Ideas - The Making of a Beast: Entering a New World of Fire

Episode Date: May 29, 2024

John Vaillant details the terrifying growth and destructive force of the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire in his award-winning book, Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast. He unpacks how fire made humans who we are — and how humans are changing fire. Vaillant says we're changing the climate "in a way that favours fire way more than it favours us."

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad.

Earth, air and water are the three elements that make life possible. But it's fire that made us human. Fire was a catalyst and engine of our evolution as Homo sapiens. Without its light and its explosive, directable energy, we would not be who or what we are today. Fire gives us heat and light, comfort and security, and power. We've been gathering around the fire. We gather around.

Forever. Look at us around a fireplace. We are absolutely hardwired to the core of our being to respond to flickering light and to move toward it. If you look under the hood of human civilization, you'll see fire everywhere. Including individual combustions in our car engines, we make tens of trillions of fires every day. we make tens of trillions of fires every day.

But our companion is also a ravenous predator. Selfish and willful, it yearns above all for freedom, which it will take at any opportunity and at any cost. In this sense, fire is not an element. It is a hunter, just like us. Look at that. Like that, even in the past five minutes, has just flared up.

And to be honest, I'm not sure how long... The 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, which became known as The Beast, was the costliest disaster in Canadian history, causing almost $10 billion in damage. It forced the biggest evacuation our country has ever seen, 90,000 people, amid scenes that could have been pulled from a Hollywood disaster movie. I've got to dodge. I can feel the heat here. This is insane. movie. That's what shocked firefighters in Fort McMurray was seeing trees explode into flame, seeing houses explode into flame and burn to their basements in five minutes. and burned to their basements in five minutes. Vancouver author John Valiant is the author of Fire Weather, The Making of a Beast,

an account of the Fort McMurray wildfire that's won and been nominated for a raft of major awards. He contends that we live in what he calls the petroscene, an age defined by the impact our dependence on fossil fuels is having on the planet. A new world of fire supercharged by the deepening climate crisis. We are going into what I would call clima incognita, the unknown climate, and it's going to keep changing, and we're going to have to keep adapting. And it's going to keep surprising us. Fire weather is also a history of our age-old, intimate, and complicated relationship with fire, as well as a rumination on what fire really is. Boy, it took me years to get a grip on it,

because I see it too as just this dancing orange light that sometimes gets scary and huge but often just creates this beautiful atmospheric glow and comfort and warmth in the home and so to understand it as chemistry which is how scientists understand it, really strained me. And what's really going on is this reaction with oxygen. So it's, in this case, hydrocarbons, which is an astonishingly broad menu of things. It can literally be my t-shirt. It can be a tree. It can be a bottle of whiskey. It can be a pair of running shoes. and all things that are, you know, either at one time biologically alive or that are derived from petroleum products, which all were strangely once alive.

All petroleum products are derived from plants, from algae and phytoplankton millions and millions of years ago. And so this reaction in a way is the same reaction we're having. We're reacting with oxygen too. So you really have to get into oxidation. When we're breathing, the oxygen coming into our bodies is oxidizing in our blood, and we're just oxidizing more slowly than the hydrocarbons are. And so we are, fire and humans and all ambulatory life is a hostage to oxygen. You write also that fire is a living thing. You describe it as a hunter or predator. And the firefighters and forestry officials

in 2016 referred to the Fort McMurray fire as the beast. How is fire like an animal? Well, in so many ways. And again, this is, it's very unscientific. And in fact, it's really almost unjournalistic to ascribe living characteristics to fire because it is not alive in the biological sense and it is not sentient in the way that we are or a tiger is. And yet, if you get back to oxygen and look at the imperative that oxygen forces upon us, we have to get more fuel. We have to keep having that reaction. And it doesn't matter if you're an octopus or an oil baron. You know, we all need it.

Makes sense. And so does fire. And, you know, it's mobile. It has an appetite. It reproduces. It can grow. It can adapt to different energy sources. It can wait.

You know, it can smolder. It can be suffocated. It can be revived. It can die. So we're similar in all these ways. And so we really are, in a strange way, kin to it. Yeah. And yet you also describe fire as having no heart, no soul, and no concern for the damage that it does or who it harms.

What are you comparing it to there? You know, in that sense, it's almost kind of sociopathic. You know, it's looking out for number one all the time. And needless to say, I'm a human being and I see those same qualities in the profit motive, especially at the corporate level. When you see a large company, it may be filled with people, run by people with feelings and children and cares and concerns. But the ultimate goal, the imperative for those employees is to keep the company going, to keep it solvent, and in that sense, to keep it oxidizing. That desire to expand and consume. Self-perpetuating.

Yeah, yeah. And that becomes, it's raison d'être, just that desire to survive at all costs. I wanted to kind of expand the lens a little bit and ask a very big question. What fire's role was in human evolution? How did it make our civilization and our way of life possible? It's our superpower. It's the one superpower that's outside our bodies. You know, besides our brains, our thumbs, our capacity for speech and maintaining community, in that sense, I think of it almost as a prosthetic energy. You know, we obviously evolved around wildfires,

you know, in the savannah, in forests. And at some point, you know, probably a million years ago, probably even before we were homo sapiens, we figured out ways to take a single stick, light another stick, and actually control the reaction. And with that came light. You know, think of when night used to fall and there was nothing you could do. So hard to imagine. It's really hard to imagine. And that was actually relatively recent that, you know, the petroleum industry was launched

by the kerosene industry, which was all about lighting. And people were talking about how ordinary people would suddenly get hours and hours more daylight, you know, sort of artificial daylight to study, to work, to accomplish things, to be a human instead of just go dormant, which is what would happen in the darkness. And so starting around a million years ago, you know, we started to be able to control that glow. And so not only did it give us light in the darkness, it actually armed us against predators. And that was another game changer if we stopped being prey. And then on top of that, we discovered early, I'm sure from forest fire killed game, that cooked food was easier to eat. And so you got this amazing hit of protein with much less effort than eating raw meat. It's much easier to digest and turn into us if it's cooked. It's essentially pre-digested by fire. So fire becomes almost this external digestive system for us. So now it's light, it's protection, it's this really compelling glow that we gather around. And look at us around a fireplace. We are absolutely hardwired to the core of our being to respond to flickering light and to move toward it. The gap between a million-year-old fireplace in a South African cave and a gas lamp, an engine,

a gun, a rocket, or a laser beam is merely one of focus and fuel. All find their beginnings, their world-changing power in combustive energy that originates in nature and is guided and refined by hominids, by us. Heat seems far too soft a term for what it has wrought in us and in our world. It's incredible how much we take that for granted. I wonder if we could talk about also how game-changing fossil fuels were for humanity. You know, obviously since the dawn of the industrial era and the widespread use of fossil fuels, civilization has really run on fires. It seems simple, and we grew up in it, so we take it for granted. But there was a moment back in the mid-19th century when we moved from solid fuel, which was coal and wood,

to liquefied fuel, which was coal oil, and then petroleum. And again, kerosene was one of the first commonly distributed manifestations of that. And also natural gas. We got gaslight, you know, very early. In fact, I think Halifax was one of the very first cities to get gas illumination. And this is, we're talking the 1870s. And so what engineers understood is that a ton of coal oil produces four times as much energy as a ton of solid coal. And so it was clear that was where we had to go for efficiency, for this desire to multiply our power, which is just something that humans do. And it's something that fires are compelled to do. And so when we liquefied fuel, we crossed into a new world and we made it.

Liquid fuel is portable. It's stable. It's easy to store. It's relatively easy to transport once you stop it from leaking, which took some time and we still have trouble with that. But ultimately, it just multiplied our impact. And so now, you know, you and I and every listener here commands the power previously reserved for kings and queens. You know, every time we get into a car, every time we turn on a stove, turn on a light, you know, there's an invisible retinue of servants leaping to our bidding. What do you make of our indifference to that? The fact that we really take it for granted. We're not, none of us are kings or queens. I know. And yet we act like it in these very casual ways. You know, I think of us as casual

wizards in this sense of this almost unthinking, you know, I can just walk into a room, flip a switch, and suddenly there are six blazing light bulbs. You know, it might be three in the morning and suddenly it's daytime. I think we're extraordinarily adaptable and almost to a frightening degree so that humans will just reset the baseline. You know, we're so intelligent, but we're also strangely forgetful. You say that, quote unquote, oil and gas should really be called fire and money.

Yeah. You know, it's a commodity that we buy. We see the price go up and down, whether it's on the stock market or on oil exchanges or at the gas station. And then I thought, you know, we never see it though. And when you do, it's a bad thing. You know, if you see a gas spill, you want to get away. When you see an oil spill, it's often a terrible accident. So this idea of it being fire and money, this is really the honest way, I think, to look at a fossil fuel. It's stable, it's storable, it's fungible, it's portable, but it does not become useful to us. It does not make money for us until it combusts,

until it's on fire. And so that's where the money comes in. That's where the value comes in. When we turn that key or push that button and start driving, then we start getting our money's worth. And that money's worth is combustion. The fact that our relationship to fire has become so intimately symbiotic has profound implications for humans and also for fire. At this point in our history, we're almost totally dependent on fire and the products it facilitates for food, shelter, heat, transportation, medicines, every object we use. You call the age that we live in right now the Petroscene, as opposed to the Anthropocene or any other possible labels. Is our economy, our civilization,

our way of life that defined by the fires of fossil fuels? I think any economist and any student of energy would say yes, unequivocally. And Standard Oil, you know, the progenitor of big oil in North America, was founded in 1870. The kerosene industry, the illuminating industry, that was all within just a couple of years of that. And then our lives really changed. That is how I define the beginning of the petrosene age. The first internal combustion engine was prototyped successfully in 1860. So that's a long time ago, but we're still there in so many ways. We're still burning. And so according to Daniel Yergin, an energy historian of some note, he said a year or two ago that about 84% of our economy is powered by fossil fuels. And that may have reduced slightly because there's so much renewable energy coming online. And we're absolutely in an energy transition right now.

But for the time being, fossil fuels are absolutely dominant. The other thing that's dominant in this book is that, you know, we've become such a powerful species by harnessing, learning to control, you know, and putting to use the power of fire. But you are suggesting now that we're not in control of fire, of fossil fuels, that they are actually in control of us. It's terrifying. Yeah, it's terrifying, but it's also, I think, offensive to our sense of ourselves. You know, we're the ones in charge. We're the ones who harnessed it. We're the ones who figured this stuff out. So we're the masters. And now when you think about it, how many fires we make every day, and I counted them, Nala, and including individual combustions in our car engines, we make

tens of trillions of fires every day. And so that's orders and orders of magnitude more than lightning could ever start or a volcano could ever ignite. And so the other thing that we've done, besides just the sheer quantity, is the range of fires, the different kinds of fires, the intensity of the fires, and the breadth of fire. So now we can bring fire to anywhere on the globe. We can have a fire at the North Pole, you know, on an ice cap. One way to think about it is, has fire, through its utility, its attractiveness, its charismatic energy, has it harnessed humans to disseminate it more broadly across the globe? It really looks like we are the handmaidens, the servants of fire,

carrying it dutifully all over the world and creating the conditions through excessive CO2 and excessive methane production that actually make the earth more flammable. So we're kind of doing double duty here. We're not only distributing it physically, we're also changing the climate and the atmosphere in a way that favors fire way more than it favors us. I wonder how you yourself, having spent the number of years you have, seven I think, writing this book, and thought about the language and the character of fire, what word you would describe your relationship or your view of fire? I mean, is it fear or awe or respect or like what's the dominant word that comes to mind for you? Well, I hate to cop out, but I would say it's complicated. You know, I have a fireplace in my house that is a sanctuary for me. It's almost a little temple for me. You know, I feel reverent in front of it. And yet I'm also keenly aware

of how vulnerable Stanley Park and the West side of Vancouver, where I live, are to fire. You know, if we got another heat dome, we could lose the city, really. And that is a terrifying prospect. And that really wasn't an issue 15 years ago. And it's a real issue now. And so I guess my relationship to fire is changing. It's in flux.

You know, we talk about this idea of the new normal, and there's no such thing as a new normal. We are going into what I would call clima incognita, the unknown climate and it's going to keep changing and we're going to have to keep adapting and it's going to keep surprising us. John Valiant's latest book is Fire Weather, The Making of a Beast, the winner of the Shaughnessy-Cohen Prize for Political Writing in Canada

and the Bailey-Gilford Prize for Nonfiction in the UK. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401,

check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. 2023 was the world's hottest year ever, and the worst wildfire season ever in Canada. Hills surrounding Lake Okanagan will be lit up again tonight. People anxious to know if their homes are still standing. The McDougall Creek fire burned closer to West Kelowna as more fires started. Wildfires forced the evacuation

of 230,000 people across the country and left vast scars across the boreal forest, amounting to an area more than half the size of Germany. They left throats and eyes burning under eerie, grayish-orange skies, as their smoke blanketed some of North America's biggest cities. And once again, this year's wildfire season is off to a grim start for much the same reason as last year.

Very hot, very dry weather. The same conditions that John Valiant details in his book Fire Weather, ones that turned the boreal forest around Fort McMurray into a tinderbox in 2016. I think for all of us, East and West, Fort McMurray looms large in our consciousness. It's an industrial powerhouse. It's this land of opportunity. It's kind of invincible. It's continually expanding. And the idea that the overburden, which is what the industry refers to as forest, that the overburden could catch fire in a way that would force this whole city to evacuate in what would become the largest, most rapid evacuation due to fire in modern times, I think was inconceivable to everybody on May 2nd, 2016.

And then 24 hours later, it was a really harsh reality. And that was so shocking just by itself. And then when I started looking at the characteristics of the fire and the conditions under which it burned, it was 33 Celsius that day. Typical temperature in Fort McMurray for early May is maybe 20. You know, 23 would be a hot day there. The relative humidity, this isn't something we think about all that often, but fire is keenly sensitive to relative humidity. And the relative humidity in Fort McMurray on May 3rd, 2016 was about 11%, 12%. And so I went and looked around for where 12% humidity was normal. And I had to go to Death Valley in the month of July to find a normal

relative humidity of 12%. Is that climate change at work? Absolutely. And here's the thing, though, you know, it's a kind of collaborative synergy. You know, way before bitumen or natural gas was discovered there, it generated massive, intense fires. You know, one reason that the Alberta sky feels so big and so clear is because the air there is so dry. And when high pressure systems come in from the north, they're coming in from the Canadian Arctic, which due north of Alberta is one of the driest places on planet Earth. And so when those pressure systems come in, it brings in absolutely desert dry air.

But the boreal forest is historically the wettest biome on Earth that isn't a lake or an ocean. So there are more sources of fresh water in the boreal forest, including Alberta, than any other system. So you have giant lakes and so many rivers and vast muskeg bogs that are just saturated with water. So they held each other in balance, but the boreal forest is now drying out in measurable ways.

And so basically, Alberta is going into the same conditions it went into in May 2016 before that terrible fire in Fort McMurray. And so that cycle is being repeated now, but with another seven or eight years of a drying trend and a warming trend. So it's going to be hotter and drier. And so that meant back then, the boreal forest, I'm just curious what kind of fuel it presented for the fire that happened. So the boreal forest, you know, again, it's the largest forest system on earth. It circumnavigates the globe all the way across Canada, all the way across Alaska, all the way across Russia, where it's called the Taiga, through Scandinavia, picks up again on Newfoundland and then keeps going west. And so it's this vast ring of hydrocarbons of fire fuel. And the boreal forest, in ways that other forests aren't, is truly a phoenix among ecosystems. It really does have to burn down in order to regenerate because there are species of tree, including black spruce, which is common in

Alberta, whose cones will not open unless they are heated to temperatures higher than sunlight alone can achieve. They have to be in a fire. And what that does is it tells the cones, okay, now it's time to open, drop the seeds because the canopy is now clear. You're open to the sun and sky and the ground is open. And so there's room for you to generate and grow without competition. And so that's the role that fire plays in the forest. And fires have always been huge and intense in Alberta. But when you make it, you know,

instead of 23 Celsius, 33 Celsius, when you make it instead of 26% humidity, 12% humidity? Think of it as creating more room for fire to grow and more opportunity and freedom for it to amplify and multiply its energy. And that's what shocked firefighters in Fort McMurray was seeing trees explode into flame, seeing houses explode into flame and burn to their basements in five minutes. Late afternoon, a fire that has been burning for a few days suddenly and dramatically grew. It was whipped up by strong gusts of wind. days suddenly and dramatically grew. It was whipped up by strong gusts of wind. These circumstances,

full tree candling, will turn trees almost instantly into hundred foot pillars of flame. With sufficient wind and heat, this can happen to an entire line of trees simultaneously. Meanwhile, high above, wind, heat, and combustible gases combine in a terrible synergy that enables fire to become airborne, not merely in the form of flying needles and embers, but as actual fireballs and spontaneous explosions that those in the business of wildfire call dragons. These Godzilla-sized and shaped eruptions of combusting gas bursting from the crowns of superheated conifer trees can be 300 feet high and hot enough to reignite the smoke, soot, and embers above them, driving flames hundreds, even thousands of feet higher into the smoke column. Once a crown fire like this is fully underway,

it is unstoppable. And the speed, yeah, the speed with which it spread. Yeah, exactly. And think about it. We try to start a campfire with wet wood and it's humid. You know, it sputters and it smokes and it sizzles. Well, all the sizzle is gone because this giant fire now coming into Fort McMurray on the morning of May 3rd, it's 33 Celsius, you know, is the ambient temperature, low humidity. So the fire has very little work to do to evaporate any moisture. The fuel's just

hot and dry for it. And we know how well a fire starts under those conditions. Multiply that by a forest, and now you have a 10-kilometer fire front with 100-meter flames barreling into a city that itself is made of mostly petroleum products. When you really get right down to it, think of vinyl siding, think of tar shingles, think of vinyl windows,

think of all the plastic stuff we have all around and inside our houses, right down to our mattresses. We're sleeping on this stuff that when it gets up to temperature, and this is something that's really key. And again, it's invisible to us, but it's not invisible to fire. And that is radiant heat.

And so we see the fire out in the forest, but it's projecting radiant heat, which moves at the speed of light. And the radiant heat coming off that fire front out of the forest into the neighborhoods of Fort McMurray, Abyssin, Beacon Hill, waterways, was 500 Celsius. Incredible. And what the heat does for fire is it releases the hydrocarbons. Fire can't interact with a solid object. It won't burn the log. It heats the log up until the log starts to off-gas hydrocarbons. So vapor, think of a gas can exploding. Think of that cloud of flame. That's what fire is interacting with. And so imagine an entire house heated to 500 Celsius, which is hotter than Venus, by the way, off-gassing all the chemicals that are in the modern house. and it is a prodigious quantity and menu of toxic, volatile, explosive gases

that we basically surround ourselves in 24-7 when we're at home. All that is highly flammable. When those houses are clad in vinyl siding, it literally adds fuel to the fire. Firefighters refer to this cheap, weatherproof material as solidified gasoline. When a boreal fire is projecting thousand-degree heat and blizzards of burning embers into a recently built neighborhood, the houses stop being houses. They become, instead, petroleum vapor chambers. But it took a while for the authorities in Fort Mock to recognize the threat that was posed by this fire. And you refer several times in the book to the Luc and he observed way back then a kind of glitch in human perception. And he noticed that people tended to think, well, the biggest mountain in

the world is the one that I've seen myself personally. And it was harder for them to assimilate or even accept the idea that there were bigger mountains. The coast range is right outside my window here in Vancouver, but the idea that there might be Rocky Mountains or Himalayas, you know, would be hard for me to imagine because these mountains are already huge. And so I think that is an impediment to how people plan for set up sprinkler systems, set up a regional command center and actually declared a state of emergency before the fire came into the city, they understood that this was a serious situation. But they still treated it as if it was a 1990s fire or an early 21st century fire. if it was a 1990s fire or an early 21st century fire. They couldn't imagine it being as powerful as it ended up being, even though the data was there. People who understand fire behavior understand the role that humidity plays, understand the role temperature plays, understand the role El Nino and drought conditions play.

Climate scientists did their job perfectly. Meteorologists did their job perfectly right down to the hour when they predicted the wind would swing into the southwest and blow the fire into Fort McMurray. They had that all right. And firefighters, the whole emergency center had that information, but they processed it in a different way. And one of the reasons, besides the Lucretius problem, besides just their inability to imagine how big it could actually get under those conditions, is the fact that there was already another massive fire burning. And that's the bitumen industry. And you got tens of thousands of residents of Fort McMurray at work. There's this huge machine going that costs, you know, millions of dollars an hour to function.

And shutting that down, that could be dangerous. Evacuating the city too early, that could create, you know, an insane traffic jam because, which happened anyway, but there's only one road in and out of Fort McMurray. It's actually a very vulnerable city. It's got some real fundamental weaknesses. And so there were these competing energies combined with just limitations in human perception that even in the face of superb data, up-to-the-minute data, was interpreted in a way that proved to be out of date. So ultimately, what does this fire at Fort McMurray show about the kind of destruction that these new wildfires are capable of? How total is the destruction?

It is total in the sense that there was nothing salvageable from those homes, not even the concrete foundations. It got so hot in those basements. It was as hot as a kiln, you know, that you make pots in. And when concrete gets that hot, it starts to crumble. So these neighborhoods were destroyed, you know, literally to their foundations. There is destructive fire, which burns down houses and forests, and then there's transformative fire, which makes familiar objects like houses disappear altogether and leave whatever's left, the cement foundation, the steel reinforcement rod holding it together, altered at the molecular level. This is what happened in Slave Lake in 2011.

Large, expensive things like riding lawnmowers couldn't be found because they had more or less vaporized. And I coined a term for the book called 21st Century Fire because it was around 2000 that we started seeing these extraordinarily intense fires that became more destructive to human property that seemed to burn in these uncontrollable ways, generating what are called pyrocumulonimbus clouds, which are basically gigantic firestorm systems that reach up into the stratosphere. And they become literally self-perpetuating in that they generate their own lightning. And if you want to get an image of this, think of volcanoes erupting and flickering with lightning.

That's what a wildfire can generate now. That's the kind of energy. And on top of that, you can actually get a full-blown, so to speak, EF-rated tornado out of these systems. And these will literally tear houses off their foundations. They are made of fire. They generate temperatures in the thousands of degrees Fahrenheit. So we're looking at, you know, 1,000, 1,500 Celsius. You know, truly metal-melting temperatures.

And, you know, there was one of those in Redding, California in 2018. The first one ever recorded in history, really, was outside of Canberra, Australia in 2003. history really was outside of Canberra, Australia in 2003. And these are energies that humans have no power to respond to in a meaningful way. You know, we've talked about what a fire does on the ground and in the forests and to people's property. What about the title of your book, Fire Weather? Are you referring to the weather that creates this kind of fire or to the weather generated by it? Well, fire weather is what fire scientists and wildfire experts and fighters refer to when they're talking about hot, dry, windy conditions that are conducive to wildfire. So that's fire weather. And we are seeing a lot of it lately, and we are seeing it in places where we're not used to seeing it. One of the things about climate change and one of the demands of the 21st century is we're going to have to learn a new vocabulary, you know, from stranded assets, you know, and economics to fire weather out on the landscape. And think of 2023, you know, Canada burnt literally from coast to coast to coast.

And we begin once again in the Halifax area, which is now facing a double wildfire threat that has grown and forced... And the idea of Halifax burning, you know, still shocks me. And I've been reading about this kind of weather and these kind of conditions for years now. And the idea that Halifax, you know, the idea of it being flammable outside of a fireplace was inconceivable. And yet it burnt like Alberta burned. And then Alberta burned like Southern California burned or Australia burned. And so I think up until very, very recently, we were able to kind of protect ourselves from this new reality in that we would think, well, that's what happens in Southern California. And it's always happened there. And same with

Australia. And then occasionally you'd get a really big fire, maybe, you know, Yellowstone burned really badly, but that was kind of an unusual event back in the eighties. You know, there are these historic fires that occur every once in a while. But past decade, look at Oregon, look at Washington State, look at British Columbia, look at Chile. All these places have had the worst fire seasons in their respective histories in the past couple of years. When wildfires threaten communities, one often hears people say that we have to wait to see what Mother Nature does, that we can't control Mother Nature. But in the context of the most powerful wildfires now, is it really nature or is it us?

I think it's nature in the sense that fire is nature. And then look at the fire that we generate with petroleum. I think it's like that. We have energized our atmosphere with petroleum so that now natural fire can burn with the same intensity and breadth that our industrial fire burns with. So it's actually reflecting us. One of the most striking things about last year's season was how far north we saw, you know, huge out-of-control fires like the one that forced the evacuation of Yellowknife. And what do you think of some of the most alarming examples of places that you really wouldn't think would be hit by wildfires?

Well, the tundra or, you know, Muskeg. You know, those are such saturated places. They're so damp and then underlain with permafrost. And yet they are literally burning now. And with climate change, forests are actually moving north. So kind of imagine a forest of ants walking slowly year by year northward. And so fires are possible now in parts of Alaska where trees didn't even exist 15 years ago. Extraordinary. So you have decade-old forests. No forest has grown there in 100,000 years,

now burning down due to lightning-caused fire. It almost sounds like our entire way of life is a fire risk. I would agree with that. And yet we are so dependent on it. And so the same thing that has amplified us in so many wonderful ways and made us really wealthy beyond our wildest dreams is also our greatest liability. And so that's going to require an extraordinary discipline and rigor in terms of how we approach it, because people don't want to give up that power. approach it because people don't want to give up that power. It's so easy. It's so convenient. And when you think of the global petroleum infrastructure, it's so well-designed. It's so effective. It's so entrenched, not just on the planet, but in our consciousness.

It's going to take real creativity and truly conscious effort to move beyond it. real creativity and truly conscious effort to move beyond it. So how would you describe how much fire is transforming the face of the earth and overwhelming the other three elements like earth, water, air, and maybe even changing the three other elements? Yeah. I mean, again, thinking of fire, you know, rather than as a cause, as a symptom. And so really it comes back to heating, which is a result of CO2 and methane buildup in the atmosphere and the drying that goes with it. And obviously that is not universally distributed. We're having worse floods now than we've ever had. So there's an unevenness to it, but in the parts of the world that are prone to heating and drying, that's becoming much more intense.

And so part of the increased fire risk is due to evaporation. So it's not just the forest that dries out, but the lakes in the forest, the rivers flowing through the forest. And again, Alberta has now become really a poster child for the hazards of climate change-induced drought and fire. It's really suffering right now. You write that this could go down as the century of fire. And you call our era the petrosine, as we discussed. But could we also call it the pyrosine? We can and we should.

And Stephen J. Pine has. And Stephen J. Pine, he is kind of the eminence grise, the professor emeritus of wildfire, and he's from Arizona, and he coined the term pyrocene after the Fort McMurray fire, and it has really caught on. I think it's with us for the foreseeable. You discussed how boreal forests have this symbiotic relationship with fire and that it was, in fact, necessary for its regeneration. Are these kinds of fires still regenerative, do you think? And is the boreal forest still a means of, could it still be a means of mitigating climate change by taking carbon out of the atmosphere? Could it still be a means of mitigating climate change by taking carbon out of the atmosphere? We're in a massive regime change right now.

And these predictable, dependable carbon sequestration regions like the forest are becoming net emitters. Again, it comes back to heat and drought. And so when you have warmer winters, you don't kill off the beetles. The beetles kill the trees. They're able to spread 12 months a year or survive the winters and to continue spreading. And so now you have all this dead firewood, which of course is a greater fire risk. So our forests all over the world are going to change in fundamental ways over the coming decades to the point that what replaces them may be something altogether different. It may be savanna. It may be a different kind of forest.

The species distribution that we are familiar with now is a living relic of the 20th century, and it's going to change in our lifetimes. Has the world ever been so conducive to fire in our history? Not in human history, no. Wildfires around the world are getting more powerful and more lethal, as you illustrate very starkly in your book, yet we still seem to be caught off guard by them. How prepared are we for the wildfires to come? Well, we aren't prepared. And the preparations that are taking place now, which are real and happening, are very sporadic and unevenly distributed. But there are communities, especially out West, there are firefighters and firefighting agencies who are really earnestly trying to get ahead of this because they have seen how big and how powerful these fires can get.

They've been through some absolutely hellacious blazes over the past decade. So they are changing their behavior, changing their plans. You know, people are really recognizing how vulnerable they are. Two of the simplest fixes are FireSmart, which is a nationwide program to make your community and even your own home less vulnerable to fire. It doesn't cost a lot of money. And then when you think of new communities, many of them only have one road in, and people are realizing now that that is a fire trap. And so a lot of people are looking at having an escape route out of their new development. You mentioned firefighters.

People wonder about where the jobs of the future are going to be, whether AI might take our jobs away. But I have to wonder whether wildfire fighting is going to be one of the essential in-demand jobs of the very near future. I think it will, and it's going through its own growing pains right now. The question of how much money should be allocated is obviously a huge bone of contention because historic fire budgets aren't adequate anymore. You know, BC spent a billion dollars on firefighting this year, and its worst prior season, 2017, that was half a billion. So it's already doubled. So Canada really is going to need more planes, more firefighters, but mostly much better education around the impacts of climate change and its influence on fire behavior.

You write so eloquently about the psychological toll of wildfires as they become more destructive and more widespread and more difficult to combat. Can you talk about how prepared we are for that angle of this growing problem? Well, I think we evolved for this and not for climate change-induced wildfire, but we evolved under incredible stresses climatically and just in terms of the other creatures that live on Earth that hunted us. So we have been prey. We've had, you know, enormous environmental calamities to deal with throughout our long history. So we're all the survivors of the people who survived those events. And so that's baked into us the same way our compatibility with fire is baked into us.

into us the same way our compatibility with fire is baked into us. So we are equal to this challenge. But, you know, it is interesting that the Fort McMurray fire was called the beast. That's because that's how it felt to be around this energy. It didn't go away. Or if it went away, it came back again the next day from a different direction. It was like being hunted. And for the firefighters who spent, in some cases, literally weeks battling this fire, it became this adversary that they became acquainted with and came to understand in a new way. You know, this past century has been so safe for so many of us that this is a new kind of hazard, a new kind of precarity that we're going to have to wrap our heads around and change our behavior to accommodate. But there are these other psychological impacts.

And one of them is after you've been burned over in a fire, even if you lived through it, you can never look at that place the same way again. So your trust, your comfort, your understanding of what that place was, what home is, is fundamentally changed. And so you're less at ease. There are a lot of people from Fort McMurray who went through that fire who have PTSD. And just these poignant ways in which children were impacted by this. And, you know, they'll smell smoke or hear a certain type of radio alert and panic. And this is, you know, months or years after the event. It scars us. And then, you know, the other thing too is the smoke. And we've all experienced orange sky now. Are we on Mars? You know, what is going

on here? It's very disorienting. The birds don't sing the same way. The light doesn't refract the same way. Children are afraid. Yeah. And people are literally changing their definitions of what summer is. And that is fundamental and deeply disturbing and is going to have repercussions for our species and certainly our society. and certainly our society. More than one firefighter described to me being on his knees, doubled over in the shower, the only place he could safely lose it without frightening his wife and children

who were managing terrors of their own. You really listened, John. I mean, you told the story of the firefighter crying in their shower. You've told the story of teenagers who are terrified at the sound of an alert. And the story of families who've lost entire histories, their photographs, their letters, and things they can never, never recoup. Just wondering what kind of psychological impact that's had on you personally. Well, it's real. I really think this book turned my hair gray. I had a lot of trouble sleeping while

I was writing it. Going over these interviews, I'd just be there in my office, you know, crying, thinking about what they went through. It's literally choking me up as I'm talking to you right now. You know, these are type A, make it happen, get her done type people who were completely undone by this event and then bravely rebuilt themselves and got back in the saddle. But they're still wounded. And I have a lot of compassion for that. And I'm still just amazed that just about everybody made it out, made it through. And my concern about that is that at some level we can out, you know, made it through. And my concern about

that is that at some level we can think, oh, well, you know, everyone got out of the Fort McMurray fire so we can handle this. And I don't think anybody realizes how lucky those people were. There was skill and bravery and sound thinking that led to that successful escape, but there was a lot of good luck. It could have been one of the darkest days in the country's history. And it's incumbent upon us now to learn from that and make sure that we don't have such a dark day in our future. How should our relationship with fire change if we're going to survive as a civilization? We have to understand that we've made choices and enabled industries and ways of living that make fire more dangerous to us. These fires

are made worse by our appetites, by our industry, by the profit motive, by, frankly, people not being honest with the conditions that we live in now and its causes. And so there is human responsibility and agency here that needs to be, in my view, highlighted, acted upon. And, you know, when it's working against the best interests of humanity and the citizenry, you know, it needs to be called out. You know, we are, you know, this amazingly vibrant, needs to be called out. We are this amazingly vibrant, creative, dynamic, charismatic species, and that's wonderful in so many ways. But this petroleum piece, this fossil fuel piece has really complicated matters. And we started out in harmony with nature. We learned how to work with nature to grow crops and amplify the growing power of the planet. And this right-hand turn we took into fire has really played itself out.

We know how that story ends now, and it does not end well. reconnected with the incredible intelligence we have when it comes to harmonizing with nature and the things that grow and flourish there by default, when they're not being killed, when they're not being burned, you know, we could have quite a beautiful century and more centuries beyond that. But it's going to require really a fundamental shift away from this kind of dominating, powering through, burning up, consumptive, profit-driven, out-of-touch way that we live now. Even when we don't think that way, those are the effects of a lot of our behaviors. We're being invited, I think, by fire and by nature at large to re-evaluate how we relate to it john valiant thank you for telling this story oh no that's really my pleasure and so glad to

speak with you vancouver writer john valiant is the author of the award-winning books The Golden Spruce, The Tiger, and Fire Weather, The Making of a Beast. This episode was produced by Chris Wadzkow. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. Greg Kelly is the executive Producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.