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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.
 
 
 

Once a Juror

 

As instructed by phone the previous day, I arrive at the county courthouse just before 8:00 on Tuesday morning. I join a line of people at the screening entrance, lower my pandemic mask to compare my face to my driver's license image, spill my belt, wallet, keys, glasses, and watch into a deep tray, then pass through the x-ray, retrieve my belongings, and descend to the basement rooms where prospective jurors are gathering. We watch county officials explain the jury system in a video, and then potential members of four separate juries are called by name, summoned according to the rows in the courtroom where they will initially sit. When we line up, we are given numbered stickers to wear—I am Juror 28—and then escorted up to a first-floor courtroom.

 

The first 24 prospective jurors are seated in the two rows of the jury box and two temporary rows before it. The rest of us sit in the gallery. Our jury will serve in a criminal trial of an accused sexual abuser. The judge introduces both the prosecutor and the defense attorney and questions the primary jury prospects to determine who might be allowed to hear the case or might need to be dismissed. When prospects in the jury box are excused, jurors in the gallery, including Juror 28, are called up to replace them. The prosecutor and the defense attorney consult with the judge and thirteen of us—the thirteenth a potential replacement for someone who becomes unable to serve—are selected to serve on the official jury,

 

That afternoon, prosecution and defense present opening statements, and each juror receives a notebook to record observations and information. The first prosecution witness, a social psychologist who hasn't interviewed the alleged victim in the case, explains the nature of sexual abuse and its effects on children. The second witness, a young female police officer, testifies to recording the victim's accusations and his confirmation of her accuracy. The third witness, the victim, a man in his twenties, testifies in emotional detail to having been sexually exploited as a child by his stepfather, the defendant. Each testimony is subject to prosecution and defense questioning, then lengthened by prosecutor and defense attorney re-direct and rebuttal.

 

On Wednesday a sheriff's department detective reports on questioning the defendant and shows a video of their interview, the defendant terse and non-communicative on camera, mostly expressionless in the courtroom. The prosecution rests and the defense first calls the defendant's father-in-law, who is also the victim's grandfather, appearing under subpoena, and then the defendant's wife, who is also the victim's mother. Defense witnesses discredit the victim's testimony, the mother claiming the stepfather never had time alone with her son. The defense rests.

 

On Thursday we hear closing arguments by prosecutor, defender, and then prosecutor again, and go into our deliberation room to seek a unanimous verdict deciding the stepfather either guilty or not guilty, judging on a basis of reasonable doubt. A juror we all respect is randomly chosen to be Juror 13 and released. Juror 29, who has served on other past juries, becomes our foreperson. We discuss our reactions to the trial at length, most of us willing to be temporarily undecided, although two women on one side of the table are strongly pro-guilty and two women opposite them are adamantly pro-not guilty. We all suspect the stepfather is guilty but aren't confident that the evidence presented is sufficient to reasonably convict. Given the way the law works, we wrestle with the reasonableness of our doubts until ten of us cave in to the not-guilty duo and agree to a not-guilty verdict.

 

The judge is informed. We walk in, our foreperson hands our decision to someone who hands it to the judge who reads it aloud, makes us all say "Yes" to whether we all agree, thanks us, and dismisses us.

 

Later, the judge comes to the deliberation room to answer questions and we learn that the stepfather is a previously convicted sex offender in a different case. Some of us gasp or sigh or groan. The last woman to leave the room ahead of me mutters her distress. I say that, given what we've learned of that disturbingly dysfunctional family, it may be that he actually didn't abuse his stepson and that his stepson lied under oath. That might be uncertain consolation for having declared a convicted sex offender not guilty of sexual abuse in this case.

 

A guilty verdict depends on convincing, corroborating evidence. A verdict of not guilty is not equivalent to a verdict of innocence. You needn't prove innocence to be declared legally not guilty—they aren't the same thing. I wonder if, like me, my fellow jurors will long be haunted by their time dispensing justice.

 

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