Fire weather John Vaillant
Apocalypse in Alberta
The Canadian city of Fort McMurray, 600 miles south of the Arctic Circle and 600 miles north of the US border, is, as John Vaillant writes, “an island of industry in a sea of trees.” This absorbing 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 serve the oil sands of Alberta, a province that produces about 40% of all American oil imports. At a time when crude oil prices were high, the town was known as Fort McMoney.
But that money is profit from a trade that has an increasingly significant byproduct: the increasing warming of the planet. One result of that warming is that the vast sea of trees in which Fort McMoney sits has become increasingly likely to burn in recent years. The city’s 100,000 permanent and transient citizens are both the primary perpetrators and potential victims of global warming.
In 2016, Vaillant argues, those two realities – fossil fuels and forests – collided in a local apocalypse. After a record-breaking dry and warm winter in Alberta that year – parts of the province barely had any snow – the endless boreal forests around Fort McMurray had already been affected by eight large-scale fires by spring.
On May 2, the fire did the unthinkable and crossed the Athabasca River, which was half a mile wide. Fire number nine, however, identified on the last day of April, was different. That fire is the subject of Vaillant’s haunting history of disasters, meticulous in its detail, taking on both human and geological dimensions, and often shocking in its conclusions.
By the end of that week, the fire had burned half a million acres of land. Fifteen months later, it was still burning, having consumed some 2,500 square miles of forest, an area roughly the size of Devon. Vaillant suspects that the fire’s ferocity has since been reflected in fires in Australia, California and elsewhere, all of which have had “different internal conditions” than before, conditions created by “an atmosphere more conducive to burning than at any time in the last 3 million years.”
These ideal conditions, Vaillant argues, are not limited to nature. Since 2016, banks have loaned “$3.8 trillion to the oil and gas industry” for future projects. Meanwhile, governments continue to behave like Fort McMurray council leaders on May 1, 2016, who “openly admitted the fire was huge, out of control, and moving toward the city under historic fire weather conditions” and urged citizens to go about their business as usual for two days.
£11.43 (RRP £12.99) – Buy from Guardian Bookshop
