mind. I keep logs for projects I'm working on, but those are geared toward ruminating about their progress or their problems; a blog would let me just react to whatever surfaces. I wouldn't have to post that particular entry, but I could. I'd let the entry itself tell me if it feels like going semi-public. Anyway, I'd be writing.

 

You know what they say: Once a writer . . .

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