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Published Jun 2023
432 pages
Genre: Science, Health and the Environment
Publication Information
A stunning account of a colossal wildfire that collided with a city, and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind.
In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada's oil industry and America's biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.
Fire has been a partner in our evolution for hundreds of millennia, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways.
With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America's oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. John Vaillant's urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.
"Searing...Vaillant concedes that we've made Earth a fire planet. His robust and vivid writing, detailed reporting, and urgent concern for the environment make for sizzling reading." —Booklist
"A gripping account of the May 2016 fire that engulfed the city of Fort McMurray in the Canadian province of Alberta, destroying thousands of homes and forcing the evacuation of 88,000 people. [Vaillant's] vivid description of the conflagration...is set against the Dantean backdrop of Fort McMurray's oil-sands mining industry, one of the dirtiest outposts of the fossil fuels sector....Vaillant's exploration of this material is rich and illuminating, and his prose punchy and cinematic....The result is an engrossing disaster tale with a potent message." —Publishers Weekly
"There's a lot of good Elizabeth Kolbert–level popular science writing here along with grittier portraits of the lives of the people who make their living among the tar sands and scrub. Vaillant...asks interesting questions...Perhaps the one most worthy of pondering being a deceptively simple one: 'Is fire alive?' A timely, well-written work of climate change reportage." —Kirkus Reviews
"Fire Weather is a gripping book that brings readers to the front lines of a major forest fire, while also exploring the inter- twined history of oil and gas development and the study of climate change. Its lessons should not be soon forgotten." —Science
"If you've read The Tiger or The Golden Spruce, you already know...Vaillant is an absolute master when it comes to gripping environmental storytelling. His latest book...is no exception. Cinematic and richly written, Fire Weather tackles the science of greenhouse emissions and droughts, the politics of unregulated capitalism, the dangers of oil-sand mining, and how these factors came together in one devastating mega-fire in Alberta."
—Orion Magazine
"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, #1 bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth
"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, bestselling author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
"A compulsively readable journey into our fiery times. At the center, Vaillant gives us fire itself as a character—fast, hungry, and evolving to shape the warming decades to come. You might never hear an engine or watch a bonfire the same way again." —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
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
John Vaillant was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has lived in Vancouver for the past thirteen years. He is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, Outside, and Men's Journal, among others. Of particular interest to Vaillant are stories that explore collisions between human ambition and the natural world. His work in this and other fields has taken him to five continents and five oceans.
His first book, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed (Norton, 2005), was a bestseller and won several awards, including the Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction (Canada).
His second book, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival (Knopf, 2010) was an international bestseller and has been ...
... Full Biography
Author Interview
Link to John Vaillant's Website
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