Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World

"Finalist"

"This book comes out of that fine North American tradition of nonfiction writing—a deeply researched and meticulously told account of a real event. It’s about a fire that happened up in the subarctic region of Canada, which is, by definition, very remote. It’s a very hard place to earn a living and it tells you a lot about human beings that tens of thousands of people have moved up there to work in the tar sands industry. This is a part of the oil industry that should be marginal because it’s very difficult to get the oil out. You have to expend huge amounts of electricity and natural gas to lift the sands and then to melt and render out the oil. That, in itself, is a remarkable thing. Fire Weather tells the story of what happens when everything goes wrong and the unthinkable happens. It’s the boreal forest up there, and forest fires are nothing new—they happen quite regularly. It’s a way that nature cleans up a bit, to put it simplistically. But this fire in 2016 went completely out of control. There are various reasons for that, but it points to a bigger issue around changes in the climate. The author gives you a very vivid account of that extraordinary event, which affected 90,000. It destroyed much of this place, Fort McMurray, and made a lot of people homeless. 2,400 structures were destroyed and 1,000 more were damaged. The physics he describes is extraordinary. The fire gets up to a level where nothing can resist it. Things that you would think are indestructible just go. Metal goes, solid structures go. It’s out of control. Some of the almost poetic parts of the book are how he describes fire as this thing in itself: how it operates on its own laws, and what it needs to keep going. That includes oxygen, of course, but also everything to do with fossil fuels. It is not just the tar sands or bunkers of petrol: much of our houses is now made of things that come from fossil fuels. Plastics are the obvious one, but there are lots of others. Once a fire gets going, these are just kindling and further fuel for the fire. It’s one of those stories that goes from utterly focused, diligent reporting—minute-by-minute tracking people as they’re fleeing from their homes and trying to take their pets and the house is blowing up—through to the bigger picture of the oil industry, going to the most remote places on earth to engage in the most insanely arduous processes to extract oil and pump it out because there’s some money to be made. It’s about all the political dynamics around that, who is in charge of those industries in that part of the world and then, into the bigger picture of the environment. It’s about the economics, the environmental state and the changes that we’re living through. It covers this extraordinary canvas. It makes you think about an issue that we hear a lot about and puts it into a very real moment. Totally. That comes out of that tradition I mentioned. It’s that intense detail—all the eyewitnesses’ quotes feeding in. There’s the blow-by-blow account of what the local radio station is putting out as they themselves are facing the decision of whether to keep broadcasting or to make a run for it. It’s very alive."

"How unfortunately ironic that this gripping investigation into a catastrophic 2016 Canadian wildfire was published at exactly the moment when the Eastern Seaboard found itself gasping through a yellow haze caused by record-setting fires that scorched over 70,000 square miles north of the border. John Vaillant, an U.S.-born author and journalist living in Canada, examines an earlier, comparable disaster. The Fort McMurray wildfire, known locally as “the Beast,” caused billions of dollars in damages and displaced tens of thousands of people. Vaillant takes readers back into the deep history of the boreal forests before thrusting us into the Beast’s fiery heart. Fire Weather is a report from the front lines of environmental cataclysm and a prediction of what more will surely come."