Fire Weather John Vaillant
Apocalypse in Alberta
The Canadian city of Fort McMurray, 600 miles south of the Arctic Circle, 600 miles north of the US border, is, John Vaillant writes, “an island of industry in an ocean of trees”. This all-consuming book is about the connection between those trees and that industry; an increasingly deadly symbiosis.
Fort McMurray is an oil town. It was built to service the tar sands of Alberta, a province that produces about 40% of all American oil imports. At times, when the price of crude has been high, the city has been known as Fort McMoney.
That money, however, is revenue from the trade that has an ever-more significant byproduct: the incremental warming of the planet. One result of that warming has been that the vast ocean of trees in which Fort McMoney sits has become, in recent years, increasingly likely to burn. The 100,000 permanent and temporary citizens of the city are both frontline creators and potential victims of global warming.
In 2016, Vaillant argues, those two realities – fossil fuels and forest – came together in a local apocalypse. After a record-breaking dry and warm winter in Alberta that year – parts of the province had very little snow – the unending boreal forests around Fort McMurray had, by spring, already experienced eight large-scale fires.
On 2 May the fire did the unthinkable and crossed the Athabasca River, a third of a mile wide
Fire number nine, however, which was identified on the last day of April, was different. That fire is the subject of Vaillant’s urgent disaster story, meticulous in its detail, both human and geological in its scale, and often shocking in its conclusions.
By the end of that week the fire had burned half a million acres. It was still burning 15 months later, having consumed about 2,500 square miles of forest, an area roughly the size of Devon. Its ferocity, Vaillant suggests, has since been echoed in fire events in Australia, California and elsewhere, all of which have “different internal conditions” to what has been seen previously, conditions created by “an atmosphere more conducive to combustion than at any time in the past 3 million years”.
Those ideal conditions, Vaillant argues, are not confined to the natural world. Since 2016, banks have loaned “$3.8trn to the oil and gas industry” for future projects. Meanwhile, governments continue to behave like the council leaders of Fort McMurray on 1 May 2016, who, “while acknowledging openly that the fire was huge, out of control and heading toward town in historic fire weather conditions”, for two days advised citizens to go about their business as usual.