The journalist John Vaillant’s book “Fire Weather” begins in the spring of 2016 in the boreal forests surrounding the remote Canadian city of Fort McMurray, where a fire is growing. Although wildfire is a regular part of life in northern Alberta, this fire was destined to be different. “A new kind of fire introduced itself to the world,” Vaillant writes.
Ushered in by soaring temperatures, drought and high winds, this wildfire obliterated thousands of buildings, forced 88,000 people to evacuate and turned downtown Fort McMurray into an apocalyptic hellscape. At the time, the Fort McMurray fire was unprecedented. But Vaillant saw it for what it really was: a harbinger of terrifying things to come.
Inside Climate News spoke with Vaillant about what we can learn from the fires currently burning in Los Angeles; the parallels between this disaster and what happened in Fort McMurray in 2016; and what we should expect from what he calls our “century of fire.”
“We’re going to have to let go of a lot of the 20th century,” Vaillant said. “That’s what these events are telling us. The 20th century is over, and we really have to rethink how we do everything, from how we get our energy to how we build on a planet that we have made much more dangerous.”
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KILEY BENSE: Can you talk about the connections between climate change and the fires in Los Angeles? What are the causes of these fires?
JOHN VAILLANT: We’ve seen a lot of local [blame]: It’s,“Well, the governor didn’t do this, and the mayor didn’t do that, and that reservoir wasn’t full.” None of that would have made a bit of difference. Whenever those 100-mile-an-hour winds are blowing, it just doesn’t matter who’s in charge. Who’s in charge is the wind; who’s in charge is the fire. And who made it worse is human beings by burning fossil fuels at an extraordinary rate for 200 years straight.
My tendency is to look at things more systemically, and what climate change does is it takes naturally occurring phenomena and makes them more intense and more erratic, and also creates conditions for them to occur in places they didn’t normally occur. We all know Southern California is flammable. It’s part of the rhythm of this landscape. But they hadn’t, historically, had to deal with fires of this intensity with this frequency. And so that’s the other thing: these events are going to happen more and more often.
California really is in a position to move the needle globally on climate change, because it’s the fifth biggest economy in the world. If California took a particular stance on petroleum, took a particular stance on building codes, took a particular stance on insurance coverage in dangerous environments, it could set the tune. This is an opportunity for Los Angeles to be a leader in building for the 21st century.
BENSE:Your book focuses on the fire that happened in Fort M
