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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.
 
 
 

Dear Me

I've been a little behind in my reading of our subscriptions. Whenever we go away for a few weeks, as we now do each autumn, our copies of The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review pile up and even by the end of the year we haven't caught up. Somehow, though, probably hurrying to find something to read at breakfast before we left the house for the day, I happened upon "Dear Me," an essay by Ann Napolitano in the NYTBR. It recounts how, inspired by a passage in Emily of New Moon by L.M. Montgomery in which the title character writes a letter to her future self, Ann at 14 wrote herself a letter that "described the current state of my life and listed my hopes and dreams for myself 10 years later." Wrestling against impulse, she didn't open the letter until her 24th birthday and was "horrified" at what "an absolute fool" her teenaged self seemed to her to be. But then she wrote another letter, to be opened at age 34, and at 34 wrote one to be opened at age 44, and at 44 wrote still another to be opened at age 54. She still has six years to wait before opening that last one. She describes the thrill of opening those pages she hasn't seen in a decade: "Who will I find in the envelope? Will I be surprised?" She wonders how many such letters she will have written by the end of her life and "love(s) the idea of the oldest version of me—how old will she be?—reading through the page, probably laughing at how young and serious I was, in every letter."

 

I have to admit that I like the idea of writing letters to oneself, recording where you are in life at one moment and where you hope to be (or predict you will be) ten years later. If I were still teaching, I think I'd likely make "Letter to Your Future Self" an assignment in my composition classes—a pretty apt one for high school and college freshmen and prospective graduates at any level. In fact, I have long had the habit of keeping a journal in which I make sure to write entries on significant days: my birthday, for example, or New Year's Day, or Solstices and Equinoxes. I tend to record what happened in the year past, list what I hope to accomplish in the year to come; sometimes, when I'm brave, I look back at the entry from a year earlier to see what claims I made, and groan when I confirm that my actions didn't match my intentions.

 

The one discouraging thing about Napolitano's example is that my peers and I are at a time of life where it's uncertain whether we'll be around in ten years to open today's letter to self. In the past calendar year alone I've lost a sister, a cousin, an aunt, and a dear friend, and media notices of celebrity deaths of every stripe confirm how many of the prominent in my generation are concluding their time here. I remember some professor somewhere—it might have a pretty morose writing teacher—who suggested his students should write their own obituaries, the ones they imagine might be written about them when the (hopefully) distant occasion for such a text would arise. I've contributed to at least one obituary in the past year and read others without comment. I wonder if we'll get the chance to read all Ann Napolitano's letters to her self as her final, perhaps posthumous book, and get the chance to compare them to what her obituaries tell us.

 

Of course, this has been the kind of year that challenges everyone's expectations of the future. The Coronavirus Pandemic has disrupted our domestic lives in every way we could imagine—schools closed, businesses closed, churches closed, events cancelled, daily life transformed. We're challenged to perform all the common tasks we took for granted—doing our work, doing our shopping, socializing, taking care of our families and homes and possessions, simply stocking up for daily living, Last week there was no toilet paper and few paper towels, this week there is almost no orange juice or Vitamin C, all kinds of products on supermarket shelves are in short supply and we find ourselves buying brand names we've never heard of before because they are the only ones on the shelves. We rely on digital technology to get in touch with loved ones we can't risk visiting in person. We watch or listen to audience-less performances or reruns from past seasons. Political news, when we make ourselves consult it, adds unfamiliar levels of anxiety and angst daily.

 

So one question the semi-apocalyptic world we're living in invites us to ask ourselves—one that would have seemed morbid last year but seems practical right now—is this: if you were going to write what perhaps will be the final letter to your future self, a message to read in a potential existence after this one, how would you describe where you are in your life right now? How did you get there? What did you hope you would have accomplished or attained if you had had that additional decade you expected? What would you like that self who will have eternity to consider who you really were to know about you? What would you not like them to know but will confess anyway?

 

I drafted the first three paragraphs here over two months ago; the final three, including this one I drafted today, almost the end of March 2020. One of the things writing has taught me is that circumstances can abruptly alter what you think you're talking about. Imagine the alterations ten years may bring.

 

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