Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

by John Vaillant

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 this sense, the circumboreal forest resembles a kind of hemispheric sponge that happens to be covered in trees, their billions of miles of roots weaving the continents together in a subterranean warp and weft.

Like Texas, Alberta is a kind of energy vortex: along with wide-open spaces and a patriotic allegiance to the petroleum industry, it shares with its American counterpart a painful familiarity with natural disasters, including tornadoes, hailstorms, floods, and fires. Hardworking and independent-minded, Alberta, too, prides itself on a mythic legacy built around cattle, horses, cowboys, and oil, further energized by deep wells of “get ’er done” can-do-itiveness, evangelical Christianity, and cantankerous alienation from its national capital.

The environment these behemoths are currently dismantling is an icebound netherworld as seen through the eyes of Sebastião Salgado, Edward Burtynsky, or J. M. W. Turner: mile upon mile of black and ransacked earth pocked with stadium-swallowing pits and dead, discolored lakes guarded by scarecrows in cast-off rain gear and overseen by flaming stacks and fuming refineries, the whole laced together by circuit board mazes of dirt roads and piping, patrolled by building-sized machines that, enormous as they are, appear dwarfed by the wastelands they have made.

Even people gainfully employed in those mines compare them to Mordor.

“The oil sands and heavy-oil belts of the world represent the most viable access point to the deep biosphere, which from a cell-balance perspective is the largest biome on the planet.”

Alberta has taken these liabilities into account and, in order for the bitumen industry to be even remotely profitable, four conditions must be met: conventional oil must be trading above $50 a barrel; the natural resources needed to produce it (fresh water, natural gas, and the boreal forest ecosystem) must be had for next to nothing; the industry itself must be heavily subsidized; and exploration costs must be nil.[*2] There is a fifth condition, exploited not just by the bitumen industry but by the entire burning world: no consequences for emissions.

“The Company,” as it came to be known, was the continent’s first industrial-scale resource extractor, and it pioneered an approach to business, markets, employees, and the natural world that together could be called “wildfire economics.” Using furs as fuel, the European market as fire, and credit as oxygen, the Hudson’s Bay Company burned its way across the North American continent, altering it forever while generating extraordinary wealth for a handful of men an ocean away.

the Athabasca region is so remote that, during the early days, a full trading cycle—by canoe from the Athabasca eastward across the continent to the port in Montreal and then by ship to England, returning with an equal load of trade goods, again by canoe, on waterways that were frozen half the year and lethally cold and fast the other half—took three years.

Both trappers and traders had things the other desperately wanted, and a fragile peace was maintained beneath a surface tension of trust, fear, and desire. While there was room for some negotiation, credit, and even friendship, a muzzle-loading rifle still cost forty beaver skins, and it was useless without powder and shot—another twenty skins. Then there were tools, traps, flour, blankets, sewing supplies, and gifts to consider. It all added up, and the bottom line was a hard one: anyone who wanted to participate in the modern world of iron, gunpowder, cotton, and alcohol had to play by Company rules. Anyone who didn’t was effectively marginalized and, ultimately, doomed. If the technical disadvantages didn’t destroy you outright, the public shame for refusing to participate would finish the job.

Consider the social and professional costs of not having a cell phone—the muzzle-loader of our day.

“A state in the guise of a merchant.”

Since [1840], the dividends have been on the decline, nor are they ever likely to reach the same amount, for several reasons,—the chief of which is the destruction of the fur-bearing animals. In certain parts of the country, it is the Company’s policy to destroy them along the whole frontier; and our general instructions [were] that every effort be made to lay waste the country, so as to offer no inducement to petty traders to encroach on the Company’s limits. Those instructions have indeed had the effect of ruining the country, but not of protecting the Company’s domains.

As barbaric as this policy might seem today, it is no different, in practice or principle, than the competition-killing tactics used by Standard Oil, Walmart, Amazon, Netflix, or Uber. In this way, corporations and wildfires follow similar growth patterns in that, once they reach a certain size, they are able to dictate their own terms across a landscape—even if it destroys the very ecosystem that enabled them to grow so powerful in the first place.

Through this lens, Canada in general, and Alberta in particular, could be seen not as “a state in the guise of a merchant,” but as a merchant in the guise of a state. This colonial model, which systematically commodifies natural resources and binds local people to the trading post system with company store–style debt, has replicated itself in resource towns across the continent.

Containing these wells once they’d been tapped was not an exact science, and, in Titusville, the aptly renamed Oil Creek flowed—and sometimes burned—with a surface layer of shimmering petroleum. Meanwhile, wagonloads of leaking barrels turned the surrounding roads into reeking quagmires through which draft horses slogged and staggered, blackened to the withers by a slurry of urine, feces, and crude oil. The combination was toxic, and a notable feature of these sorry animals was that, below the neck, they had no hair. But horses were cheap and, with money flowing as freely as oil, this was considered a small price to pay.

By 1870, it was clear that the same energy and ambition that had so recently driven fire-powered steamships across the Atlantic, and bound the continent with a fire-powered railroad, could accomplish virtually anything a motivated mind might seize upon. The following decade was as pivotal for energy and fire as the 2000s were for information technology and digital communication. It was then that the heyday of petroleum—what could be described as the Petrocene Age—began in earnest: the period of history in which our Promethean pursuit of fire’s energy, most notably crude oil, in conjunction with the internal combustion engine, took a quantum leap to transform all aspects of our civilization and, with it, our atmosphere. This period covers, roughly, the past 150 years, and it is peaking now.

according to a 2019 International Monetary Fund report, Canadian taxpayers contributed more than $40 billion (U.S.) in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry in 2015 alone (approximately $1,200 for every man, woman, and child). In the same year, Americans contributed more than $2,000 per person, while China (a nation of 1.4 billion citizens) contributed the equivalent of $1,025 per person to support the fossil fuel industry.

Pew’s notion of “freedom” was similar to that enjoyed by the Hudson’s Bay Company and, more recently, by the petroleum industry at large. It is the kind where “free rein” and “free reign” blend together in a glorious, God-given, wealth-generating synergy.[*1]

Manning was unfazed by his remoteness from the centers of power, in part because Albertans were used to being ignored by eastern Canada, but also because he was comfortable with prophecy—raised on it, versed in it, and, on the podium that day, he was uttering it. Certainly familiar to Manning, Pew, and many others present that day would have been these words from Isaiah: Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.

It is pocked with red dots—so many, so close together, that it resembles maps of migrant deaths along the Mexican border.

The ice is one reason every semi working western Canada’s northern routes is equipped with a reinforced grill guard known as a “moose bar” (or “buffalo basher”), because whatever you encounter up there, at those speeds—moose, elk, bear, bison—you are going through it like an asteroid. In daylight, you can see the aftermath: blood smears so long and wide it looks like a paint truck exploded. Huge blue-black ravens, unfazed by the speeding traffic, perch on bones that look like leftovers from the Pleistocene as they feast on the obscene and frozen wreckage.

It is not the tree or house that burns, but the gases those things emit.

In fire’s world, everything relevant is breathing, emitting, vaporizing, volatile—not just the air, but the trees, the neighborhood, the house, the Formica countertop, the bag of cat food sitting on it, and, if conditions are favorable enough—hot enough—the cat itself.

Animals can start fires, too: there are species of hawk and kite that will pluck burning twigs from the margins of bushfires to drop them elsewhere, starting new ones.

“Hydrocarbons” is an awkward concept to wrap one’s head around because they take such wildly different forms. As dissimilar as they may seem on the surface, Kentucky coal and Kentucky bourbon are both full of hydrocarbons; so are Irish peat and Irish whiskey. Hay bales, cow farts, library books, and extra-virgin olive oil are all hydrocarbons, too. Likewise, Big Wheels, Barbie dolls, LEGOs, Lululemon, Trojans, Vaseline, WD-40, and every tree on Earth are also hydrocarbon based. So is human fat. Fats—lipids—are the organic precursors to all the petroleum we burn. They occur in plants, too, including algae and phytoplankton. Long after other components of these creatures have decomposed or been reduced to inert sediment, the lipids endure, thus confirming a suspicion held by many people attempting weight loss: fat lasts forever.[*1]

There is a strong case to be made that there has never been a better time to be a human than right now. Some might argue this point, but one thing is for sure: in all of human history, there has never been a better time to be a fire.

If you look at how humans—undisciplined and unregulated by education or culture—use resources, they tend to consume whatever is available until it’s gone. Of course, fire does this, too.

A key difference between us is that fire has no control over its appetite or rate of consumption, but we do, even if it’s hard to tell sometimes.

Hope—the willpower of positive thinking—is clearly adaptive to human survival. To remain cohesive under pressure, communities need trustworthy authority figures capable of leading by example and exhorting others to manage their thoughts and feelings, especially doubt and fear. But there is a fine line between hope and denial and delusion.

Fire synthesizes its surroundings. Those surroundings are cultural as much as natural, and choices about fire practices and regimes will inevitably be made on the basis of social values and philosophies, as integrated by political institutions. Science can enlighten that process but will not determine it. —Stephen J. Pyne, “Pyromancy”

How do you talk about a fearsome thing without instilling fear?

Fire is the principal mechanism by which the boreal forest purges and regenerates itself, to the point that the cones of several keystone conifer species, including black spruce, will not drop their seeds unless they are heated to temperatures unachievable by sunlight alone. Not only do these blasts of intense heat open the cones, releasing the seeds inside, they also indicate that fire has cleared the ground below and opened the canopy above, thus improving the odds of those seeds’ successful germination. Without fire and its seemingly random but ultimately regular patterns of return, the boreal forest would collapse. There is in this cycle a kind of codependency that, when viewed from the point of view of fire, upends the notion of what a forest is, and whom it serves.

“Fire-spawned stands of lodgepole pine are, in a sense, locked into a fire cycle. They are creations of fire and, in turn, they create conditions hospitable to future fire. You could almost think of it as a symbiosis…a form of farming: fire creates these stands of lodgepole pine so it can eat them later.”

That morning, it was as if Fort McMurray, with its eighty-year jackpot rollover of unburned trees, and its half-century bonanza of vinyl-sided, tar-shingled plywood houses, had won the lotto for flammability—all six numbers in exact order, plus the El Niño bonus and the spring dip mega ball. The payout for a long shot like that would be in the billions.

That morning, the other 88,000 inhabitants of greater Fort McMurray were living in a parallel reality, as oblivious to their environment as the passengers on the Titanic were to theirs. Just as icebergs were clearly visible from the deck of that doomed ship, smoke plumes billowed over the green sea surrounding Fort McMurray. For those who took note of them, they were an abstraction—a feature rather than a factor, worthy of an Instagram post but nothing more.

The disconnect between the reality of this fire—its objective potential based on the physics and chemistry in play that day—and the leadership’s estimation of it had less to do with information or attitude than with vision. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. Senate’s 9/11 Commission Report declared, “The most important failure was one of imagination.”

This conclusion could be applied just as easily to the financial crash of 2008, the election of Donald Trump, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or Odysseus’s Trojan Horse trick—any number of accidents, catastrophes, victories, and defeats.

It was a room full of alphas,

At this point, most of the city’s residents were still at work, or at lunch, and their children were still in school. But that was about to change, and it would do so like the moment of arrival in a sci-fi movie, or in H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds: people stopped in their tracks, heads turned to the sky, beholding something whose size and import they could neither limn nor scale. It wasn’t Martians, or Godzilla, but it was a monster and they knew it.

These differences are evident in the equipment they deploy, and also in the firefighters’ respective builds. Forestry crews may spend days at a time in the bush or the mountains moving quickly through country accessible only by foot or helicopter, while municipal firefighters are seldom more than a hose length from their trucks and a short drive from their kitchens. Form follows function: where wildfire fighters are built for endurance in rugged terrain, munis are built to scrimmage and scrum. This is one reason you won’t see many powerlifters like Mark Stephens on a Forestry crew, but you will often see more women.

The situation facing those patchwork crews in Beacon Hill—now a textbook firetrap—was not so different than that facing the firefighters marching resolutely up the stairs of the World Trade Center: it was nothing they had dealt with before, it didn’t feel right, and the prospects weren’t good, but there were people up there, so they went. Service before self.

This spontaneous transition from firefighting operation to lifesaving operation has become a hallmark of twenty-first-century urban fire—from Portugal and Greece to Australia and California.

The only way out was through; the entire hilltop was igniting.

In 2005, Underwriters Laboratories conducted an experiment in which fires were set in a pair of model living rooms, one filled with legacy furnishings, the other with modern equivalents. The fires were started with candles in the sofa cushions, and, for the first minute or so, the only real difference was in the quality of the smoke, which was much darker and more acrid in the modern room. At three minutes, the modern room is clearly in trouble, with the sofa fully engaged. Then, just twenty seconds later, something unexpected happens: the modern living room bursts into flame, engulfing everything from floor to ceiling as thick, oily clouds of black smoke billow from the entryway. What only seconds earlier had been a living room with a burning sofa was now raging like a refinery fire. Anyone inside would have been killed. It is terrifying to watch. Meanwhile, next door in the legacy room, the smoke is minimal and the fire, while clearly growing, could be doused with a bucket of water or a small fire extinguisher. It would take another twenty-five minutes for the legacy room to reach a similar state of involvement.

It recalled the velociraptor in Jurassic Park peering at her prey through the window of that kitchen door, suddenly realizing there was another way in.

Suddenly, the fire punches through the second layer of glass, making the same sound and hole as a fist. There has been no three-dimensional intervention of any kind, only this vaporous, spectral presence, and yet it is battering its way into the room. This is what horror is—a malevolent entity from another dimension breaking through to this one.

It was like doctors in a small-town hospital who were used to dealing with patients one or two at a time, suddenly having to perform triage on neighbors and family members.

A lieutenant named Damian Asher compared these frantic efforts to cats chasing a laser pointer.

The fire was a cruel teacher, but its lessons were heeded: in the space of two hours, the Fort McMurray Fire Department had been transformed from a hierarchal, Blue Card–following paramilitary organization into loose cells of hit-and-run guerillas, mixing fluidly with other departments and crews as they fought street to street and house to house.