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A review by dsbs42
Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast by John Vaillant
challenging
dark
informative
sad
tense
slow-paced
4.25
Another book that needs to go on everyone's reading list, stat. I wanted to shove it in the face of everyone I came across while reading and yell READ THIS READ IT RIGHT NOW (joining Stolen Focus and Missoula from this year alone).
This book tackles a lot. The history of Big Oil worldwide and bitumen development in Alberta; the establishment and growth of the community of Fort McMurray; the history of climate science and its discovery, dismissal, denial, and deferral; the realities of climate change; the chemical and physical behaviour of fire.
And I think it's vital reading for everyone because it tells the human story of what happens when the laws and baselines of the past no longer apply, and when the people entrusted with protecting you are unable to act on, unable to even imagine, what needs to be done. As Vaillant all but comes out and says in this book, the once-in-a-lifetime 2016 Fort McMurray fire, nowhere on Earth is safe from the effects of climate change, and we will all experience climate catastrophe in one way or another. This is what it looks like. This is what it feels like. This is how it happened.
I found Fire Weather a bit slow to get going. Part 1, "Origin Stories" is necessary set up for the tale Vaillant wants to tell, but it's a bit dry, unless you happen to have a particular fascination for bitumen extraction. The parts dealing with the Fort McMurray fire itself are, as the many blurbs say, as adrenaline-soaked and engaging as anything you'll read in a thriller. Personally, I connected most with the history of climate science and the personal stories of people throughout the day on May 3rd, 2016, as the fire changed from a commonplace backdrop for daily routine, to an imminent threat, to an unnatural natural disaster. These, and the final few chapters in Part 3, "Reckoning," are why this is one of the best, or at least most important, books I've read this year (although I can't call it a favourite), and essential reading for all of humanity.
When I was in grade 9, a student from our school's environmental club passed me in the hallway asking people to sign a petition calling for Canada to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Even back then, ALMOST A QUARTER OF A CENTURY AGO, I was confused as to how there was even a debate about the reality of climate change and global warming. And, it turns out, the scientific debate on the subject was all but concluded another freaking quarter of a century before that (in the 1980s), as I found out later.
The fact that in all that time we, as a society, have failed to do anything meaningful about our part in the destruction of our environment and the obliteration of the climate norms humans have experienced for centuries is infuriating. I thought about writing "unfathomable," but let's face it, it is all too fathomable, especially with what we witnessed during the pandemic so recently as an example. When faced with catastrophic change, just when you think a turning point must finally have been reached, industry and capitalism dig their heels in deeper, worshiping at the alter of the status quo, even regressing out of spite. No masks! No vaccines! No health and safety regulations! And similarly, no pivot from fossil fuels and bitumen for Alberta! No limits on carbon emissions! No changes to emergency response recommendations!
It remains to be seen for how much longer those in power and those who fill their purses can stick their heads in the sand while shoving others' down there with them, but the consequences of this willful blindless are already being felt by all of us, and it's not going to get any better. Published two years ago, before even taking into account the devastation the current US administrations' policies are going to have on the environment, Vaillant notes that "The next decade is a crucial test for humanity. Unlike past species, humans have a choice. If we fail, the stakes will rise with each subsequent test." So no, it isn't hopeless, but the longer we put off this reckoning, the harder facing it will be. And we have put it off for so long already.
Quotes:
"As far as Pollan's plants, or our fire, are concerned, humans are simply zombie hosts obediently disseminating their seeds, tubers, sparks, and gases around the globe. In the end, the geologic record will show that it is we who served fire, who enabled it to burn more broadly and brightly than it ever has before. Fire, thus far, has mastered us."
"We are, right now, witnessing the early stages of a self-perpetuating and self-amplifying feedback loop, accompanied by myriad "cascade effects." In human terms, this has been a long time coming, but in geologic terms it has taken place overnight-roughly 7 human generations, or 2 life-spans. So limited are we by the brevity of our lives and, lately, by the kaleidoscopic swirl of technological advancement..."
"Currently we are on pace to re-create [...] climatic conditions that previously took millions of years to bring about. Such a cataclysmic rate of change will outrun most species' ability to adapt, and a new equilibrium will be a long time coming. Whatever that new world looks like, it will be a lonelier place inhabited by a relict fraction of today's biodiversity."
"[...] devoting our energy and creativity to regeneration and renewal rather than combustion and consumption - is what Nature is modeling for us and inviting us to do. Homo sapiens got us to the Petrocene Era. Homo flagrans is who we have become. Homo viriditas can guide us forward - and, possibly, back."
A lot of the quotations I've highlighted aren't from author John Vaillant himself but were quoted by him. Here are a couple:
This book tackles a lot. The history of Big Oil worldwide and bitumen development in Alberta; the establishment and growth of the community of Fort McMurray; the history of climate science and its discovery, dismissal, denial, and deferral; the realities of climate change; the chemical and physical behaviour of fire.
And I think it's vital reading for everyone because it tells the human story of what happens when the laws and baselines of the past no longer apply, and when the people entrusted with protecting you are unable to act on, unable to even imagine, what needs to be done. As Vaillant all but comes out and says in this book, the once-in-a-lifetime 2016 Fort McMurray fire, nowhere on Earth is safe from the effects of climate change, and we will all experience climate catastrophe in one way or another. This is what it looks like. This is what it feels like. This is how it happened.
I found Fire Weather a bit slow to get going. Part 1, "Origin Stories" is necessary set up for the tale Vaillant wants to tell, but it's a bit dry, unless you happen to have a particular fascination for bitumen extraction. The parts dealing with the Fort McMurray fire itself are, as the many blurbs say, as adrenaline-soaked and engaging as anything you'll read in a thriller. Personally, I connected most with the history of climate science and the personal stories of people throughout the day on May 3rd, 2016, as the fire changed from a commonplace backdrop for daily routine, to an imminent threat, to an unnatural natural disaster. These, and the final few chapters in Part 3, "Reckoning," are why this is one of the best, or at least most important, books I've read this year (although I can't call it a favourite), and essential reading for all of humanity.
When I was in grade 9, a student from our school's environmental club passed me in the hallway asking people to sign a petition calling for Canada to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Even back then, ALMOST A QUARTER OF A CENTURY AGO, I was confused as to how there was even a debate about the reality of climate change and global warming. And, it turns out, the scientific debate on the subject was all but concluded another freaking quarter of a century before that (in the 1980s), as I found out later.
The fact that in all that time we, as a society, have failed to do anything meaningful about our part in the destruction of our environment and the obliteration of the climate norms humans have experienced for centuries is infuriating. I thought about writing "unfathomable," but let's face it, it is all too fathomable, especially with what we witnessed during the pandemic so recently as an example. When faced with catastrophic change, just when you think a turning point must finally have been reached, industry and capitalism dig their heels in deeper, worshiping at the alter of the status quo, even regressing out of spite. No masks! No vaccines! No health and safety regulations! And similarly, no pivot from fossil fuels and bitumen for Alberta! No limits on carbon emissions! No changes to emergency response recommendations!
It remains to be seen for how much longer those in power and those who fill their purses can stick their heads in the sand while shoving others' down there with them, but the consequences of this willful blindless are already being felt by all of us, and it's not going to get any better. Published two years ago, before even taking into account the devastation the current US administrations' policies are going to have on the environment, Vaillant notes that "The next decade is a crucial test for humanity. Unlike past species, humans have a choice. If we fail, the stakes will rise with each subsequent test." So no, it isn't hopeless, but the longer we put off this reckoning, the harder facing it will be. And we have put it off for so long already.
Quotes:
"As far as Pollan's plants, or our fire, are concerned, humans are simply zombie hosts obediently disseminating their seeds, tubers, sparks, and gases around the globe. In the end, the geologic record will show that it is we who served fire, who enabled it to burn more broadly and brightly than it ever has before. Fire, thus far, has mastered us."
"We are, right now, witnessing the early stages of a self-perpetuating and self-amplifying feedback loop, accompanied by myriad "cascade effects." In human terms, this has been a long time coming, but in geologic terms it has taken place overnight-roughly 7 human generations, or 2 life-spans. So limited are we by the brevity of our lives and, lately, by the kaleidoscopic swirl of technological advancement..."
"Currently we are on pace to re-create [...] climatic conditions that previously took millions of years to bring about. Such a cataclysmic rate of change will outrun most species' ability to adapt, and a new equilibrium will be a long time coming. Whatever that new world looks like, it will be a lonelier place inhabited by a relict fraction of today's biodiversity."
"[...] devoting our energy and creativity to regeneration and renewal rather than combustion and consumption - is what Nature is modeling for us and inviting us to do. Homo sapiens got us to the Petrocene Era. Homo flagrans is who we have become. Homo viriditas can guide us forward - and, possibly, back."
A lot of the quotations I've highlighted aren't from author John Vaillant himself but were quoted by him. Here are a couple:
""The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." ~ Albert Allen Bartlett, physicist"
""This isn't a "drought," wrote the climate journalist Bob Berwyn in 2020, "because that implies recovery. This is aridification." Aridification precedes desertification.""
""This isn't a "drought," wrote the climate journalist Bob Berwyn in 2020, "because that implies recovery. This is aridification." Aridification precedes desertification.""