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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.
 
 
 

Solace

 

In her afterword to her new book Gretel Ehrlich tells us, "The writing of Unsolaced began in the spring of 2017 as a bookend to The Solace of Open Spaces, which was published in 1984. The fuel for writing Solace had come from the loss of a loved one and the discovery that my heart's home would always be Wyoming, a home on the range for a wanderer. Little did I realize that as I finished this new book, another similar kind of loss was at hand." As a bookend, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is gives us a powerful perspective on the writing that came between the two books and also on the landscapes she traveled over nearly four decades. She doesn't say much about that potential similar loss but having alluded to her husband's brain cancer, anyone who has read her earlier book senses what she's feeling.

 

I read The Solace of Open Spaces, her first collection of essays, and each of her subsequent books about place as they were published. Her third nonfiction book—she's published fiction and poetry as well—was A Match to the Heart, where she recounts being struck by lightning while walking across her ranch on a clear day. The very idea that she could eventually write a book about it suggests something of her resiliency. Somehow, she not only survived but recovered, and has spent the decades since adventuring around the world. Later books take her to Greenland (This Cold Heaven), around the Arctic Circle (In the Empire of Ice and The Future of Ice), China and Tibet (Questions of Heaven), and Japan in the wake of a devastating tsunami (Facing the Wave). She's had an eventful life.

 

Unsolaced takes us into many of those locales with fresh imagery and narrative, not so much revisiting earlier writing as reflecting further on the places and experiences that occupied chapters of her personal and professional lives. As she moves forward in her chronology, she revives in me not only the memories of those earlier books but also my own awareness of her as a distinctive individual.

 

Decades ago, determined to write creative nonfiction in addition to the academic articles, conference papers, and criticism I'd been generating, I occasionally enrolled in workshops led by writers whose work I knew. The Environmental Writing Institute, a weeklong workshop led by Gretel Ehrlich, took place at the Teller Wildlife Refuge, a Montana ranch on the edge of the Bitterroot Mountains. We workshopped our writing in the morning, wandered in the mountains in the afternoon, and hung out in the evenings. About a dozen eager outdoor writers were in the group, gathering in a barn where swallows continually flew in and out. We all had read The Solace of Open Spaces; Islands, the Universe, Home; and A Match to the Heart.

 

On late morning breaks we strolled out into mountain sunshine, hoping Gretel would join us for conversation. Often, we formed a circle around her and talked about writing, hers and others'. We might have marveled at how well she had recovered from that lightning strike. The sky was mostly clear and bright. Suddenly a clap of thunder exploded close by; everyone instinctively stepped back away from Gretel, as if she would draw lightning to her again. As we sheepishly tried to recover our positions, Gretel laughed, undaunted by the thunder and amused by our sensing the potential for lightning in her presence. Happily, she wasn't offended.

 

Ehrlich's return in Unsolaced to locales from earlier books makes readers familiar with her writing aware of how climate change has accelerated the alteration of those landscapes, especially when she and fellow travelers risk crossing crumbling ice and shrinking shorelines in the Arctic and also when she encounters the changes in prairie grasslands from settlement and industry. She tells us in her afterword, "Finally, the sharp lessons of impermanence I learned while writing Solace still hold true: that loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness, and despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life." That awareness of loss and appreciation of life are vitally present throughout the book.

 

I don't remember now what work-in-progress I brought to that workshop, but recall that no one, especially Gretel, was much impressed with it. Still, at the end of each day, I journaled about my walks in the mountains, and eventually composed my earliest polyptychal essay, "Knowing Where You've Been." I reread it recently, after reading Unsolaced. It doesn't mention Gretel Ehrlich, but I'm sure her influence emanates from its pages—it may well hover over the best of the environmental writing I've done since that workshop.

 

Notes: "Knowing Where You've Been," Ascent 27:3 (Spring 2003): 45-55; "Knowing Where You've Been (The Bitterroot Mountains, Montana)," Postscripts: Retrospections on Time and Place. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012: 97-107.

 

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