In 2016 Fort McMurray, one of Canada’s wealthiest industrial centres, was faced with a wall of fire so powerful that it created its own climate. This environmental emergency led to the fastest, most extensive single-day evacuation in North American written history.
Bringing together interviews, testimonies, scientific data, and local history, journalist John Vaillant uses the Fort McMurray fire as an avenue to look into the ways in which wildfires in Canada and abroad are starting to burn through the previously unquestioned divide between urban space and wilderness. Well written, extensively researched, and paced like a thriller, Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast by John Vaillant is a comprehensive record of the 2016 Fort McMurray fire that upended my understanding of what the petroleum industry is and who it serves.
Our petroleum-based lives puts us in danger of burning, and turns what is the reality to most Canadians — living in an ecosystem like the boreal forest that naturally replenishes itself with fire — into an apocalypse waiting to happen. While discussing the science, circumstances, and human stories emerging from the Fort McMurray wildfire, Vaillent maps the kind of spaces and events that encourage the transition of wildfires from the forest into urban environments. The “Wildland Urban Interface” (the ideal upper-middle class North American home, with a forested backyard and a paved street out front) is an element of city layout that essentially provides a welcome mat for wildfires to make the leap from trees to neighbourhoods. When the static electricity from a cat can start a blaze, our petroleum-based lives make fires not a question of “if” but “when”.
This insistence on taking up space and consuming resources is something that Vaillant identifies as Canada’s colonisation mindset, one of expansion and resource extraction that has consistently decentred Indigenous voices in its policy-making. Clayton Thomas-Müller, author of Life in the City of Dirty Water, stated during a talk he did in Yellowknife that Canada is a resource economy to other countries with military power, a tedious position to be in considering the land itself is stolen and its resources are finite. Vaillant makes it clear that the only outcomes of this built-in vulnerability on a global and local scale are to diversify or die.
Since jobs, livelihoods, and Canada’s own industry are built from oil — often literally, as our houses, furniture, and even clothing are largely petroleum products — that means that all of these things that we depend on can burn up around us if given a spark. Houses, now being built with vinyl siding and plastic interiors, are no longer kindling for fire but accelerants. Along with discussing the failings of Canada’s urban design, which tries to accommodate for our need to see nature in controlled environments like parks and back yards, Vaillant also looks into the petroleum industry — from CEOs working with lobbyists and insurers on a scale of billions of dollars to the design of the oil sand camps, of which Vaillant paints a terrifying picture.
Fire Weather overlaps in some significant places with Kate Beaton’s memoir Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, a graphic novel which recently won Canada Reads, and both books provide a sobering voice on life in the oil sands.
Fire transmutes the urban landscape into something else. In this urgent assessment of Canada’s climate emergency, Vaillant takes a sober look at the kinds of calamity created by fire that can jump rivers, burn right through bulldozers, make its own lightning, and turn cement into something unrecognizable. “Under certain circumstances,” warned one of the many people present in Fort McMurray that Vaillant interviewed, “fire can alter the nature of things so completely that they are transformed from objects in space to moments in time.”