Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

Description

'Astounding on every page. John Vaillant is one of the great poetic chroniclers of the natural world' David Wallace-Wells 'A towering achievement; an immense work of research, reflection and imagination' Robert Macfarlane A stunning account of this century's most intense urban fire, and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind In May 2016, Fort McMurray, Alberta, the hub of Canada's oil industry, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster turned entire neighbourhoods into firebombs and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration, John Vaillant reveals a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world. For hundreds of millennia, fire has been a partner in our evolution, shaping culture and civilization. Yet this volatile energy has always threatened to elude our control, and in our age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in ways never witnessed by human beings. With masterly prose and cinematic style, Vaillant explores the intertwined histories of the oil industry and climate science, the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and the lives forever changed by these disasters. Fire Weather is an urgent book for our new century of fire.

John Vaillant's first book, The Golden Spruce, won the Canadian Governor General's Award for non-fiction. He has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Outside, National Geographic and Men's Journal, among other publications. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife and children.

In John Vaillant's vivid anatomy of the apocalyptic Fort McMurray inferno, the histories of humankind's ever-accelerating consumption of fossil fuel, and of our ever-increasing vulnerability to extreme wildfire, converge with the relentlessness of fate - and the urgency of prophecy -- Philip Gourevitch Riveting, spellbinding, astounding on every page. John Vaillant is one of the great poetic chroniclers of the natural world, and here he captures the majesty and horror of one of its great disasters - and what made it tragically possible -- David Wallace-Wells Fire Weather is a compulsively readable journey into our fiery times - by turns a propulsive account of the Fort McMurray Fire burning an oil town to ash; an investigation into the gas-guzzling economic systems that make wildfires so hot they melt steel (and so large they form their own weather); and a meditation on the human relationship with combustion. At the centre, Vaillant gives us fire itself as a character - fast, hungry, and evolving to shape the warming decades to come -- Bathsheba Demuth, author of Floating Coast The Fort McMurray fire was a vortex of people, ideas, institutions, forest, oil, city, and wind, the quirky and the existential, all mutating under the wanton impress of the Anthropocene Age. Fire Weather offers a compelling account of that tragedy, and a reimagining of a pyric infection that threatens to remake the planet -- Stephen Pyne, author of The Pyrocene A towering achievement; an immense work of research, reflection and imagination . . . Fire Weather is extraordinary in terms of its scope and range; it also sings and surprises at the level of the sentence. It grips like a philosophical thriller, warns like a beacon, and shocks to the core -- Robert Macfarlane