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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 Way of the Essayist

January 29, 2021

 

I've been collecting the nonfiction of Scott Russell Sanders for over thirty years now. At the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont, the last writing workshop I attended as a student, I sat with him at lunch a couple of times. I remember he insisted that "nonfiction" or "non-fiction" was not a useful term for what he wrote, since it only identified what his writing wasn't—it was not fiction. He pointed out that it was also non-poetry, non-play, non-article.

 

I tended to agree with him, though I was then deeply involved in "creative nonfiction," the adjective an effort at specifying the nature of the noun. Dropping the hyphen helped. Others preferred "literary nonfiction" or "nonfiction narrative," each alternative suggesting the possibility of "non-literary non-fiction" or "non-creative non-fiction" or "nonnarrative nonfiction." I felt we were stuck with "nonfiction" and later used it (self-consciously) in my own titles and subtitles (The Nonfictionist's Guide: On Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction; Landscapes with Figures: The Nonfiction of Place).

 

Sanders' intimate, open essay "The Inheritance of Tools" in Best American Essays 1987 introduced his writing to me and led me to his first collection, The Paradise of Bombs and Other Essays, centered on family and place in the Midwest—he lived and taught in Indiana. In an essay from Writing from the Center (1995), he wrote, "I write from within a family, a community, and a landscape, concentric rings of duty and possibility. I refuse to separate my search for a way of writing from my search for a way of living." I liked the idea of what he termed "a literature of inhabitation." I'd grown up and attended college in western New York, earned graduate degrees in Iowa, and taught for decades at a university in Michigan. Sanders and I were, in a sense, coming to our writing from similar places. His collections like Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World (1993) and Writing from the Center encouraged me not to be one of the "nomads who write about no place at all" but to be among the writers who "have settled down and rooted their art in a chosen place . . ."

 

Recently, with the release of his most recent collection, The Way of Imagination, Sanders was interviewed online about his writing. He explained that, instead of "nonfiction," he prefers specific terms for what he writes: essays, personal narratives, memoirs. Over time he has become, increasingly, an investigator of ethical and moral issues centered on daily living, the focus of books like The Force of Spirit (2000), and A Private History of Awe (2006). I particularly admired Hunting for Hope: A Father's Journeys (1998), which alternates chapters about his relationship with his son with his efforts to find reasons for hope in a world that his son thinks has made his father desolate. In the interview Sanders claims, in regard to the calamitous state we have recently been living in, "I'm not optimistic, but I am hopeful." He believes in "the human capacity to change, to learn" and it's the reason he keeps writing essays.

 

Referring to Montaigne, Sanders explains that the word "essay" comes from a French word "meaning to test or to try." In his own writing process, "an essay almost always starts with a question, a question I don't know the answer to or at least I don't have a satisfactory answer for. And the essay is my way of trying to come to a better understanding of the thing that puzzles me or moves me or bewilders me." He thinks that an essay, at least as he writes one, "doesn't start by knowing what you want to end up saying—it's a quest to figure out something or at least to gain greater insight into something. [. . .] And when I'm writing a piece and I feel a sense of discovery, I know the essay is alive."

 

I'm one of the readers of Scott Russell Sanders' essays who has often discovered how alive his essays are. In the very first pages of The Way of Imagination I was aware that I was reading perhaps his most profound and observant collection. Even before I finished reading it, I volunteered to review it for River Teeth because I wanted to urge everyone to read it. It's a very vital volume.

 

Note: Further Reading:

 

Root, Robert. "Creative Nonfiction," Dictionary of Midwestern Literature. Volume Two: Dimensions of the Midwestern Literary Imagination. Philip A. Greasley, General Editor. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016:179-184.

 

Root, Robert. Review, "Meditative Naturalist, Intimate Essayist, Visionary Author," review of The Way of Imagination by Scott Russell Sanders, River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative, January 8, 2021.

 

Root, Robert L., Jr. Review, A Private History of Awe by Scott Russell Sanders, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction 8:1 (Spring 2006): 143-147.

 

Sanders, Scott Russell. Interview by Mitch Tiplitsky, Morgenstern Books. October 3, 2020.

 

Sanders' Website: https://www.scottrussellsanders.com/

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