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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.
 
 
 

Commonplaces

August 21, 2020

 

Recently, going through books we were donating to our local library, I noticed some with dogeared pages, often more than one, and tried to straighten them. I habitually mark memorable passages that way instead of underlining them or scribbling marginal notes—which makes them unreadable for later readers –or stopping to copy them by hand and lose the expository thread. I reread Walden often, each time the same copy. Many pages have bent-back corners, at top or bottom, depending on where the passage is on the page. One reward of multiple readings of Walden is reminding myself what struck me in those passages; another is discovering unblemished pages with overlooked ideas I now need to dogear. Every page will likely have bent corners by the time I stop rereading the book.

 

If you skim my blog entries, you'll notice how a passage in a book, essay, article, newspaper column, or interview initiates my further reflections. I often type such passages into my laptop, in case I later want to compose a response or instigate a vaguely related meditation of my own. Writers have always done this kind of thing, collecting quotes in commonplace books, almost since the beginning of writing. The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius kept one and later drew his published Meditations from it. Rare book archives house manuscript or print copies by such philosophers, scientists, poets, and politicians as Erasmus, da Vinci, Bacon, Milton, Newton, Jefferson, Thoreau, Emerson, Irving, Auden, and Woolf. The tradition continues to this day: on Facebook Dinty W. Moore, the founding editor of Brevity, posts an author's quote about writing almost daily: a digital commonplace site.

 

Decluttering created space on our bookshelves and, while moving different volumes off their customary shelves and onto others, I noticed dogeared pages and wondered what was in that book I wanted to recall. What follows here is (sort of) the start of a commonplace file, what Wikipedia claims works "as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts [. . .] found in other texts." Here are a few from books on my shelves:

 

"Even the oddest, most particular book was written with that kind of crazy courage—the writer's belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect those books and manuscripts and preserve them." (Susan Orlean, The Library Book, 309-310)

 

"The love of a comrade and the attention of the reader: these desires (which have no clear boundary between them) reach effortlessly across years and cities, then centuries and continents. No poet has spoken to the audiences of the future with such certainty that they are there, listening." (Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life, 252)

 

"The essay poured out with such ease or rather tumbled out seemingly of its own accord. When this happens it means that the thoughts have long been gestating and writing is only a birth of what was already taking form out of sight. So much of the work of writing happens when you are seemingly not working, made by that part of yourself you may not know and do not control, and when the work shows up like that your job is to get out of its way." (Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence, 216)

 

"Throughout my life it's through attention that I've tried to tie myself to various places, through mindful recognition of my body's presence in the world of forms to memorize my own brief passage in this world. Now I try to imagine the pull of some other bond: mindless, selfless, a recombinant plein air melting in relentless solar wind. A scatter of atoms, unspecific and undifferentiated, into what happens next." (Elizabeth Dodd, Horizon's Lens: My Time on the Turning World, 123)

 

"Some feelings resist expression for years or decades. Some never submit. The sight of the peaks has long struck me as a kind of prayer I am supposed to know but cannot find the words to. They are the chorus of a hymn I want to sing but cannot finish: the mountains rise like, the mountains rise like . . . but what is it they rise like, to the sky?" (William deBuys, The Walk, 96)

 

Any one of these passages might start me pondering what it means to me, why I dogeared that page, what it meant to the author who composed it, how much we would agree about what it expresses. It might even foster a blog entry. Of course, any reader of this entry might wonder why these, among all my dogeared passages, are the ones I'm sharing as commonplace examples. You, reader, might blog about what you think is going on with me or blog about your own reaction to any or all of them or start checking dogeared pages of your own.

 

That's the way commonplace books work, fertilizing the mind by recording ideas in abundance and discovering what emerges over time. It's worked that way for writers of every kind throughout the history of writing.

 

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