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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.
 
 
 

Hindsight and Foresight

 

Sometimes among the extraneous postings emerging on my laptop, one provokes my curiosity enough to send me searching for further information. Decades ago, I'd viewed the Hoover Dam and its creation Lake Mead and further upstream Lake Powell, behind the Glen Canyon Dam, when the water in them was abundant. But times have changed in the 21st Century. Among several on the subject, an online article for Grist by Jake Bittle reported that recently at Lake Powell "water levels fell to their lowest threshold ever, since the lake was created by the damming of the Colorado in 1963 . . . forcing unprecedented water cuts in states like Arizona" and affecting the production of hydroelectric power. Bittle writes, "When Lake Powell is full, its surface sits some 3,700 feet above sea level," but at a low level of 3,525 feet this March, it is "now only a quarter full, and water levels are just 35 feet about the dead pool threshold for power generation." Power production there has dropped "consistently," as well as at nearby Hoover Dam, and "there's a 1 in 4 chance [the Glen Canyon Dam] won't produce power by 2024." If I lived in the Southwest, I'd be concerned, perhaps alarmed.

 

Exposure to current events often provokes memories of earlier reporting on the same or similar subjects. This news reminded me of a 20-year-old book review of mine published in the Spring 2001 issue of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. That book, Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California by author William deBuys and illustrator Joan Myers, explored the consequences of human efforts at irrigation and climate change in the arid southwest. I claimed that the authors "are, in Robert Coles' memorable phrase, 'doing documentary work' in the tradition of such exemplary verbal and visual texts as American Exodus by Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor (1939) and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans (1941). Combining thorough research with on-site observation and sharp, vivid images, they produce a haunting and compelling portrait of place." Salt Dreams concentrates on the Salton Sea, in the corner of California "abutting Mexico on the south and Arizona on the east." DeBuys writes that "here is the lowest of the low: Salton Sea, growing saltier by the day and stewing with the waste of the upstream world."

 

In an effort to make the Imperial Valley in that part of California more fertile and productive, dams and canals were built to divert the flow of the Colorado River. For the most part it succeeded, but it also created the Salton Sea, "what deBuys calls 'the most spectacularly bungled development scheme of the century, perhaps of all time.' Floodwaters overran inept diversion schemes and, guided by irrigation channels, emptied the Colorado River into the Salton Sink." The man-made lake—the world's largest—had no outlet, but entrepreneurs hoped to create a lucrative planned community, with marinas and country clubs, expecting that "determination and high finance [could] transform any terrain into a promised land of opportunity and profit." It didn't work out. "In the end, the Salton Sea became a receptacle for raw sewage flowing north from Mexico and agricultural run-off from the Imperial Valley, its size reduced by evaporation, its salinity ever increasing [. . .] a way station and refuge for birds which feed on contaminated fish and suffer recurring cycles of avian disease [. . .] an ecological disaster both nightmarish and irremediable."

 

Salt Dreams is a complicated book, one that "tells the story of this region, the lives of those who still live here, the environmental and social consequences of actions by governments and investors and exploiters and entrepreneurs." Joan Myers' "pictures of barren landscapes, encrusted shorelines, flooded ruins, and desert faces reward close viewing with multiple levels of detail." Reading my review again, much of the experience of the book comes back to me. It's still on a bookshelf in our guest room, beside several other books by deBuys.

 

I confess to having a rather Thoreauvian outlook on life and it affects what I choose to read. I discovered deBuys at a Santa Fe writer's workshop I attended and read him and many other southwestern nature writers when I lived in Colorado Those writers gave me a vivid sense of where they were, a present hindsight panorama. But the essayists and outdoor memoirists I've read recently have increasingly uneased me about the future of life on our planet: extinctions in Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction and Barbara Hurd's The Episodes, flooding in Elizabeth Rush's Rising, and others. It's likely those earlier authors provided awareness of where we've been heading, but the discouraging thing at the moment is that foresight currently offers little to be optimistic about in the coming age.

 

 

Notes:

Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1941.

Bittle, Jake. "Lake Powell water crisis is about to be an energy crisis," Grist, March 21, 2022

Coles, Robert. Doing Documentary Work. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

deBuys, William, and Joan Myers. Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.

Lange, Dorothea, and Paul Taylor. American Exodus. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939.

Root, Robert. "Interview with William deBuys," Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. 10:2 (Fall 2008): 133-145.

Root, Robert L., Jr. Book Review: "Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California by William deBuys and Joan Myers," Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. 3:1 (Spring 2001): 203-205.

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