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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.
 
 
 

Moonlight

 

I didn't see the moon on April 8—the "Pink Supermoon" being hyped online in anticipation for days—because the skies were cloudy in Wisconsin, but the next night, I saw a very large, very bright moon, not pink but still as close to the earth as it would get all year and as dazzlingly illuminated as I had ever seen it. I wondered if the brilliance was enhanced by the recent clearing of the atmosphere because factory and traffic pollution had lessened everywhere as the country practiced self-isolation. The travel and business shut-down due to the Coronavirus quarantine was, generally speaking, good for the air, a plus for the environment. It had been a very long time since I'd seen the moon so bright in a sky so clear,

 

As it happened, I'd been reading Kathleen Jamie's essay collection, Sightlines, before I noticed the brightness beyond our window blinds. I immediately turned back several pages, to one I'd dogeared in her essay "Moon." She had the chance to watch a lunar eclipse mostly on her own at home, the children preoccupied downstairs, and her account of the eclipse is carefully and exactingly observed. I was struck by her reflections on the event. "The moon does us great service," she tells us, "metaphorically and literally, and this is part of it—occasionally she allows us to appreciate the shadow cast by our own planet. She shows us that the earth, for all the cacophony of life on its surface, is firstly an object, bigger than we are, magisterial enough to cast a shadow thousands and thousands of miles into space." Her essay made me remember being stunned by Annie Dillard's essay "Total Eclipse," in Teaching a Stone to Talk, where she takes us through a solar eclipse and ponders its impact upon her.

 

Despite the catchy title of Supermoon, the moon this April offered nothing of the drama of the earth's shadow darkening its surface or the moon's body blocking our view of the sun, but it held my attention for many minutes. I could see it at an angle through the space between the bedroom window and the blind, nearly filling that narrow gap, making me put my book away and reach for a pair of opera glasses I use to watch birds on our feeder some mornings. I could easily see the dark land-formation shapes against a gleaming yellow surface and eventually hurried downstairs to fetch stronger binoculars. Soon enough I urged my wife to come to my side of the bed and look out at the moon, handing her the opera glasses and binoculars in turn. I turned off my reading lamp to make our bedroom darker, to make the moon even brighter,

 

Unexpectedly, memories of moon-gazing flashed into my mind. I'd been in college when the first unmanned lunar landings occurred, living alone in an apartment in an old house in a neighboring town. I sat up past three o'clock in the morning to watch the first live telecast from the moon from a camera on the lunar lander. When the images began to appear, slowly, one strip at a time, I turned off the lights and pushed my face close to the screen, as if I could get even closer to the moon. On earth the physical moon could at that moment be seen through my apartment window high in a clear, cloudless sky. I kept looking out the window at that small bright circle in the darkness and then looking back at the image on the television screen, trying to reconcile the two, trying to appreciate how I could be seeing both the familiar remote and distant satellite and the close-up of its actual surface at the same moment. I remember feeling that our relationship with the solar system—with the universe itself—had changed.

 

Now, back in bed, leaning to keep the moon in view, I hoped to memorize what I was seeing so that I might be able to call it up when I closed my eyes some cloudy nights, to reassure myself it was out there. In our daily lives, our attention to getting and spending keeps our line of vision low and lets so many aspects of the natural world be overlooked, ignored, forgotten about. I was happy to lie there quietly, envisioning the moon as vividly when I closed my eyes as when I had viewed it through my window. I tried for a moment to put pandemics and politics into perspective, but soon dismissed thinking about them at all. Even with my eyes closed, the moon was too bright, too close, too permanent for me to be distracted by anything else.

 

 

Note: This image of the April 7, 2020 Supermoon by Bill Funcheon appeared on www.space.com the next day. He photographed it above New Jersey.

 

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