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432 pages, Paperback
First published June 6, 2023
John Vaillant is an author and freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and the Guardian, among others. His first book, The Golden Spruce (Norton, 2005), was a bestseller and won several awards, including the Governor General's and Rogers Trust awards for non-fiction (Canada). His second nonfiction book, The Tiger (Knopf, 2010), was an international bestseller, and has been published in 16 languages. Film rights were optioned by Brad Pitt’s film company, Plan B. In 2014 Vaillant won the Windham-Campbell Prize, a global award for non-fiction. In 2015, he published his first work of fiction, The Jaguar's Children (Houghton Mifflin), which was long-listed for the Dublin IMPAC and Kirkus Fiction Prizes, and was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (Canada).
Wildfires live and die by the weather, but “the weather” doesn’t mean the same thing it did in 1990, or even a decade ago, and the reason the Fort McMurray Fire trended on newsfeeds around the world in May 2016 was not only because of its terrifying size and ferocity, but also because it was a direct hit — like Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans — on the epicenter of Canada’s multibillion-dollar petroleum industry. That industry and this fire represent supercharged expressions of two trends that have been marching in lockstep for the past century and a half. Together, they embody the spiraling synergy between the headlong rush to exploit hydrocarbons at all costs and the corresponding increase in heat-trapping greenhouse gases that is altering our atmosphere in real time. In the spring of 2016, halfway through the hottest year of the hottest decade in recorded history, a new kind of fire introduced itself to the world.
A photo taken from an airplane window late on the night of May 3 shows a vast and luminous smoke cloud where the city had been while, high above, the northern lights blaze across the sky. In another age, this might have been an omen worthy of formal record, but that night, it was just one more illumination from the twenty-first century, captured in this smartphone-crowdsourced record of apocalyptic visions.
By the early 1990s, Republican attitudes toward environmental action of virtually any kind had turned decidedly negative. Meanwhile, energy producers and manufacturers used this extraordinary turnabout as an opportunity to promote even more carbon-intensive products, including plastics (recall the sudden explosion of bottled water in the early 1990s, simultaneous with the first Gulf War).
In 2016, people who raised the question of climate change in the context of Fort McMurray, or its fire, were ignored, accused of exploiting a tragedy or, worse, kicking a man when he was down. The province’s brief and contentious dalliance with a slightly more liberal government happened to overlap with the fire and ended abruptly afterward with a return to, and hardening of, the industry-friendly United Conservative Party, among whose devotees Donald Trump is considered an ally and, increasingly, a role model.