Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

by John Vaillant

I was born in the 1960s, but I personally knew people born in the 1870s and ’80s, when the petroleum industry was in its infancy and Standard Oil was a start-up. The Civil War, waged by horse- and manpower, was a raw and recent memory then; Queen Victoria reigned over a global empire held together by sailing ships, and the climate visionaries Svante Arrhenius and Arvid Högbom were still in high school. In 1875, Chicago was still rebuilding after its great fire, the battle at Little Big Horn had not yet been won or lost, and boreal explorers were still fantasizing about how men might one day turn Alberta bitumen into money. Back then, 1.3 billion people walked the planet—literally, because there were no cars. Nor was there plastic, and the Keeling Curve of CO2 had only just begun its relentless upward bending. That world—the same one into which people whose hands I touched were born—is so close temporally (I looked into their eyes; I felt their breath), and yet it is so remote chemically, biologically, atmospherically, technologically, anthropogenically from the world we inhabit now, the world we are currently unmaking, the world our children are inheriting that resembles, less and less, the one that made us.