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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.
 
 
 

Kanjiroba Pilgrimage

 

I started reading William deBuys' books about the southwest around the time I enrolled in a writer's workshop he taught in Santa Fe. I had been working on early drafts of Recovering Ruth: A Biographer's Tale and he gave me sound advice and a lot of encouragement on the book. When I read his books, I could tell that we had similar ideas about what we wanted to accomplish in our writing about place. Enchantment and Exploitation: The Life and Hard Times of a New Mexico Mountain Range (1985), River of Traps: A New Mexico Mountain Life (1990, with photographer Alex Harris), and Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California (1999, with photographer Joan Myers) were all thoroughly informative narratives of place. A Great Aridness (2011), in some ways a culmination of the earlier series of books, sweepingly surveys the effect of climate change on the American southwest. I suspect that some of my writing about place is much indebted to deBuys' books, especially Following Isabella: Travels in Colorado Then and Now, written while we lived there. During that period, I heard him read at The Tattered Cover Bookstore from The Walk (2007), his most powerfully personal book, and the next day I interviewed him for Fourth Genre.

 

In that interview, deBuys mentions having discovered "a certain paradox. The exploration of the familiar can lead you to surprising new places and new discoveries as easily as—or maybe more easily than—exploration of the unfamiliar. The familiar can take you into unusual personal territory faster and more deeply than the exploration of what you never encountered." The paradox arises from consideration of the opposite experience: "if I'm traveling in wilderness—that's what wilderness is, where it's really wild, where it's unfamiliar—I'm so fascinated by the newness that I don't go inside. There are so many connections to be made on the sensory surface of experience that you don't necessarily go as deeply into those senses." In his latest book he goes to somewhere unfamiliar.

 

I was unaware of how far he'd ventured from the southwest in his explorations and his writing until I discovered copies of his most recent books in a local library. The Last Unicorn records his search in mountainous areas of Laos for a saola, a rare, virtually undocumented horned animal. In The Trail to Kanjiroba he recounts his journey on a medical expedition to remote regions of Nepal, in the Himalaya. I started reading it on my twice-weekly library visits and, soon needing to dogear pages in chapter after chapter, I bought my own copy to read daily at home.

 

DeBuys tells us in his introduction that, like his books about climate change and the likely extinction of the saola, this one will "look into dilemmas posed by human transformation of the planet," but he expects The Trail to Kanjiroba to be "about preserving one's sense of joy. It is about finding grace amid the grief." The primary narrative of the book is a recounting of a "five-week, one-hundred-forty-mile medical expedition, in a remote corner of Nepal, hard against the border of Tibet, a land known as Upper Dolpo." The group he travels with, the Nomads Clinic, brings primary medical care to people who are remotely isolated from modern health care services. The route they travel takes them on a long circle, climbing to altitudes of seventeen thousand feet, where deBuys describes "turn[ing] in a slow circle, and in every direction I see the majesty of Tibet and the high Himalaya [. . .] All around me, brilliant in the light of the sun, I see the world resplendent." Kanjiroba, we learn, is "a massif cresting just shy of twenty-two thousand feet, a height taller than the highest points of Europe, Africa, and North America." They view it on their downward passage, its summit deep in clouds, aware that the glaciers of the Himalaya are shrinking and places that some people remember as having been ice-covered twenty years earlier are barren now.

 

At one point, deBuys wrestles with his awareness of both how magnificent the landscape is and how its remoteness doesn't isolate it from change. "Let's be real: we don't live in the gentle Holocene anymore. Alteration of the climate has delivered us to the Anthropocene, and the heat already loaded into the climate system guarantees increasing impacts for decades to come." He had been advised that "Everyday is a yatra"—a pilgrimage, and he accepts the possibility that the way past grief is to stay in motion, as the people he's been traveling with have been doing: "And always, all around us, the land presided. It contained our traveling and our living. It immersed us in an immense, austere beauty that was at once impermanent and eternal, thrilling and stern."

 

Notes:

 

deBuys, William. The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth's Rarest Creatures. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015.

 

deBuys, William. The Trail to Kanjroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss. Oakland: Seven Stories Press, 2021.

 

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

 

SHELF LIFE: "Rediscovering Earth: A Conversation with William deBuys and Bill McKibben." April 21, 2022. A video recording at VaBook.org/watch.

 

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