Ideas53:59The Making of a Beast: Entering a New World of Fire
The 2016 Fort MacMurray wildfire — 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’ve been pulled from a Hollywood disaster 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,” Vancouver author John Vaillant told IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed.
Vaillant contends that we live in what he calls the Petrocene — an age defined by the impact our dependence on fossil fuels is having on the planet. A new world of fire super-charged by the deepening climate crisis.
“There’s no such thing as a new normal. We are going into what I would call climate 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.”
In his award-winning book Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast, Vaillant details the devastating 2016 Fort MacMurray wildfire. He also explores the history of humanity’s intimate and complicated relationship with fire — how fire made our evolution and civilization possible, but also how our species has unwittingly turned fire into something more destructive and fearsome.
Here is a short excerpt from John Vaillant’s conversation with Nahlah Ayed.
You call the age that we live in right now the Petrocene as opposed to the Anthropocene or any other possible labels. Is our economy, our civilization, our way of life defined by the fires of fossil fuels?
I think any economist and any student of energy would say yes, unequivocally.
Standard Oil, 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 Petrocene 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.
According to Daniel Yergin, an energy historian of some note, he said a year or two ago that about 84 per cent of our economy is powered by fossil fuels. That may have reduced slightly because there’s so much renewable energy coming online. And we’re absolutely in an energy transition right now, like a once in a century, once in a two century, energy transition. But for the time being, fossil fuels are absolutely dominant.
The other thing that’s dominant in this book … is that we’ve become such a powerful species by harnessing, learning to control, 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.
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, Nahlah. Including individual combustion in our car engines, we make tens of trillions of fires every day. 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, 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 favours fire way more than it favours us.
I wonder how you yourself, having spent the number of years you have… writing this book and thought about the language and the character of fire — what word would you use to describe your relationship or your view of fire? I mean, is it fear 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. 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.
If we got another heat dome… we could lose the city, really. And that is a terrifying prospect. That really wasn’t an issue 15 years ago. And it’s a real issue now. So I guess my relationship to fire is changing. It’s in flux.
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 climate incognita, the unknown climate. It’s going to keep changing. And we’re going to have to keep adapting, and it’s going to keep surprising us.
Listen to the full conversation by downloading the IDEAS podcast from your favourite app.
*Q&A edited for clarity and length.This episode was produced by Chris Wodskou.