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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.
 
 
 

Decluttering

 

I'm not someone who tends to throw things out. In my youth I proudly stacked my paperbacks in a corner of my bedroom to impress my brother with how many books I'd read and, except for occasionally giving some of them to him, I seldom got rid of any. Accumulating seems to be the standard activity someone like me engages in across the course of his life. But eventually things pile up to the point that they start to interfere with daily living, especially if you don't keep finding spaces to put the new stuff you acquire.

 

Since the first decade of this century, when my wife and I twice downsized our dwelling space in cross-country moves, we often engage in decluttering, reducing the mass of storage items in our home through nearly annual summer housecleaning. We've donated, sold, recycled, and trashed a multitude of possessions, most of it, if not all, easy to dispense with. Having winnowed things down so much, we're getting to the level where, increasingly, some of it becomes more problematic to let go. When I open certain boxes, the artifacts I encounter provoke involuntary time travel into the past.

 

Here are the records I listened to alone in my bedroom, often singing along and hoping passersby would hear only the recording, not me, as the music drifted out my window into the street. I often sang songs that captured my sense of self, the person I wished I might be or the person the lyrics reminded me I already was. Often the songs were about loneliness—that word readily evokes half a dozen titles: "Lonely Boy," "Lonely Teenager," "Lonesome Town"—about unfulfilled longing, about being desired or imagining being desired or about failing to be desired. I couldn't sing along to the album Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely; I choked up on too many of the lyrics. Even if I'm no longer lonely in that space I occupied then, I feel too intimately connected to these records to let them go.

 

Some of the albums are 78s with links to childhood and family. I have both Gene Autry's Western Classics albums and dramatized Western adventures starring Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy, all boyhood gifts; I also have my mother's Al Jolson album on 78 and the soundtrack from The Jolson Story on 33 1/3. Even though I no longer have a phonograph that will play them, I can't imagine not keeping them.

 

The situation gets even more complicated when I start considering the boxes of books. One holds all the plays and literary criticism I used to write my dissertation and eventually my first book, a treasure trove of English Restoration drama material that I haven't looked at in least four decades. Others hold volumes that guided me as a college professor teaching rhetoric, composition, creative nonfiction, and editing. I no longer teach those subjects and won't write further academic articles about them, since I'd need to acquire more recent research. I'm not sure what libraries or used bookstores would take them and I don't want them to end up recycled or shredded. Even though I'm unlikely to write about E. B. White again, I'll still not remove any books by or about him from the shelf and a half they now occupy.

 

Other people created everything I've mentioned, still resonating with me despite my distance from them. I've accumulated artifacts of my own creation as well, writing I initiated and wrestled with and sometimes sent out into the world. I scribbled in abundant journals across decades, some even older than I remembered, all confessing and recording and lamenting and pondering moments in my life. File boxes harbor handwritten manuscripts and typescripts of songs, poems, plays, short stories, unfinished novels, essays for radio, college newspaper columns, movie and book and theater reviews. The magazines and journals where articles and essays and poems and reviews and interviews were published are now all crammed unread into dusty boxes in our garage. So too are the extra copies of the books—the academic publications that advanced my career, the personal nonfiction that mined my experience and my memory—unsold at bookstore readings and unlikely to leave their boxes in the time to come.

 

All these things I value solely for their worth to me, if to no one else, all these things that occupied so much of my time across all those years, all that evidence that I once got both something personal and something professional done in the world. To obliterate all that evidence of my existence seems too much like a proclamation of my existence ending. I know it will. For a while longer, I'd just to like to feel as if I'm not agreeing to disappear, I'm only willing to declutter.

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