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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.
 
 
 

The Parking Lot Picture

July 17, 2020

 

Here's a familiar photo that came to mind while I was thinking about the pitcher picture. Note the similar stance, the similar era of photography (b&w), whatever immediate differences you notice.

 

You could ask yourself about this photo most of the questions you asked yourself about the earlier photo. Handily, having a second photo offers an occasion for comparison, the similarities and differences in the two helping to sharpen your perceptions and impressions of both pictures. If you had two different photos of either person, you could make similar comparisons, just as you did when you compared your possible yearbook pictures or when you have selected someone else's photo for a celebration or an obituary. Who is the person who is still there in different images of him- or her-self?

 

I've been treating these two images as if they were images of strangers, although there are occasions when most of us have to examine images of ourselves. But all images of individuals have a further dimension that could be considered. What happens when you know the person in the photo even if the photo itself is unfamiliar to you?

 

For example, my friend Mike's pitcher picture dates from 1958 but I didn't meet him until a quarter century later, when he invited me to join him in starting a writing workshop for teachers at Traverse Bay. For most of the time I knew him he was mustached and bearded—I looked through photos of the two of us across decades and, after his death last year, I posted images from 1994 to 2013—and the high school photos in Still Pitching show me someone I wouldn't have otherwise recognized. I can't always remember the exact dates of the pictures of the two of us, but I almost immediately recall the occasions and the locales. The pitcher picture deepened my sense of who my grown-up friend was all along.

 

I am the figure in the parking lot picture. I felt an affectionate amusement when I stumbled on the similarity of our poses in these two photos, taken only a few years apart. As it happens, the parking lot was next door to both my parents' house and a neighborhood park with a baseball diamond so close my father or brother or I would sometimes toss any foul balls that landed in our yard back over the park fence. I had no other contact with sport then. But thinking how Mike's adolescent image speaks to who he was throughout his life, I start to wonder what my image forecasts about me.

 

The guy in the photo is a high school graduate a year out of school who can't imagine that a year later, as a freshman, he'll begin an educational trajectory that will one day make him a published professor. He'd   always been solitary, usually closeted away to read voluminously and to write private fiction, including a post-high school novel. In that year after graduation he and his friend Dave drove cross-country from western New York to California and, to his surprise, back. I see him there, in what he thought was a fairly dramatic black and white outfit and likely assumed to be a pretty solid stance, and start to wonder if their excursion along Route 66 to Disneyland, Hollywood, San Diego, and Tijuana somehow helped form his tendency to wander and to write about wandering—the lifelong attention to place that led to many of his publications. In all the times I've seen this photo before I never realized it hinted at the man who would be looking at it in the future.

 

The writing we do in reaction to an image draws so much upon who we are, what we bring to the viewing, what the image connects to in us; journaling the image can be both revealing and rewarding. As it happens, trying to recall the dates that Mike and I ran that Traverse Bay program, I looked in Those Who Do, Can: Teachers Writing, Writers Teaching, the anthology we edited from material written at and about those workshops, and found that my article about my writing group is titled "Writing the Outdoors: From Journals to Essays" and my pedagogy article centers on "Popular Media in the Language Arts Classroom," both written twenty-five years ago. I seem to be still practicing what I once preached.

 

Gazing at the picture of Mike taken decades before I met him, I somehow feel more intimately connected to him than I did in life. Gazing at my own photo I somehow feel more stable, more aware that I did become whoever I once—however uncertainly—set out to be.

 

If Mike had ever seen that photo of me, would he have felt the same way today?

 

 

Note: Those Who Do, Can: Teachers Writing, Writers Teaching—A Sourcebook by Robert L. Root Jr. and Michael Steinberg was co-published by the National Council of Teachers of English and the National Writing Project in 1996.

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