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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.
 
 
 

Being a Bird

September 17, 2021

 

How many times in your reading do you cry out "Oh, my god!" or "No, no ki dding, no"? How often is it likely to be in a book that intends to be mostly informative? I read a lot of nature memoirs or narratives in which writers wander around outdoors and contemplate what they see—Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, Gretel Ehrlich, John McPhee, and others. I've read a few birding memoirs as well: T. H. White's The Goshawk, Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk and Vesper Flights, Jonathan C. Slaght's Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World's Largest Owl, Susan Cerulean's I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird, and J. Drew Lanham's The Home Place. I own several different bird guides, some a uthored by familiar names—John James Audubon, Roger Torey Peterson, and David Allen Sibley (men who write bird books usually have three names). National Geographic's Field Guide to the Birds of North America (Third Edition) rests on a shelf near our front door, so I can identify the birds who snack at our front yard feeders, and the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds: Eastern Region travels with us in a backpack in our car. I'm pretty certain that none of these made me blurt anything out loud.

 

But here I am reading a lovely gift from my daughter and her Florida family, What It's Like to be a Bird by David Allen Sibley. I imagine that Sibley has authored the most read bird guides after Audubon. Here I am, past the fact-filled multi-pages of introduction and into the dual-page treatments of individual birds, and I find myself having to stop on pages about Alcids to exclaim once again "Oh, my god!" and "Are you kidding?"

 

We're past the Loon, perhaps the bird I admire most, denizen of Lake Superior and favorite sites along the shores of Isle Royale, of whom I've written before, having discovered how fast their offspring grow to become independent feeders and what good parents they are—I know this—and how they need open lakes to catch flight into the air—but three pages later I'm looking at Alcids, "equivalent to penguins but unrelated," their large bills "strange and wondrous" and unexplainable, and how their related Murres can dive 200 feet below the surface, "unlikely using vision to locate and pursue prey, but"—and I quote here—"nobody knows what senses they are using." "Similarly, no one knows how the birds withstand the pressure of those depths . . . or how they can travel that far and fast without breathing."

 

And then Sibley goes on to Cormorants, another of my favorites, "the most efficient marine predator in the world," where he explains that, unlike humans, whose vision blurs underwater, they have a flexible lens that lets them see clearly. When talking about Sandhill cranes, which I encounter annually, he tells us that "what we call a bird's foot is really just the toe bones," and what we think is the bird's shin is actually its ankle. The book is rich in this kind of information.

 

Did you know that if you record bird song and then play it back at half-speed, you'll hear a wider range of notes and pitches than you thought you'd heard? My recent reading, in a variety of nature books, has made me aware of how much more complicated and sophisticated relationships within and among other species are than our human-centered attention to the world has led us to believe. I noticed this in Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and anticipated it in Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard, our current dinner read. I'm learning it in Elizabeth Kolbert's writing on the shrinking of Lake Powell and Rivka Galchen's article on the potential to view the earliest ages of the universe, both in the August 16 issue of The New Yorker.

 

Almost weekly, sometimes daily, I realize how much what I've always taken for granted was wrong, partly because I gave no thought to it at all but partly because little in my information sources or, to be honest, in my education made me consider it. We're living in an age where what we're doing to our planet's climate is rapidly altering the kind of future it will offer us and learning what we've overlooked in the life forces all around us, including the nature of humanity as well as the nature of the other creatures that we need to share the planet with. Even as I'm exhilarated by what we're discovering about existence, I'm dismayed to realize how long it's taken us to get here and how little time we have left to understand it more fully.

 

 

Notes: Sibley, David Allen. What It's Like to Be a Bird: From Flying to Nesting, Eating to Singing—What Birds Are Doing, and Why. New York: Penguin/Random House, 2020.

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