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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.
 
 
 

Family Photos

 

A cousin recently sent me some family photographs. Seven of them were taken in her parents' basement family room in 1960, likely on the occasion of my maternal grandparents' fortieth wedding anniversary. Her father was their oldest child, my mother their second child, and two more uncles followed. My cousin was the youngest of three daughters; I was the oldest of all the grandchildren. The second uncle and his wife had two boys and two girls, the youngest boy the same age as my brother. The youngest uncle by then had been divorced and his two children no longer lived in our state; he and his third wife had yet to have their first child. Four of the photographs highlight individual families, another pictures the four siblings behind their parents, and another displays my grandparents and ten of their grandchildren. My grandmother's younger sister and her husband, a childless couple, also appear in a photograph.

 

In that photo of grandparents and grandchildren my brother and sister surround my oldest uncle's oldest two daughters in the back row; three of the second uncle's children are in the middle row; and the three youngest grandchildren—my adopted sister, one uncle's youngest son, and another uncle's youngest daughter, the one who sent me the photos—share the front row with their grandparents. The only grandchildren missing are those two living elsewhere and me, who graduated from high school that year and was on a road trip to California and Mexico with a high school friend.

 

I've opened and reopened those photos several times by now. Even at the first viewing I could identify by name every one of the people pictured. My grandmother would have been sixty on that occasion, my grandfather sixty-five. I especially like the picture of my mother and her brothers standing behind them—I can't recall ever seeing a similar photo. Unsurprisingly, my mother is the only one speaking while everyone else simply smiles cheerfully. In all the pictures, except for some closed eyes or distracted glances, almost everyone appears pleasantly genial.

 

I can't help reopening and enlarging the photo of my family. It's not ideal—my smiling mother's eyes are partially closed, my sister seems solemn, perhaps pretending to hide annoyance, my brother is pleasant and cheerful, my father looks weary but cooperative though his shins are showing, and my young adopted sister hunches down between my parents with a jolly, mischievous look. The photo likely captures the moment.

 

The images remind me of three photos from a family reunion ten years earlier, grouping people by generation or gender. Some children in the anniversary photos were then unborn. In the children's picture, my sister and I are surrounded by older grandchildren of more distant relatives and stand squinting at the photographer; two of my oldest uncle's daughters sit at our feet, the younger one bawling, the older one pretending not to notice. In the men's picture, below a crowded standing row, my father sits on the lawn gazing toward my young brother on his lap, my grandfather crouches near them, seemingly disinterested, and neither notices the photographer. In the women's picture, my mother kneels on the ground before five standing women, two of them her sisters-in-law, and looks solemnly away. These pictures often suggest relationships.

 

Sixty to seventy years have gone by since these pictures were taken. Much has happened in these families. Some of my cousins are parents and grandparents by now, their own photographic records probably extensive. Like me, many of them left our hometown for new lives elsewhere. The longer I look at their images the more I remember how many of them are no longer living. My grandparents, grand-aunt and grand-uncle are gone, my uncles are gone, an aunt is gone. Two cousins are gone. My parents are gone. My sister is gone. My brother is gone. Out of twenty-two people in those seven photos, fourteen are gone. Only eight are now alive in this new century, two aunts and six younger cousins. I know little of how their family histories continue.

 

Sue and I have been married almost forty years. This summer we expect to gather with Sue's siblings, their children and grandchildren and our children and grandchildren. We'll hope to take photos like those my cousin sent me, pictures of everyone in family groups and generation groups. I could send copies to all of those relatives so they could pass them on to their own descendants forty years later to give them the chance to think about who preceded them and possibly who is following them. Perhaps some of those grandchildren (or great-grandchildren) will want to record where everyone is right then, so that their own grandchildren will be able to consider it someday. They might like to know.

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