Fire Weather

March 15, 2023
A Vancouver-based writer recounts "the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history." Located at the edge of Canada's boreal forest in northern Alberta, Fort McMurray--"Fort McMoney" to the locals--is the epicenter of the oil sands operations. Vaillant, the author of The Tiger and The Golden Spruce, calls it a place of "outsized dimensions," where the largest bison on the continent roam and oil-field workers cultivate monstrous dependencies on cocaine. One of the most outsize of the phenomena is fire, which has a natural ecological role in maintaining the health of the forest but, in a time of a warming climate and ever encroaching human settlement, can become cataclysmic. So it was in May 2016, when a wall of fire sprung up and swallowed much of Fort McMurray. The fire was not extinguished until August of the following year, and it generated lightning storms and hurricane winds of such force that they spawned fires many miles away. It also cost nearly $10 billion in damages. "When it burns," writes Vaillant of the vast boreal biome, which stores as much carbon dioxide as the world's tropical forests combined, "it goes off like a carbon bomb." As his narrative makes abundantly clear, there is very little that anyone can do to stop this degenerative process, short of retreating for a couple of millennia during which humans don't burn fossil fuels. Given that unlikelihood, the Fort McMurray fire, already "a cruel teacher," will have plenty of kin to teach further lessons. There's a lot of good Elizabeth Kolbert-level popular science writing here along with grittier portraits of the lives of the people who make their living among the tar sands and scrub. Vaillant, whose previous books have centered on the intersections of human and natural realms and their often tragic consequences, asks interesting questions as well, perhaps the one most worthy of pondering being a deceptively simple one: "Is fire alive?" A timely, well-written work of climate change reportage.

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April 3, 2023
Journalist Vaillant (The Tiger) offers a gripping account of the May 2016 fire that engulfed the city of Fort McMurray in the Canadian province of Alberta, destroying thousands of homes and forcing the evacuation of 88,000 people. His vivid description of the conflagration, which ignited during freakishly hot and dry weather and swept into town so suddenly that residents barely escaped in their cars as their houses flared and vaporized, is set against the Dantean backdrop of Fort McMurray’s oil-sands mining industry, one of the dirtiest outposts of the fossil fuels sector. Later chapters recap the science showing that greenhouse emissions to which the oil sands contribute are making droughts, heat waves, and wildfires more common. Vaillant’s sprawling narrative also takes in 19th-century sea otter hunts and the musings of 12th-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen, as he turns the Fort McMurray wildfire into a potent warning against the dangers of climate complacency and “unregulated free market capitalism.” Despite some moments of overwriting, Vaillant’s exploration of this material is rich and illuminating, and his prose punchy and cinematic. (“He thought he’d been hit, and he had—not by another vehicle, but by a fleeing deer, its fur smoking and aglow with embers.”) The result is an engrossing disaster tale with a potent message. Photos. Agent: Stuart Krichevsky, Stuart Krichevsky Literary.

May 15, 2023
Fire is the most versatile and whimsical of disasters,"" Vaillant writes in his searing coverage of the wallop of wildfires, dominance of petroleum, blunders of Big Oil, and cataclysmic consequences of climate change. He investigates the genesis, spread, and damage of the massive 2016 Fort McMurray Fire in Alberta, Canada, capturing the catastrophe in apocalyptic prose: ""a suddenly annihilating world where fists of heat pounded on the windows, the sky rained fire, and the air came alive in roaring flame."" Vaillant's exploration of fire draws on physics and chemistry, philosophy and symbolism. He muses about the possibility that fire is ""alive."" It grows, breathes, moves, and can be extinguished. He notes that a fire's origin is often humble, while its future hinges on fuel, oxygen, heat, wind, and weather. People are dependent on fire and the energy it provides. For humans, fire is both a ""begrudging servant"" and a savage agent of destruction. Vaillant concedes that we've made Earth a fire planet. His robust and vivid writing, detailed reporting, and urgent concern for the environment make for sizzling reading.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.