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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.
 
 
 

Then Then Now

Then: E. B. White's 1949 essay Here Is New York opens with mention of "the stubborn fact of annihilation," giving gruesome hints of what might happen in an air attack: "The city for the first time in its long history is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition." World War II was over, Germany reduced to rubble, Hiroshima and Nagasaki obliterated, the debris of war spread throughout Europe. The Cold War had begun, and memory of the atomic cloud hung menacingly over the planet.

 

At the same time, under construction not far from the Whites' Turtle Bay Gardens apartment, the United Nations Building was expected to house an international congress of diplomats hoping that, if enough nations united in the cause of peace, it could possibly be maintained. White noted "a race between the destroying planes and the struggling Parliament of Man": "The city at last perfectly illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution, this riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of nonviolence, of racial brotherhood, this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway, home of all people and all nations, capital of everything, housing the deliberations by which the planes are to be stayed and their errand forestalled." In the intervening half-century, he seems overly optimistic—or perhaps reservedly hopeful.

 

Then: White's scenario was grim speculation in his day, but after the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001—Ground Zero on 9/11, as we call it—it felt uncomfortably like prophecy. In 2003, at the end of a conference in New York, I joined Michigan colleagues at LaGuardia for our flight to Detroit. Two had visited the site of the destroyed World Trade Center. They were surprised not to be more moved by it, the scene of so much horror and rage and, temporarily, a binding national grief. Expecting upwellings of strong emotions while gazing into the crater where the city's tallest building had been, they felt very little. One said, "It looks mostly just like a massive construction site." The flow of commerce creates similar sites every year. E. B. White commented about change in his Here Is New York introduction, claiming "The Lafayette Hotel, mentioned in passing, has passed despite the mention." Perhaps the hotel created such a crater, probably somewhat smaller, when it was demolished and replaced by a new skyscraper.

 

The United States then occupied Afghanistan and had invaded Iraq, retaliating for attacks on New York and Washington two years earlier. Some friends abandoned the conference in fear of further attacks. I remembered White's fear for the city and felt as if the terrorists had confirmed it. But in LaGuardia that day, television channels broadcast American aerial attacks on Baghdad. I thought: The destroying planes outracing the Parliament of Man are ours; the chance for peace is being evaded by us; our government drops the stubborn fact of annihilation on a foreign city, its people the victims, we the aggressors. Gazing from our flight, I thought New York looked very open, very small, very vulnerable, more destructible than ever before, indistinguishable in that regard from all the other cities of the world.

 

Now: In 2021 American President Biden ended occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, the longest military campaigns of our history. In February 2022 Russian President Putin invaded Ukraine, causing massive destruction, an enormous refugee crisis, and a vast number of deaths. As I write, in June, the war persists, Ukraine supported militarily and economically by a broad spectrum of international allies. The Russian president is unrelenting and persistently menacing, seemingly willing to expand his war further into the world. In the US the Republican Party is relentlessly focused on gaining absolute control over legislative, judicial, and executive branches of government and opposed to environmental protection, health care, education, employment, equal opportunity, or public safety, responding to yet another massacre of school children with callous, hypocritical responses while expanding access to gun ownership and abolishing abortion rights. In the first twenty-one weeks of 2022 there were 213 mass shootings in America and at the end of May, 1,004,119 people had died of COVID-19 since January 2020.

 

It's hard to feel safe in America, fearful internationally of a potential third World War and disconsolate domestically about what our own government allows and enacts to reduce our personal rights and our community safety. Now, to me, feels less reassuring than the Thens we've endured in my lifetime.

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