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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.
 
 
 

Umwelten and Beyond

 

Catching up on unread articles in The New York Times Book Review's year-end issue, I opened to the section on what they judge to be the ten best books of 2022 and realized that I'd been reading one nonfiction choice nightly, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong, for a week or so. They provided a cover image, a capsule review rich with merited praise, and a short excerpt, part of a paragraph about the speed and power of a striking rattlesnake that I'd already read and remembered well. Upstairs at my nightstand, I leafed through the book, pausing at each dogeared page where scenes or observations had caught my attention on various nights. Rich in vivid description and significant information about the animals it discusses, the book continually expands the reader's awareness of how all kinds of creatures operate in the world.

 

Yong draws on an amazing range of research—most pages throughout the book include footnotes adding to the informative paragraphs above and his extensive bibliography runs 45 pages—sharing not only abundant scientific reading but also onsite conversations with various researchers to learn what distinguishes the sensory ranges of all kinds of creatures. Chapters center on smells and tastes, light and ways of seeing, color, pain, heat, sound, and contact, as well as sensory powers humans might not know they themselves have or once had, powers other very different creatures consistently rely on.

 

Yong begins the book demonstrating how seven creatures in the same physical space might "experience it in wildly and wondrously different ways." As the book will show us, "every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality's fullness," because each creature is "enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world." He introduces the key term Umwelt: "the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience—its perceptual world," and uses the term Umwelten throughout the book to distinguish different ways that different creatures discern their world. For example, the chapter on electric fields examines such creatures as knifefishes and elephantfishes that "use their electric fields to sense their surroundings, and . . . communicate with each other. Electricity is to them what echoes are to bats, smells are to dogs, and light is to humans—the core of their Umwelt." Yong makes a good case for his assertion that "[t]o stand a chance of knowing what it is like to be another animal, we need to know almost everything about that animal': its senses, nervous system, needs, environment, "evolutionary past and its ecological present."

 

Examples abound throughout the book, encompassing an almost encyclopedic range of creatures. For example, observing heat-sensitive pits behind a rattlesnake's nostrils, Yong tells us they evolved among three groups of snakes, "two non-venomous constrictors, pythons and boas," and "the highly venomous and aptly named pit vipers—cottonmouths, copperheads, moccasins, and rattlesnakes." He points out that "a pit viper can detect the warmth of a rodent from up to a meter away. A blindfolded rattlesnake that's sitting on your head could sense the warmth of a mouse on the tip of your outstretched finger."

 

Such facts surface about other creatures throughout the book. For example: "Around 350 species of fish can produce their own electricity, and humans have known about their ability since long before anyone knew what electricity was." And: "After a busy night of insect-catching, big brown bats use a compass sense to return to their home roosts. After an early life in the open ocean, baby cardinal fish use a compass sense to swim back to the coral reefs where they were born. Mole-rats use their compass to find their way through their dark underground tunnels."

 

As exhilarating as his revelations about all kinds of creatures are, there's a darker aspect to what we learn. In his final chapter Yong details the ways humans have profoundly altered the Umwelten of Earth's other creatures. "We are closer than ever to understanding what it is like to be another animal, but we have made it harder than ever for other animals to be."

 

He heightens our awareness of where our world is now: "We normalize the abnormal, and accept the unacceptable. Remember that more than 80 percent of people live under light-polluted skies, and that two-thirds of Europeans are immersed in noise equivalent to constant rainfall. Many people have no idea what true darkness or quiet feels like . . . . As the problem of sensory pollution grows, our willingness to address it subsides." He asks, "How do we solve a problem that we don't realize exists." This book makes us more profoundly aware and gives us hope that we'll find a way to address it.

 

 

Notes: Yong, Ed. An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. New York: Random House, 2022.

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