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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.
 
 
 

Reviewing

 

When, under Michael Steinberg's editorship, the first issue of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction appeared in Spring 1991, I served both as Interviews Editor—in that issue my interview was with essayist Scott Russell Sanders—and as one of its reviewers. I sometimes wrote full-length reviews of a single book and sometimes wrote short ones for the Reader-to-Reader: Capsule Reviews section. My first capsule subjects were The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, Field of Vision by Lisa Knopp, About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory by Barry Lopez, Thistle Journal and Other Essays by Daniel Minock, and Reaching Keet Seel: Ruin's Echo and the Anasazi by Reg Saner. The Spring 2008 issue published my last Fourth Genre review, of Deborah Tall's A Family of Strangers. By then I was chiefly Interviews and Roundtable Editor. My final interview was with Carl Klaus in the Spring 2012 issue, before an editorial change ended my involvement. Since 2014, I've occasionally written reviews online for River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. The most recent one was about a new essay collection by Scott Russell Sanders.

 

I resist rummaging through cardboard boxes in our garage containing most of what I've ever published, but I recall writing reviews of stage productions or movies for my college newspaper as an undergraduate. As a high school teacher, I wrote 100-word reviews of television programs for the weekend edition of the Buffalo Evening News, an enterprise that taught me to write rough drafts of whatever length and tighten them up gradually in rewrite after rewrite. I'm confident one of those reviews was of a first season episode of Star Trek. I continued reviewing as a grad student and as a college professor. A good many of my current blog entries almost amount to reviews, usually in the context of what affected me in what I read or heard or saw.

 

Of course, I've also read or heard or viewed a great many reviews by other writers over the years. For an early academic book of mine, Working at Writing: Columnists and Critics Composing (when my scholarly and instructional interests were in rhetoric and composition), I interviewed drama critic Walter Kerr and film critics David Denby and Neil Gabler (as well as essayists Jim Fitzgerald and Kathleen Stocking and political columnists Richard Reeves and Tom Wicker) about their composing processes. I also watched Siskel and Ebert in their various television series. My newspaper reading usually skipped news, sports, and business sections but always opened to entertainment or book sections. My wife and I have subscribed for decades to weekly editions of The New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker, from which at breakfast each day I read reviews of books, films, plays, musical performances, and television programs.

 

Sometimes I find myself reading conflicting reviews of the same work, perhaps a positive one in The New Yorker, a negative one in the Times. Those occasions reinforce my awareness that, no matter how intelligent or well-educated or accomplished in their professions—(not all critics are literary people)—all reviewers read like individuals and their reviews attend to their priorities, if not flat out to their tastes or biases. I sometimes feel that the Times editors urge each reviewer to find something to complain about or disapprove of even in the most approving review but allow them to relent somewhat to end on a positive note.

 

I've mostly had the option of choosing what books (or recordings or films or plays) I want to review. That means I never have to let readers in on any works I was disappointed in or bored by or infuriated with. Since I mostly read books all the way through, I'm selective about what I intend to read and usually choose something by a writer I've liked in the past or on a subject I've wanted to know more about or in a literary form that promises clear communication. I seldom have to give up on what I'm reading and usually find myself personally invested in what I've chosen.

 

The writing that I do about another writer's work bridges the gap between what that writer is sharing and what I react to in what I read. What I write may start out as random commentary, a note to help me remember what the work was about, or a journal entry to explore my reactions further. If that doesn't seem sufficient, I'm likely to go back at what I've written, to clarify it further, to express it more accurately. Sometimes it ends up being much like a review, maybe something I could share as a blog post. It may even prompt someone else to read that other writer's work. I'd rather encourage more reading than discourage it.

 

 

Note: Twenty-three volumes of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction are available online at JSTOR <https://www.jstor.org/journal/fourthgenre> and Project Muse <https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/217>.

 

Reviews for River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative are available online at https://www.riverteethjournal.com/blog/keyword/book-review,

 

Root, Robert. Review of A Family of Strangers by Deborah Tall. Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. 10:1 (Spring 2008): 175-178.

 

Root, Robert L., Jr. Reviews of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, Field of Vision by Lisa Knopp, About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory by Barry Lopez, Thistle Journal and Other Essays by Daniel Minock, and Reaching Keet Seel: Ruin's Echo and the Anasazi by Reg Saner. Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. 1:1 (Spring 1999): 171-173.

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