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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.
 
 
 

Transcribing

 

Years ago, while researching Walking Home Ground, I visited Aldo Leopold's shack and nearby Leopold Center, and I still follow their Facebook page. Recently I learned that they were transcribing Leopold's journal—its thousand-plus manuscript pages already viewable online—for print publication. The organization invited volunteers to help with the project. I quickly applied and quickly received a link to 20 manuscript pages online and a set of guidelines. Perusing Leopold's handwriting immediately reminded me of having done this kind of task before.

 

At a display in Central Michigan University's Clarke Historical Library, I'd encountered the manuscript of an Isle Royale journal. Our daughter Becky would be working on the island that summer and we would camp there for a week and so I read it. On Isle Royale we wandered locations where the journalkeeper and her husband lived in fall 1848, ending on December 30. Although the journal was credited to C.C. Douglass' second wife, Lydia, I discovered it had actually been written by his first wife, Ruth. It took me a while to learn when they had left the island and what had become of her.

 

In 1998, I published my edition of "Time by Moments Steals Away": The 1848 Journal of Ruth Douglass, my introduction much shortened by press editors, but still absorbed by the text and by the personality of its author, I felt obligated to uncover the full background of Ruth Edgerton Douglass, resulting in a second book, Recovering Ruth: A Biographer's Tale, a blend of travel, biography, and memoir, published in 2003. The two books had an impact of me: editing Ruth's journal altered the direction of my scholarship; composing the memoir altered my sense of identity as a writer.

 

My title for that first book comes from Ruth's final entry. The journal's calendar format was designed for business, each page divided into three separate sections and no Sunday entries provided. She skipped many dates until they reached the island. At year's end, she claimed the need to "reflect upon the fleetness of time, with its many changes, and that every rolling year adds another to our age, and draws us nigher to Eternity, and we might well say with the Poet,

 

'Time by moments steals away,

First the hour and then the day!

Small the daily loss appears,

But it soon amounts to years:

Thus another year has flown,

And is now no more our own.

Forty-eight! Old year! So thou

Hast for aye departed now.'

 

I have no idea if "the Poet" is anyone other than Ruth Douglass herself and confess to doggedly writing an annual New Year's entry in my own journal ever since.

 

The illustrations in my edition of Ruth's journal include that an image of that final journal entry. It's challenging to read in the small size allotted to it, but even without a magnifier it's still legible. That's not always the case when you're reading old manuscripts and some adaptation is often required. The older the manuscript, the greater the chance of finding out-of-date spellings and letter formations, not to mention unfamiliar terms and allusions or random errors in word choice. Since editing Ruth's journal I've sometimes transcribed portions of other writers' manuscripts. It usually requires adjusting to the idiosyncrasies of individual writers.

 

In my own handwritten journals, I tend to print, a habit I picked up from my father, but when drafting an early sketch of something in longhand that I know may eventually be revised and re-revised (or abandoned), I tend to scribble in a cursive script other readers might justifiably curse at. The longer I work on it, the less legible it becomes; sometimes later I have more trouble transcribing my own handwriting than I have with a stranger's. I'm pretty sure Aldo Leopold's journal entries are principally thoughts he expected only himself to read, recording clues to his reactions at the time, allusions to information he thought worth keeping. He would expect to be able to read his own handwriting, fill out his own abbreviations, understand his own allusions.

 

I self-published my grandmother's newspaper column years ago, thinking it would be good to have it out in the world, to have her descendants know they could connect to them whenever they wanted. Somewhere I have a file folder with my mother-in-law's handwritten poetry gathered inside, poems I meant to transcribe and print to pass around to family members. It might be past time to unearth that folder and complete the transcription.

 

Aldo Leopold's handwritten journals are viewable online. It will be good to expand their accessibility into print. They won't be as popular or as influential as A Sand County Almanac but then, they don't have to be. I think I need to volunteer to transcribe another 20 pages soon.

 

Notes: Aldo Leopold papers: Diaries and Journals: Shack Journals.

 

Root, Betsy. How to Develop Your Personality. Edited, with an Introduction, by Robert L. Root, Jr. Glimmerglass Editions, 2012.

 

Root, Robert. Recovering Ruth: A Biographer's Tale. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.

 

Root, Robert L., Jr. "Time by Moments Steals Away": The 1848 Journal of Ruth Douglass. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998.

 

Root, Robert. Walking Home Ground: In the Footsteps of Muir, Leopold, and Derleth. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2017.

 

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