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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.
 
 
 

Historically

March 18, 2022

 

I was either falling asleep or slowly waking up when I found myself thinking how isolated I have usually been from events that created what we call history. I was born just after American involvement in the Second World War began— my parents married on Valentine's Day 1942 and I was born nine months and two days later while my father was serving in the U. S. Marines. He was absent for the war's duration; I first met him, briefly, after I turned one, and I was three when he came home for good. The war had no other impact on me. Throughout the Korean war, I was in elementary school and, except for school air raid drills that taught us to cower in the halls or cower under our desks and glimpses of news programs my father watched or newspaper front pages I didn't read, I focused on tv westerns and superhero comic books. In the sixties I was aware of the Communist presence in Cuba and the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King and the expansion of the Vietnam War, but I was either in college, concentrating on literature and creative writing, or later teaching high school English among older teachers who were WWII vets. I was relieved to have evaded the draft and though I urged students to avoid military service, I persistently stuck to the curriculum.

 

Race issues around the country had come up one day when college classmates and I drove into Rochester to tour riot sites, but I barely interacted with any African Americans except for a few older college students. What generated headlines and televised news could have happened anywhere in the world except where I was teaching or studying. I mimicked my parents' and grandparents' values and generally disapproved of war and racism just as I disapproved of murder and rape and crime in general. I felt that by being law-abiding and generally ethical, I was sufficient in my citizenship and in my—what can I call it?—righteousness.

 

No particular political or moral motivation justified my remoteness from the world's dilemmas. I was a small town-boy interested in books and at first radio programs and then television shows and continually movies, and I was continually preoccupied with personal interests—reading voluminously, constantly writing about something or other, living inside my own head rather than venturing out much into the world or taking up causes. Only occasionally did I acknowledge having an opinion about something, one I made up on the spot if asked about it since I probably didn't already have one handy. I primarily focused on my teaching and concentrated on classroom interactions with students (though I did occasionally reveal an opposition to the Vietnam conflict). I had a few friends for awhile, once in a while, people much like me—academic, aesthetic, personally responsible, though probably less self-absorbed. I mostly concentrated on the work I did professionally or the creative projects that preoccupied me—that is, when I worked professionally or was creatively preoccupied.

 

At the moment, I'm aware of how much the pandemic life I've been living is like my adolescent life and the habitual tendency toward self-isolation that followed it. And yet the world seems now more present in my life than it would have been decades ago. We can't seem to avoid encountering the most persistently intrusive elements of the times we live in. The library where I write has strict regulations about face masks and nobody enters without one. That's also true of the people delivering curbside orders to my open car trunk. For two years now I've parked weekly in the exact same spots in those stores' parking lots. Most of my communication with family and friends has been through the internet: online mail, online conversations, Facetime chatting, Zoom calls. It seems now as if my sense of isolation is less something I thoughtlessly accepted in myself and more something being imposed on me, on us, on everyone I know, something we can't avoid and are constantly being reminded of.

 

And then there's Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the almost universal disapproval of it, the Ukrainian flag posted everywhere, Ukraine's president's eloquent address to the world, the threat of nuclear war, as if the last two years hadn't had enough deaths across the planet. Now my grandchildren may be living through a time more fearsome and more ominously present on a wider scale than I was present for decades ago, when I was at their ages, during the last World War and through continual Asian "conflicts." It is less likely that they'll be able to ignore or overlook the current war as it escalates—less likely that they'll develop a sense of isolation from the events decimating the world.

 

 

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