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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.
 
 
 

Incidentally

March 4, 2022

 

I've been to Alaska only once, in 2009, to teach and read at the Kachemak Bay Writers Conference. My friend Mike Steinberg had taught there the previous year and I was invited on his recommendation. The conference was held at the Land's End Resort, at the tip of a narrow spit of land extending out from Homer, a small city on Kachemak Bay opposite a longer arm of the Kenai Peninsula. To prepare for the conference I read books by other presenters, especially those essayists and memoirists who lived and wrote in Alaska: Marybeth Holleman, Nancy Lord, Peggy Shumaker, Miranda Weiss, Sherry Simpson, and the poet Eva Saulitis. I was eager to hear them read at the conference, eventually acquired some of their subsequent books, and was saddened to later learn of Eva's and Sherry's deaths.

 

Sue came with me to Kachemak Bay and our son Tom flew up from LA to wander some of Alaska with us for a few days. We visited Anchorage and locations on the Kenai Peninsula and, perhaps most memorably, toured Harriman Fiord on a vessel that took us close to a glacier that sheared tremendous sheets of ice into the water. I had wanted to see the glacier because, prior to the trip, I'd read both John Muir's Travels in Alaska and another book about Muir's experiences with naturalist John Burroughs on the 1899 Harriman expedition, gathering material as if I might write a book about John o' Mountains and John o' Birds. (I didn't, but I still have folders full of notes and printouts.) We three then returned to our homes in California and Wisconsin and I didn't keep in touch with many of those Alaskan writers for long, except for one.

 

Bill Sherwonit, a journalist and outdoor essayist, shared his experiences in the wild reaches of Denali National Park and what he terms Anchorage's "backyard wilderness," Chugach State Park. He'd written To the Top of Denali: Climbing Adventures on North America's Highest Peak (it's 20,310 ft high), and I knew I wouldn't emulate him there, but his later books, Living with Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey and Changing Paths: Travels and Meditations in Alaska's Arctic Wilderness, gave me a somewhat less intrepid model for the kind of nonfiction of place I wanted to write. We talked some at the conference, and in later years I linked up with his writing on Facebook. "City Wilds," his column for the Anchorage Press Sports and Outdoors section, is accessible online and its subjects are wide-ranging, including remembrances of poet Robert Bly and Anchorage birder Dave DeLap; considerations of ravens, Bohemian waxwings, snowshoe hares, snow spiders, hiking in the Chugach Front Range; a celebration of the black-capped chickadee; a call for a "healthier relationship with our home planet, the wild earth"; a celebration of the "wondrous wild."

 

These memories of Kachemak Bay and Alaskan nonfiction were triggered by reading Bill Sherwonit's recent column taking "a brief look back at 40 years of writing in Alaska." It provides an overview of his writing life since he left southern California in February 1982 and anchored himself in the north. He mentions coming "to identify [him]self as a 'nature writer'." I especially appreciated his perspective on what being a writer has meant to him. He writes that whenever he's asked when he'll retire, he responds, "A writer never retires," yet acknowledges to himself that he doesn't "devote the time and energy to writing that [he] once did," spending more time now "in the close company of nature." He adds that "writing for me has long been more than a job or career, and something closer to a way a life, a way of being in the world." Those comments are the ones that I related to the most in that particular column.

 

Last week, when I finally opened the log I keep to record thoughts about this blog, I pondered some reasons for taking time off for so long but also found myself imagining topics that might prompt more new entries in the coming months. Every so often I seem to need to be reminded that writers usually keep on writing even when there's no likelihood of—or any particular interest in—publication. Writing does something for them that they need to let it do. It's a psychological necessity, perhaps even a spiritual one. It helps them come to terms with themselves—to know who they are and where they are and why they need to be there. They don't always remember those things—I haven't lately. The next time I read Bill Sherwonit's "City Wilds" column, I hope it will remind me of them and I will be able to reassure myself that I am still writing.

 

 

Notes: Bill Sherwonit. "City Wilds: A brief look back at 40 years of writing in Alaska," Anchorage Press. (February 9, 2022). [If you scroll below this particular column, you'll find other "City Wilds" entries.]

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