Our Neighbo(u)rs to the North, Aflame: On John Vaillant’s “Fire Weather”
John Vaillant | Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World | Knopf | June 2023 | 432 Pages
There’s a fire in the woods outside of town. If you look out your window, you can see enormous gray and black columns of smoke flowing up into the clouds. Occasional flashes of orange hint at the flames below. The sight is worrying, but far away. And the professionals are surely dealing with it. Fire Weather, journalist John Vaillant’s account of a destructive 2016 wildfire, begins like this, with a menacing fire in the woods outside Fort McMurray, a city in northern Alberta built by and for the oil sands industry. When an angry plume of smoke rose from the forest west of town in early May 2016, most Fort McMurray residents were not worried. “Whatever was out there was being handled,” they assumed. What’s the appropriate response when you see smoke on the horizon? That’s the question Fort McMurray’s residents faced on May 1, 2016. In this case, they should have fled. The small fire outside of town—initially called fire MWF-009, or the Horse River Fire—exploded into the Beast, an inferno that consumed much of the city over several days. But it’s also a question posed metaphorically for US readers of Fire Weather. More broadly, it’s a question facing all of us due to climate change. There’s smoke on the horizon. It looks bad, but surely the professionals are handling things. Right? More ominously, when we see the smoke and flames on the horizon are we seeing not just a fire but a reflection of our own voracious appetites and desire to consume until we’re finally extinguished?
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Few Americans have heard of Fort McMurray. Among those who have, it’s likely because Alberta’s oil sands became a focus of US climate protests in the 2000s. This culminated in the fight to scuttle the Keystone XL pipeline, a proposed thirty-six-inch diameter steel tube that would have carried crude oil and diluted bitumen from Alberta’s oil sands to the US Gulf Coast. The Keystone XL pipeline is dead, but Alberta’s oil still flows to the US. The US imported the majority of its oil from Canada for many decades, most coming from Alberta. Readers in the US may also know Fort McMurray as a modern petroleum boomtown, where fast money inevitably leads to crime and exploitation, both human and environmental. Like North Dakota’s Bakken formation, Fort McMurray is often portrayed as an oil-soaked patch of the north country filled with strip clubs, drugs, and transient workers. There’s a kernel of truth in this portrayal. Kate Beaton’s award-winning graphic novel, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, highlights the booze, drugs, and sexual assault that’s all too common among the oil sands’ workforce. But lurid or tragic stories can overshadow Fort McMurray’s more prosaic reality. The city is less an American Wild West than a hard-working Canadian one-industry town.
Fort McMurray is an oil town, but it’s surrounded in all directions by the boreal forest. The city is “an island of industry in an ocean of trees.” The northern hemisphere’s boreal forest, a “green wreath crowning the globe,” has evolved to burn. The forests’ spruce, aspen, and birch trees regenerate via fire, making the boreal forest “a phoenix among ecosystems: literally reborn in fire, it must incinerate in order to regenerate.” But climate change—fueled by emissions from petroleum, among other sources—has made these forests more likely to burn hotter and faster than in previous eras. This was the setting for Fort McMurray’s calamitous spring in 2016.
Northern Alberta’s history, at least since the arrival of the first non-indigenous men like the fur-trader and murderer Peter Pond (today a mall in Fort McMurray carries his name), is a story of unsustainably exploiting the animals, plants, and minerals of the boreal forest. Vaillant draws a direct line from the Hudson’s Bay Company’s exploitation of First Nations for beaver pelts to today’s bitumen mining. Syncrude Canada Ltd., one of the largest companies on the oil-sands, is the inheritor of that legacy in the twenty-first century.
What beaver pelts were to the Blackfoot, Cree, and Hudson’s Bay Company traders, petroleum is to modern civilization: a commodity that draws people and capital to the boreal forest to exploit natural resources while blinding us to what’s being lost in the process. Vaillant describes the last century and a half as the “Petrocene Age,” or “the period of history in which our Promethean pursuit of fire’s energy, most notably crude oil, in conjunction with the internal combustion engine, took a quantum leap to transform all aspects of our civilization and, with it, our atmosphere.” Following energy historians such as Daniel Yergin and Vaclav Smil, Vaillant emphasizes how fossil fuels, especially crude oil, are entwined with nearly every aspect of modern life.
But the history of Fort McMurray and its development as the urban hub for petroleum production in northern Alberta is not the main point of Fire Weather. Fort McMurray is ultimately a synecdoche for our destructive relationship with petroleum and the new fire-prone climate it has created. The fire’s path of destruction through Fort McMurray illustrates, Vaillant argues, “the sympathetic feedback between both the headlong rush to exploit hydrocarbons at all costs… and the heating of our atmosphere that the global quest for hydrocarbons has initiated.” Many of the book’s characters are similarly torn between their love of petroleum-fueled fire—thousands of tiny explosions inside the cylinders of an internal-combustion engine—and the destruction it causes. Wayne McGrath, for example, was a welder who was already wearing flame-resistant coveralls and drinking screwdrivers on the day the fire engulfed his home in a subdivision south of downtown. McGrath was a “toy guy” who lost five snowmobiles (“sleds”) and one hundred thousand dollars-worth of tools to the inferno. He also owned a boat, a Harley, a quad, a classic car and, of course, a new pickup truck. These petroleum-fueled “toys” were at the center of his life and, in the depression McGrath faced after the fire, they caused his death. McGrath crashed his snowmobile on a frozen river and died in 2018.
Petroleum companies are ultimately in the fire business, selling a product that’s meant to burn. Alberta’s oil sands are “heavy industry at its most titanic and world altering, with fire at its core.” Vaillant reaches his most poetic register when describing the fire itself. “In fire’s world, everything relevant is breathing, emitting, vaporizing, volatile—not just the air, but the trees, the neighborhood, the house.” One of Vaillant’s strengths is that he’s able to render events from the fire’s perspective. (Although this raises the question of why he chose to define the era as the “Petrocene” rather than adopting Steven Pyne’s fire-centric periodization of “Pyrocene.”) Fire Weather makes it clear that not all fires are equal. The fire that incinerated Fort McMurray in 2016 was not simply “destructive fire, which burns down houses and forest.” Rather, it was “transformative fire, which makes familiar objects—like houses—disappear altogether, and leaves whatever’s left… altered at the molecular level.” Vaillant further suggests that we humans are not all that different from fire. “Distilled to our essence, we are fire’s kin—gas-driven, fuel-burning, heat-generating appetites who will burn as bright and as hot as we can, stopping at nothing until we’re finally extinguished.”
If the symbiosis of fire, petroleum, and humanity is Fire Weather’s main theme, our cognitive dissonance in the face of disasters caused by climate change is the book’s secondary leitmotif. Disaster “is cognitive dissonance made manifest,” Vaillant argues. As fire was exploding out of the forests southwest of Fort McMurray, residents were gripped by a powerful inertia to stick to familiar routines. The owner of a dry cleaner sees a wall of smoke and flame—the fire has jumped the wide Athabasca River—and he calls his wife, warning, “Honey, it just jumped the river—get out, get out, get out!” Then, he calmly turns to the next customer and reminds her of the date to pick up her laundry. Fort McMurray’s leaders appear to always be a step or two behind events, “unable to grasp the enormity of the danger facing them.” This, Vaillant implies, is the problem we all face in the Petrocene: the climate has slipped beyond anyone’s lived experience, so we are, like Fort McMurray’s leaders, always one step behind the cascading calamity.
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I first read Fire Weather while living in Calgary—over seven hundred kilometers south of Fort McMurray—where I was a Fulbright scholar in early 2023. I bought the book in May and read it while choking wildfire smoke covered the city with a brown-orange blanket. The smoke was unusually bad, my neighbors said, but life goes on. I saw golfers playing in the thick haze, thwacking balls that disappeared after twenty meters. Not coincidentally, Calgary is the corporate heart of Canada’s oil and gas industry. At least five people on my street were petroleum geologists.
I re-read the book after returning to my home outside St. Louis. It’s a long way from Alberta to the Midwest. If you drive, as I did, it takes several days for the brown hills of Alberta to give way to the lower Midwest’s corn and soybean fields, deep green and flat as a billiard table. The trip takes longer for the millions of gallons of oil that flow along a parallel route. For oil moving through pipelines from Hardisty, Alberta, to the Wood River Refinery near my home, the trip takes roughly thirty-four days, with the petroleum glugging along at three to six miles per hour.
It’s tempting to read about Fort McMurray burning while sitting in the green and humid Midwest and think, “thank goodness that can’t happen here.” But this thought requires historical blinders. Some of the deadliest and most destructive fires in US history were midwestern infernos: the Great Chicago Fire of 1871; the Peshtigo fire that broke out on the same day and incinerated over a million acres of Wisconsin forest and killed more than 1,200 people; and the regular fires that ignited on Cleveland’s oil-soaked Cuyahoga River, including the 1969 fire that became a poster child for the environmental movement. Aldo Leopold, perhaps the Midwest’s greatest nature writer, died from a heart attack while fighting a brush fire near his farm.
Nor are midwestern wildfires safely contained in a sepia-toned past of sawmill towns and wooden sidewalks. The October 2023 update to NOAA’s “North American Seasonal Fire Assessment and Outlook” contains a map with red blobs showing the regions facing above-normal fire risk. The second-largest fire-warning blob begins at Lake Winnipeg in the north and stretches south to cover all of Minnesota and most of Wisconsin. In the dry, understated language typical of climate science, the report warns that “above normal potential [for fire] is forecast across the Upper Midwest.”
In northern Alberta, climate change is drying the boreal forest and causing hotter, wilder fires. There’s no boreal forest in the Midwest, but the same hotter and drier climatic conditions can have other devastating effects. In May 2023, high winds blew across the Illinois prairie following an exceptionally dry spring. Topsoil blown off nearby farm fields created a dust storm that blanketed Interstate 55 between St. Louis and Springfield. By the time the dust storm moved on, eighty-four84 automobiles had been involved in accidents and eight people died due to injuries from the crashes. Survivors’ nightmarish accounts could easily be swapped for reports of residents fleeing a wildfire. A Chicago Tribune investigation described how “a wall of dirt 200 feet high engulfed the interstate. Suddenly blinded and panicked drivers desperately tried to slam on their brakes or veer off the road for safety, only to find none. Vehicles smashed into each other, some with such force that each collision sounded like an explosion.” Bloodied by a crash, one victim described how “all around he heard the terrifying crunching of cars smashing into each other… A man, barely visible in the swirling dust, appeared out the window and yelled for them to get out of the car. Suddenly, there was another explosion.”
Petroleum is what connects Fort McMurray, where tens of thousands of Canadians have carved a city out of the forest to mine oil sands, the automobiles on US interstates that become high-speed firebombs in a dust storm, and the warming atmosphere where carbon dioxide slowly collects in the air above our heads. Petroleum also connects the US Midwest and Alberta more directly. In the Midwest, “foreign” oil mainly means Canadian petroleum. In 2022, for instance, 979 million barrels of oil were imported into the midwestern PADD 2 region. (Petroleum Administration Defense Districts, or PADDs, were created to manage gasoline rationing during World War II and are still used to carve up the vast US market.) Almost all the Midwest’s imported oil—except for a paltry 31,000 barrels—came from Canada. The Midwest is the most extreme example, but the US relies on Canada for a large portion of its oil. As Vaillant describes, the oil arriving to the US from Canada every day is “the equivalent of one ultra large crude carrier ship every twenty-four hours. Of this vast quantity, almost ninety percent originates in Fort McMurray.”
As a midwesterner, my life has been saturated with Alberta’s oil. My first car, a used Ford F-150 with a bench seat stained brown from the plumber who owned it before me, had dual fuel tanks that held over thirty gallons of gasoline. Much of that gasoline came from Alberta oil. The gasoline I spilled when filling up the tank for a boat’s outboard motor—a shimmering rainbow spreading across the water—probably came from Alberta, too. Alberta and the Midwest are closer than they appear.
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Despite the fire’s enormous destruction in Fort McMurray, no one died. Civic leaders and firefighters initially assumed there would be hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths from a fire that devoured entire subdivisions within hours. Yet when the fire finally burned past the city, the only lives lost were two drivers killed when their SUV collided with a semi-truck south of the city. It’s a tragic contrast with the wildfires that destroyed Lahaina on Maui in August 2023, where, as of September 2023, the death count was ninety-seven. Or California’s 2018 Camp Fire, where at least eighty-five85 people were killed.
Fort McMurray escaped casualties thanks to an extraordinary total evacuation of the city. All residents were ordered to leave in what Vallient notes was the “largest, most rapid single-day evacuation in the history of modern fire.” Fleeing the burning city in their cars and trucks, Fort McMurray’s residents were shockingly well-organized and orderly. Their youth and workplace safety training certainly played a part. Most petroleum industry meetings—including office meetings hundreds of miles from any well or refinery—begin with reminders about workplace safety. But the distinctly Canadian culture of rule-following was also crucial. Trying to flee the fire with his family in a work truck, one man reached to turn on the roof light and cross the sidewalk to bypass other cars. His wife simply said, “don’t be that guy” and he, alongside ninety thousand of his neighbors, inched out of the city “at the pace of a Tim Horton’s drive-through.” In the words of climate journalist Chris Turner, it was an evacuation defined by “calm and kindness and order” with “virtually no stories of greed or grotesque selfishness, no roadside jousts over the order in the line of escape.” Again, the contrast with the disorderly, everyone-for-themselves flight from the Lahaina fires is striking.
What are we to think when a wildfire, accelerated by climate change, burns through a city built to extract petroleum yet everyone escapes? Is the fire’s destructiveness the main story? Or should we instead celebrate the residents’ survival? Vaillant argues that the Beast deserves a place in the annals of history’s most devastating urban fires: the 1657 fire that destroyed Edo (today’s Tokyo), the Great Fire of London in 1666, and Chicago in 1871. Perhaps, but each of these earlier fires took a dramatic toll in human lives. When we enumerate the worst fire disasters—and there are surely more to come—should we count buildings destroyed or human lives lost? This gets to the heart of the tension within Fire Weather. The climate is changing to make fires bigger, hotter, and more explosive. It’s scary stuff. But we also have the wealth and technology to keep people alive—so far, at least—in the face of these devastating new fires.
Climate scientists and activists distinguish climate mitigation from climate adaptation. Mitigation means stopping greenhouse gas emissions. Adaptation refers to changing our lives and our societies to adapt to a warmer and more volatile climate. Fire Weather is meant, I think, as a climate mitigation story. Alberta’s oil sands are among the world’s most greenhouse-gas-intensive sources of oil. So long as we continue to mine them and burn them, our atmosphere will keep heating up.
But there’s a more optimistic story about climate adaptation within Fire Weather. Ironically, the corporate investment and young, cosmopolitan labor force of Fort McMurray was well-positioned to survive the disaster. Minnesota journalist Aaron Brown describes a similar event from midwestern history. When horrific wildfires swept across northeastern Minnesota in October 1918, the iron-ore mining town of Hibbing was largely spared thanks to a modern, aggressive fire department paid for by a local government that heavily taxed the mining companies. Nearby cities like Moose Lake and Cloquet were destroyed and hundreds of people were killed. The same industrial might that ripped metal from the Earth could be summoned to protect human life, but it required political will and a plan.
Adaptation saved lives and homes even while the fire was raging in Fort McMurray. The city’s firefighters quickly changed tactics while fighting the Beast. They abandoned the usual approach of urban firefighting—get to a fire with equipment and blast it with water—and started acting like wildfire fighters, knocking down houses and cars like they were clearing trees to make a firebreak. By day two of the fire, firefighters were “knocking down intact, unburned houses, most of them brand-new—and not one or two at a time, but by the block, just as a bulldozer would knock down a stand of trees.” This “urban firebreak” strategy worked. “By removing fuel [i. e., houses], they successfully broke the chain of ignition” and likely spared large sections of the city.
In a poignant essay about the residents of Staten Island’s Oakwood Beach, who have chosen to retreat from the shoreline in the face of a rising ocean, Elizabeth Rush argues that these homeowners are not just “canaries in our coal mine” but are, rather, “an example for the rest of us to follow. Lights along the landing strip, illuminating the way.” Fort McMurray’s residents similarly offer us lessons about how we can keep ourselves safe even while acknowledging our imbrication with petroleum. Mitigation is our only option in the long run. But we will also need to embrace the “calm and kindness and order” displayed by Fort McMurray’s residents to adapt, and hopefully to thrive, on a hotter planet.
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Vaillant ends Fire Weather by narrating the history of climate science, a story told via portraits of heroic scientists who puzzled out the mysteries of carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect. These scientists were our civilization’s Cassandras, speaking with “an oracular quality” about the coming disasters but fated to be ignored. As a story from our recent past, what might Fire Weather portend for our future?
As a historian, I am perhaps overdetermined to think chronologically. But climate change requires us to confront overlapping scales of time: the eons of the Earth’s warming and cooling, the multi-century effort to build a fossil-fuel-driven industrial system so vast it can accelerate those geological cycles, and the lifespan of human generations, in which choices were made by great-grandparents that will affect children and grandchildren. “I was born in the 1960s,” Vaillant writes, “but I personally knew people born in the 1870s and ‘80s, when the petroleum industry was in its infancy and Standard Oil was a start-up.” The decades when fossil fuels were new are not that far away from us in the grand sweep of time, but due to climate change they are increasingly “remote chemically, biologically, atmospherically, technologically, anthropogenically from the world we inhabit now, the world we are currently unmaking, the world our children are inheriting that resembles, less and less, the one that made us.” From the northern edge of the Midwest, Aaron Brown similarly looks into the future as his son considers a job fighting wildfires: “I imagine my oldest son holding back a wall of infinite flames for the rest of his life.” Today, we can all see the smoke rising in the woods outside the city. What will we do?