Author john vaillant has a climate change psa

SPOILER ALERT: GLOBAL WARMING HAS UNLEASHED A NEW ERA OF WILDFIRE BEHAVIOR

ASthe crow flies, the Canadian city of Fort Mcmurray, Alberta, is nearly 1,500 miles from Santa Fe. But the catastrophic wildfire that took the city by storm eight years ago was a bellwether for what was to come for Northern New Mexico and other communities across the world that are now experiencing the new era of wildfire behavior climate change has unleashed.

Fort Mcmurray is in some ways a supersized Los Alamos: nicknamed “Fort Mcmoney,” the city is a company town dedicated to petroleum production, a brutally extractive industry that involves withdrawing bitumen from the province’s vast oil sands. [For an incredible book about what it’s like to work in Alberta’s petroleum industry, read Kate Beaton’s graphic memoir Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (Drawn and Quarterly, 2022).] The region has the highest median family income in the nation and the home prices to match.

In May of 2016, a fire burning in the boreal forest took nearly everyone by surprise when it grew to massive proportions in a matter of hours and swept through Fort Mcmurray, prompting the evacuation of 88,000 people and ultimately burning almost 1.5 million acres and more than 3,000 homes and other structures.

The fire was a catastrophe more on par with Hurricane Katrina or an act of war than a typical wildfire, which author

John Vaillant spent seven years reporting on for Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World (Knopf, 2023), which was published to stunning international success and was announced this week as a 2024 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in General Nonfiction. (Canada is typically “a tough sell,” he notes.)

Vaillant, who has written two other books about the natural world and a novel, says he wasn’t initially any more attuned to wildfire than anybody else, but the Fort Mcmurray Fire stayed with him.

“A whole city being overrun and evacuated in an afternoon, that happens in war time,” he says. “That doesn’t happen in peacetime in the richest city in the country like Fort Mcmurray.”

If that could happen in Fort Mcmurray, which is at the same latitude as Alaska, “it could happen anywhere,” he says.

As Vaillant describes in Fire Weather, the Fort Mcmurray Fire was not an unexplained one-off event but the inevitable outcome of what he describes as the Pyrocene age, in which nature has been made dangerously unpredictable due to the destabilizing amount of carbon being pumped into the atmospheres by our ignition-powered lifestyles.

“A lot of new things are possible now because of climate change,” he says.

Vaillant will be speaking at the Santa Fe International Literary Fest on May 18, where he will be in conversation with author

“A fundamental problem of climate change is that it’s producing behaviors in the natural world that are so far outside of our historical knowledge. We’re dealing with truly extraordinary circumstances now, and we need to find within ourselves the courage to take the extraordinary actions that are therefore demanded.”

— Author William debuys

and titan of New Mexico conservation William debuys, who is making his return to the festival after an absence last year.

debuys, who had just returned from a trip down the Colorado River when he spoke to Pasatiempo, says he was blown away by Fire Weather.

“I was actually surprised by its breadth and depth,” says debuys, who admits he expected it to be a blow-by-blow of the Fort Mcmurray disaster and was impressed by how deeply Vaillant dove into the history of climate science and its associated corporate obfuscation, as well as philosophical questions about how to grapple with our rapidly warming age.

Vaillant’s book fights against what debuys describes as our “powerful loyalty to normality.”

“It’s really difficult to persuade people that we’re launched into unprecedented times and conditions,” he says. “People shrink away from that awareness quite often.”

debuys’ book A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest (Oxford University Press, 2011) details how global warming will make the American west — along with other parts of the world with similar climates — destined to become hotter, drier, and more prone to wildfire and drought as time progresses.

In the decade-plus since publication, that thesis has become visible to the naked eye.

“There’s no particular satisfaction in being right about something that is so unfortunate and so unwelcome,” debuys says.

While not as catastrophic as the Fort Mcmurray Fire, the Calf Canyon/hermits Peak Fire that ravaged Northern New Mexico after the U.S. Forest Service lost control of a prescribed burn in April of 2022 contained many of the elements Vaillant discusses in Fire Weather, including high winds that spread the fire at a rapid pace and made it difficult to fight by aircraft, pyrocumulonimbus clouds that pushed columns of smoke tens of thousands of feet into the air, and night burning that required firefighters to fight the fire around the clock with little respite from cooler night temperatures that in decades past would naturally dampen wildfires.

“The Calf Canyon/hermits Peak Fire was a really frightening example of that,” Vaillant says of night burning.

Much of Fire Weather is about the fact climate change has dragged the natural world out of its predictable patterns, which is what debuys says is part of what makes it so hard to confront.

“A fundamental problem of climate change is that it’s producing behaviors in the natural world that are so far outside of our historical knowledge,” debuys says. “We’re dealing with truly extraordinary circumstances now, and we need to find within ourselves the courage to take the extraordinary actions that are therefore demanded.”

That’s what led to disaster in Fort Mcmurray, as the emergency personnel on scene had no context for a wildfire that could grow so quickly and be so hard to contain. The descriptions of firefighters simply bulldozing down people’s homes — homes that were otherwise burning down to their foundations in a matter of minutes — in order to create fire breaks in an attempt to spare other parts of the city were profoundly surreal.

It is that kind of detail that adds Vaillant’s book, although nonfiction, to the ranks of real-life disaster stories such as Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air that read screenplays for Hollywood films. debuys (who’s own book is much more traditionally academic) says that kind of approach has immense value.

“Data is important, but it doesn’t stick with us very well unless it’s encased in narrative,” debuys says. “That’s how we remember things as a species — we incessantly tell stories to each other and to ourselves.”

Vaillant says part of what made writing the book challenging is that things continued to evolve in real time throughout the seven-year process.

“The bar of what fire could do kept being raised while I was writing the book,” he says. “When you’re committed to a rapid in the Grand Canyon, you’re being carried along by it, you just have to deal with what’s coming. And that’s honestly how I felt writing Fire Weather: I wasn’t writing about just Fort Mcmurray anymore, which was safely in the past, but these new fires that were showing in all their horrible colors what 21st century fires are capable of.”

Vaillant says the attention given to Fire Weather, which admittedly is not a comforting read, has been moving.

“It’s really gratifying to see a topic that feels really urgent to me, really important and timely to me, be taken seriously,” he says, including by the organizers of the Literary Festival. Vaillant, who says he’s been traveling to Santa Fe since the 1980s, is looking forward to attending.

While the book is in many ways a call to action on a grand scale, he says he wrote it as a PSA to keep more people from having to go through what the residents of Fort Mcmurray did.

If you see flames on a ridgeline near you, “don’t look at the flames, look at the wind,” he says. If the wind is blowing in your direction, that means flames could be on your roof in a matter of minutes.

In talking to people who dealt with catastrophic wildfire, Vaillant says one of the main things he heard was, “it happened so fast. I had no idea it could happen so fast.”

“If you were going to distill what’s different about 21st century fire into a nutshell it is it’s faster, it’s hotter, it’s more volatile,” he says. “Even if you don’t come to the talk, just watch your hilltops. And watch the wind.”

John Vaillant in conversation with William debuys at the Santa Fe International Literary Festival

1 p.m. Saturday, May 18

Sweeney Ballroom, Santa Fe Community Convention Center 201 W. Marcy Street

Tickets ($27.50 to $75) and information at sfinternationallitfest.org