On the afternoon of 3 May 2016, firefighters spotted a plume of smoke near the Canadian oil city of Fort McMurray. It was early in the fire season for the subarctic region and slabs of ice were still floating on its lakes. A water-bombing helicopter was immediately scrambled but it was already too late. Within two hours, flames had roared through 60 hectares (150 acres) of forest. By the end of the day, 90,000 people had been driven from their homes. Whole neighbourhoods had been reduced to ash.
A week later, recalls John Vaillant in Fire Weather, a gripping account that has just won the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction, the city looked as if it had suffered a nuclear blast. All that remained of many houses was piles of nails. Sifting through the ashes of her home in what had been a five-storey building, a local journalist found just a colander and some barbecue tools. Even the ceramic toilet had been vaporised.
Vaillant was working on his second novel at a writing retreat in Italy when the story began to circulate on social media. “It was like hearing Houston was on fire,” he says. “Fort McMurray is the petroleum hub of Canada. It’s a wealthy, powerful, charismatic, overbuilt place and the idea of it being on fire was absolutely shocking.” The city, Vaillant goes on, “was shrouded in a firestorm cloud 45,000ft tall. The fire had punctured the stratosphere, generating its own lightning and hurricane-force winds.”
Amazingly, the evacuation was so efficient that the only two fatalities were due to a car crash in the rush to get out. In their efforts to describe the horror, the survivors reached for fantasy: to Tolkien’s fire demon Balrog; and to the asteroid-strike fires of the film Armageddon. These survivors, says Vaillant, bear witness to the future. “Spending time with them was like spending time with Isaiah or Ezekiel – except they’re named Carol and Dave and Rob, and they do regular jobs. But they saw something most of us have never seen and never want to see.”
Talking to Vaillant is itself rather like being sucked into a vision of hell. A silver-haired 61-year-old who moved from Massachusetts to settle in Vancouver 25 years ago, he only started writing in his 30s, specialising in the collision between human beings and the natural world. The Golden Spruce, published in 2006, told the story of an anti-logger who took a drastic measure: felling a tree sacred to the Haida people to raise awareness about the dangers of cutting down many more trees elsewhere. Four years later, The Tiger followed a hunt for a man-eater in the frozen wastes of the Russian taiga. Whereas these earlier books were about finding an accommodation with nature, Fire Weather is about what happens when none can be found.
Bright-eyed and urgent the morning after his win, Vaillant talks with messianic fervour about the bigger theme of Fire Weather: a global breakdown in climate conditions capable of supporting life. It’s not lost on him that we’re sitting in chilly London, where runaway bush fires feel like distant TV spectacles. But don’t be fooled, he warns. “Our concept of England is like our concept of Canada: not flammable. But we’re being forced to recalibrate very rapidly, and it creates enormous dissonance psychically and intellectually. And that’s where climate change has an advantage over us, because we’re really attached to the old world we grew up in. We built all our responses, planning and infrastructure around a world that really doesn’t exist any more.”
Atmospheric heat and dryness of the forest floor were the key ingredients in the lethal cocktail that destroyed Fort McMurray, creating a fire that burned with a new ferocity, reaching record temperatures. But there was another factor: a suburban sprawl of homes built and furnished with the same petrochemicals on which the Alberta city had made its fortune.
“Spalling,” writes Vaillant, “is a verb you don’t encounter much below 500 degrees.” It’s what happens to concrete when all the water is burned out of it. Part of the job of the writer, he believes, is to find a vocabulary for this new reality. “Words possess spell-casting, shock-inducing power even in this jaded age.” The English language, he says, already has terms for all this, but there hasn’t been much need for them. Now, like firefighters, they are being called up and sent in to action. He cites another word: “Infandous – a thing too horrible to be named or uttered. For a mayor or fire chief, fire running rampant through a town they are charged with protecting is infandous.”
The problem with dealing with infandous situations is if they are too horrible to be named, they usually don’t get planned for. This is what happened in Fort McMurray and its surrounding forests: firefighters ended up having to bulldoze gaps through the city’s housing to stop the blaze. This sort of failure of imagination has been dubbed the Lucretius problem by Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who paraphrased the Roman poet and philosopher with the words: “The fool believes the tallest mountain in the world will be equal to the tallest he has observed.”
This problem is compounded by the refusal of nations and businesses to disinvest in oil, despite decades of warnings. Back in 1979, big oil seemed united behind the stated mission of the first World Climate Conference – to “foresee and prevent potential manmade changes in climate that might be adverse to the wellbeing of humanity”. But recently, says Vaillant, something has changed in the petroleum industry. “I don’t know if it’s since the invasion of Russia, or if maybe the petroleum industry sees the end coming, but they seem more openly profit-driven, and less interested in wasting time mincing words about greenwashing. They’re insisting, ‘No we’re going to burn as long as we can.’”
And the Carols and Daves and Robs of Fort McMurray go along with this, because many of them come from impoverished coastal areas of Canada and need to earn a living. In this, they are not dissimilar from the young Mexican migrant who featured in Vaillant’s 2015 debut novel, The Jaguar’s Children. “These are folks from remote rural areas with really limited opportunities, who are trying to participate in the 21st century. And the petroleum industry pays well, but you’re being paid well to destroy the Earth.”
Two years after the Fort McMurray blaze, Vaillant reported for the Guardian on another big wildfire in Redding, California. These already feel like ancient history, he says. “Over the last summer alone, Canada has generated 100 cumulonimbus fire clouds. These are major planetary phenomena, not unlike hurricanes, except they’re born out of fire. Volcanoes are usually the only natural thing that can generate that much energy.”
Who needs fiction when nature can provide such a fast-moving, harrowing story? “The 21st century is a place we’ve never been,” he says, “And that’s not a facetious statement. People talk about the new normal but there is no such thing. And there never will be. What we are in now is clima incognita – the unknown climate. This is what our lives are going to be. And fire is just one particularly charismatic manifestation of that. Obviously, you’re having floods and droughts and other phenomena that are all driven by the same engine. It really all comes down to heat and the energy it generates, and all that comes back to carbon dioxide and methane.”
How has Vaillant’s research affected his own lifestyle? “Well, I’m flying all over the place right now,” he says. “I’m practically living in a jet. But I’ve really never felt like this about a book before. I will serve it as long as people want to talk about it, because I can’t think of anything more important. We’ve given this earth a fever. And the irony is that the fossil fuel industry is, in essence, a fire industry: we draw these substances from the ground at great expense so we can burn them.”
A chill passes through the room as Vaillant’s tone turns truly apocalyptic. “Fire has empowered us and enriched us beyond our wildest dreams. But the strange side-effect is that we’ve also empowered the climate. We now live in a world that is more explosively flammable than at any time in human history.”
• John Vaillant’s Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World is published by Sceptre. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
