FIRE WEATHER

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.