Welcome to 21st century fire: You’re not safe
California's explosive cataclysms, says John Vaillant, author of National Book Award-nominated "Fire Weather," are showing the future to the world.
For a book revolving around a city-consuming wildfire in Canada, John Vaillant’s “Fire Weather” — named last month a U.S. National Book Award non-fiction finalist — features a great deal of California content. This state’s fiery cataclysms, Vaillant says, opened a window into everybody’s future.
California’s eight largest fires in recorded history came in the past seven years, an abrupt escalation that “anticipated what a lot of us are experiencing now,” Vaillant said in an interview. “A lot of North Americans comforted ourselves: ‘Well, that’s just a California thing. This couldn’t happen to us.’ We are learning that no, it can happen anywhere.”
Vaillant, a U.S.-born journalist and author, visited Redding in Northern California shortly after the Carr Fire in 2018, the state’s eighth-most damaging blaze that killed eight people and torched 1,600 structures. It also spawned the world’s second observed fire tornado, an apocalyptic phenomenon unknown before fossil fuel use heated Earth into what Vaillant in his book calls “a fire planet that we have made.”
The way the tornado moved “was so astonishing, and obliterating,” Vaillant says. “It really was comparable to Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It was destruction on a scale that I’ve never seen anywhere.”
The fire at the center of Vaillant’s book swept out of the forest in 2016 to ravage Fort McMurray, Alberta, the city supporting Canada’s gigantic tar-sands oilfields. Homes burned to foundations in three minutes. Neighborhoods vanished in an hour. Fire Weather draws a blazing connection between the fuels that propel modern civilization and threaten to destroy it.
“Oil has been dominant for our entire lives,” Vaillant says. “It really was an experiment, and we now know what the results are: fabulous wealth for some, and climate disaster for everybody.”
Vaillant hailed a lawsuit filed in September by the administration of Gov. Gavin Newsom, accusing major oil companies of knowingly pushing California toward catastrophic wildfire, extreme weather and drought while deceptively touting their products as safe. “It’s a needle-moving, culture-changing, law-changing moment,” Vaillant said.
The Bay Area News Group caught up with Vaillant recently by phone. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q In “Fire Weather,” you quote a Cal Fire deputy chief saying that in California, we used to have a four-month fire season and now it’s effectively all year. Canada, your country of residence, this year has been an inferno, as have several other countries. Why did the situation escalate so abruptly?
A There are these climate thresholds that we are crossing. What we’ve done with CO2 and methane (emissions) is, if you think of the atmosphere and the ocean as batteries, we have sort of supercharged these batteries in terms of their heat-retaining, energy-retaining characteristics. The petroleum industry is a man-made super-volcano that is supercharging the heat-retaining characteristics of Planet Earth. If you tweak the chemistry, you’re going to get a real response. It’s not a new normal — it’s an unknown place.
Q Until fairly recently, urban areas were considered safe from forest fires, but now we see suburbs burning in California, and “Fire Weather” shows the play-by-play of a Canadian city decimated by a wildfire. Is any community safe?
A Historically safe places are no longer as safe. Look at where these fires have occurred in these very implausible places: Gatlinburg, Tennessee burned in 2016. That was a total anomaly. Halifax, Nova Scotia burning (this year) — are you kidding? I cannot overstate how foggy and damp that city is. And yet it burned like California. I don’t think any place is safe. When you have these really low humidities and these excessive heats it just gives the fire more power so it’s able to project radiant heat and embers into the built environment with a kind of ferocity that it wasn’t able to do before. We’re seeing the luck run out for community after community.
Q What should citizens demand from their elected leaders in response to the rapid escalation of wildfire risk, frequency and severity?
A We can’t elect leaders who are in climate denial. We can’t elect leaders who are beholden to the petroleum industry — the petroleum industry has to lose its social license. They need to be brought to heel. We can’t go to zero on fossil fuels overnight, but we have to push on it hard. At the municipal level and the state level and the national level we have to demand a climate consciousness and a proactive attitude toward reducing our carbon output.
Q Did the Fort McMurray fire and the sudden onset of mega-fires all over the world turn climate-change skeptics into believers?
A The answer is a resounding no. For most of us, we have tolerable lives. We’ve worked hard to put everything in place. We want to keep doing that. We are being thrust into the future, but most people just through the intrinsic qualities of human nature don’t want to be thrust into the future.
Q What do you fear losing if we don’t slow global warming?
A The world that we knew, the world that gave us comfort and joy and also water and food. We’re kind of giving our planet and every species including ourselves a massive case of heatstroke. A lot of animals, people and other beings are going to die from it. There’s going to be terrible loss, as we saw in Lahaina. There are places in the world where it’s getting literally too hot to grow food. That area’s going to expand. There’s going to be a massive movement of population and a massive change in what can grow where, if it can grow at all. That’s going to impact food supply. What we can’t underestimate is the sadness of it. It was a beautiful world.