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Robert Root

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.
 
 
 

Learning from Coincidence

May 1, 2020

April 30, 2020. This morning, looking out my study window to appreciate how green the grass across the street has become and to watch the swaying of the trees that tower beyond the condos opposite ours in insistent gusts of wind, I caught a movement in front of a neighbor's garage. I noticed robins bouncing around the driveways, suspected goldfinches and purple finches and mourning doves and chickadees might be visiting our feeders, out of sight from my window, but knew at once the movement I'd seen was not a bird. I leaned closer to the window and saw a rabbit scurry past white garage doors and condo entrances and small bushes and then beyond more garages and bushes and parked cars until it disappeared into a well-manicured hedgerow at the end of the buildings. I look out at six two-story condos in a row and the rabbit scampered past them all.

 

A few minutes later the rabbit made a second run past the condos, as if it had circled others behind them to complete the circuit. This time I watched it closely, trying to see if it was nibbling anything in the flowers below the shrubs and trees, but it moved on quickly and slipped in between the bushes in front of the final condo again. Almost before I could remember what I was doing on the computer the rabbit returned to run in the opposite direction and veer off toward the back near where it had first appeared. And then it was back a fourth time, partly retracing its last run but suddenly turning onto the blacktop driveway, crossing lawn and sidewalk and curb and bouncing across the street toward our complex, only a few doors down from me. I hurried into our bedroom for a closer view but by the time I opened the blinds it had vanished. I wondered if it had run through my neighbor's flowers and herbs or past our patio and garage. For the rest of the morning I kept flicking my gaze up from my laptop screen to scan the scene before me but saw no sign of the rabbit again.

 

Ours is a pretty suburban neighborhood, our condo complex sprawling across two sides of our street, pretentiously labeling itself as Townhomes of River Place. The Fox River runs through wetlands beyond the condos behind ours and a bike path lets us walk near it and through a forest. From time to time deer emerge from the woods to venture into the neighborhood, Sandhill cranes stalk parkland close by, a blue heron wades in a pond near the bike path, and foxes have been seen near the Fox River, so the rabbit wasn't entirely a surprise visitor. But it especially activated my attention this morning because of the images my cousin had posted on Facebook that were taken from her bedroom window in Arizona.

 

She lives in a retirement community and often displays the lively activities of her friends and neighbors, though of late the need for social distancing has limited the interaction she's been reporting. This morning, however, the photos and videos she posted were all of javelinas (collared peccaries) strolling through her patio at sunrise. She counted twelve, including at least three babies, and sure enough her videos show them wandering through cacti and ferns and wicker chairs and small endtables, munching on acorns that have fallen across stones and patio flooring. In one photo a javelina close to her bedroom window looks in at her.

 

My cousin's southwestern wildlife is more exotic that my midwestern ones but the coincidence of us both noticing unfamiliar animal activity the same morning put me in mind of images I've been seeing lately on internet posts from far-flung acquaintances. All of them seem to suggest that, during these days of lockdown and human isolation, wildlife have felt freer to roam suburban and urban areas. It's not entirely unusual to hear of cougars wandering in Boulder but this year their wandering has been a little more wide-ranging—at least one image showed a cougar passing a department store. Coyotes have been more visible in San Francisco; a kangaroo was filmed hopping down an empty thoroughfare in Adelaide, Australia; herds of deer, sheep, and goats have been grazing more readily on suburban lawns in Britain, Japan, and North America. Given how empty the streets of my neighborhood have tended to be over the past several weeks, I shouldn't be surprised if local wildlife didn't range more freely around here, especially with the grass so green and lush. My wife and I have noticed birds in the street uncertain about how to behave in regard to oncoming cars.

 

But then, now that the traffic is so light, my attention has more often been drawn to the birds and the squirrels and that rabbit, delighted to see the heron, hoping the cranes will show up soon. I look at those swaying trees a few blocks east and am aware of how seldom I attend to them. On cloudless days I remember images people have posted of smogless skies above LA, clear skylines in the distance in Chicago and Detroit, free-ranging animals having Rocky Mountain National Park or Yellowstone all to themselves. All those creatures going about their lives as if they barely know we're here.

 

Or maybe it is that we barely notice they are here and have been and will be. Given our own losses and our isolation in this pandemic, our awareness of sharing something simultaneously intimate and universal, our altered sense of our existence, gives us the chance to remind ourselves that this world is not ours alone. In the weeks or months to come, the other creatures we share it with will likely keep reminding us. We ought to pay attention.

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