Book Review: Fire Weather
“The most important failure was one of imagination.”
~U.S. Senate’s 9/11 Commission Report, as quoted by John Vaillant in Fire Weather, On the Front Lines of a Burning World
John Vaillant’s 2024 book, Fire Weather, On the Front Lines of a Burning World is not reading for the faint of heart. Anytime the fire bombing of Hamburg, Germany, during World War II is used as an analogy for what is happening in today’s fire world with explosive events that behave unpredictably, move quickly, and consume completely, you know it’s going to be a rough ride. Yet, with a riveting narrative that centers around the 2016-2017 wildfire that destroyed much of Fort McMurray, Alberta (yes, the fire actually burned for 15 months), the book is impossible to put down.
In May 2016, a wildfire overtook the city, 88,000 people fled in the space of a few hours, and houses burned completely in minutes due to a weather phenomenon known as “crossover,” where the ambient air temperature exceeds the relative humidity. This is the point at which the action of the fire becomes effortless. Vaillant writes, “Instead of burning in spite of its environment—wet wood, cool temperatures, the dead smothering air of an inversion—the environment becomes an ally attending to the fire’s every need: high temperatures, low humidity, dry fuel, and wind.” For hours, Fort McMurray officials didn’t understand, and therefore couldn’t convey, the true scope of the fire’s potential. Vaillant describes this “disconnect between the reality of this fire and the leadership’s estimation of it” as having “less to do with information or attitude than with vision.” The chasm was a byproduct of the “Lucretius Problem.” Titus Lucretius Carus, a Roman poet and philosopher, first observed this “bug in human perception” as Vaillant describes it, in the first century BCE. Put simply, the problem has to do with the often large gap between individual human experience and what is actually possible. Fire behavior that caused houses to explode and burn to the ground in minutes was not something that public officials in Fort McMurray had ever experienced. Consequently, they couldn’t imagine them either. Vaillant offers the Lucretius Problem as a proximal cause to “any number of accidents, catastrophes, victories, and defeats,” including the financial crash of 2008 and the recent election of a certain U.S. president.
In addition to describing what happened to Fort McMurray in spring 2016 Vaillant also pulls back to the larger picture of the fossil fuel industry and when scientists and industry and government officials understood how the planet could warm through the release of carbon dioxide. This knowledge was known as early as 1856, realized by an American scientist named Eunice Foote. In her article, “Circumstances affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays,” she described an experiment she’d devised with two glass cylinders, one filled with regular air and one filled with additional carbon dioxide. Upon exposure to sunlight, the latter grew substantially more heated. Vaillant describes her observations: “The receiver containing the gas,” Foote wrote, “became itself much heated—very sensibly more so than the other—and on being removed, it was many times as long in cooling.” A male colleague then presented Foote’s work at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Albany New York.
Some planetary history is also a part of this expansive book. Vaillant writes, “Fire, as far as we know, is unique to our planet. A relative newcomer, it has occurred on Earth for about half a billion years.” Fire is a chemical reaction requiring oxygen, an element that for much of Earth’s history only existed in small amounts. However, as photosynthesizing plants became more abundant, oxygen increased and allowed for an abundance of organisms to come into being. Oxygen is absolutely necessary for most life (Vaillant advises that if we don’t believe this, we should try holding our breath for 30 seconds and see how we feel), and it also, under the right conditions, can be extremely reactive.
John Vaillant is very adept at blending science and social history. He also isn’t afraid of tackling ecological controversies. The imagery and metaphors in Fire Weather are powerful and designed to wake all of us up from our energy dependence blindness. Three that I thought particularly effective included describing the disorientation that results when all the familiar landmarks vanish around one (“Between [the waypoints] disappearance and the smoke, Palmer was becoming a stranger in his own hometown. This was happening now on a city-wide scale: the memory palace was burning down.”); reminding all of us of the toxicity that comes out of our cars’ tailpipes every time we turn them on (“If the Silverado’s exhaust were piped into the driver’s living room, she and her family would be dead in an hour. But somehow, when we run our cars “outside,” in our shared atmosphere, all the soot and toxic gases magically disappear.”); and scientists as the designated drivers of society (“Sober, responsible, and vigilant, their job is to tell us when we’ve had enough, and try to get us safely home.”).
As I read Fire Weather, I remembered Greta Thunberg’s questions about why people weren’t treating the climate crisis as the emergency that it is. This is one book to hammer home the point. Upon finishing it, I felt renewed resolve to purchase a second electric vehicle, forego all jet travel, commit more to a plant-based diet, and do more to add my voice to the chorus pressuring leaders to enact policies and legislation to save the planet. Humanity must act quickly. We know this is possible because we just recently saw rapid changes in behavior during the pandemic. But we must understand that this is a real emergency, and we must also understand that we’ve never been here before.