Book review: Fire Weather, by John Vaillant

Fort McMurray is the heart of Canada’s tar sands production, a remote and wealthy boom-town that grew rapidly in the Alberta forest in the early to mid 2000s. With higher oil prices making the tar sands profitable, there was lots of well paying work, despite it being one of the most damaging environmental projects on the planet.

Fort McMurray was a city in service to fossil fuels and in defiance of their effects on the climate. And then in 2016 it burned to the ground, in a fire so apoca...