Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

by John Vaillant

Canada contains 10 percent of the world’s forests, vast tracts of which are uninhabited.

Girdling the Northern Hemisphere in a circumpolar band, the boreal forest is the largest terrestrial ecosystem, comprising almost a third of the planet’s total forest area (more than 6 million square miles—larger than all fifty U.S. states). Fully a third of Canada is covered by boreal forest, including half of Alberta.

As densely wooded as the boreal might appear from the roadside, it is, within, something far more amphibious, containing more sources of fresh water than any other biome.

the circumboreal forest resembles a kind of hemispheric sponge that happens to be covered in trees,

One reason the trees never get very big or very old is because, in spite of all that water, they burn down on a regular basis. They’re designed to. In this way, the circumboreal is truly a phoenix among ecosystems: literally reborn in fire, it must incinerate in order to regenerate, and it does so, in its random patchwork fashion, every fifty to a hundred years. This colossal biome stores as much, if not more, carbon than all tropical forests combined and, when it burns, it goes off like a carbon bomb.

Fort McMurray is an anomaly in North America. Located six hundred miles north of the U.S. border and six hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle, the city is an island of industry in an ocean of trees.

“We’re just a colony of oil companies.”

Despite being virtually unknown outside of Canada and the petroleum industry, Fort McMurray has become, in the past two decades, the fourth-largest city in the North American subarctic after Edmonton, Anchorage, and Fairbanks. In terms of overtime logged and dollars earned, it is, without a doubt, the hardest-working, highest-paid municipality on the continent. In 2016, two years past a decade-long boom that ended with a sudden drop in global crude oil prices, the median household income was still nearly $200,000 a year. Fort McMurray has earned several nicknames over the years, and one of them is Fort McMoney.

As far as the Linders and their guests were concerned, whatever was out there was being handled. After all, that is what people do in Fort McMurray: they handle things. Not many regions self-select as rigorously as northern Alberta does, and Fort McMurray selects for workers—tough, adventurous team players, highly motivated to do what it takes and prosper.

Alberta Forestry’s wildfire crews—with a territory ranging from tallgrass prairie and parkland to the Rocky Mountains and the boreal forest—are considered among the best in the world. In private, some members consider themselves the best.

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.

Long before Syncrude, Suncor, Exxon, or Shell, there was the Hudson’s Bay Company. “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.

Explosive growth of this kind mimics that of fire, and humans seem particularly prone to it. Fire is known to physicists as an exothermic reaction—that is, a reaction that unleashes more energy than was required to initiate

heat, fuel, and oxygen. These are the ingredients of fire, but a fourth ingredient—a catalyst—is needed to unite these disparate elements into a dynamic, unified whole.

ignition—that singular poesis when fire springs into being from nothing, from nonbeing—isn’t the true moment of origin. This falls to the chemical reaction that precedes it.

It is not the tree or house that burns, but the gases those things emit. This is what the heat is for: to liberate the flammable gases from their solid or liquid prisons by transforming them into vapor.

It is here—in the invisible gaseous interface between the thing and its ignition—that fire becomes mobile. This molecule-thin frontier, known as the “reaction zone,” enables or denies, from moment to ignescent moment, the promise of fire’s limitless, unimpeded growth. This phenomenon—pyrolysis—is the key to understanding the motives and behavior of fire. Simply put, the goal of fire—its threefold objective—is to string these pyrolytic moments together for as long as possible, as broadly as possible, as intensely as possible.

If we have a superpower—besides our brains and thumbs and speech—it is fire. Without its light and its explosive, directable energy, we would not be who or what we are today. For as long as there have been hearths to gather around, cook over, and see by, fire has been, literally, central to our lives.

Today, it is easy to overlook the fire-powered miracles that we daily perform, but they are real, unprecedented, and too many to list. Whether we’re boiling tea or crossing an ocean, fire is right there with us. Without it, we really are dead in the water.

even the youngest viable fossil fuels are millions of years old.

According to the energy historian Vaclav Smil, every gallon of gasoline represents roughly one hundred tons of marine biomass, principally algae or phytoplankton, that has gone through an inconceivably long crushing, cooking, and curing process deep underground.

Today, crude oil—liquid sunshine—is the world’s most widely traded commodity (though coffee is right up there).

According to another energy historian, Daniel Yergin, the world economy was worth around $90 trillion in 2019, and nearly all its energy (84 percent) was derived from fossil fuels.

More than a third of global shipping is devoted to transporting petroleum products.

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.

Earthly fire—our fire—is different; it is not a thing, or a gas, or an element as Aristotle defined it. It is a chemical reaction.

here on Earth, almost everything is oxidizing all the time, just in different ways and at different rates: a steel I-beam rusts almost imperceptibly for decades; a hibernating frog absorbs oxygen through its skin all winter; a Molotov cocktail explodes instantly. As disparate as these things are, they are all reacting with oxygen.

Fire is possible because oxygen is so reactive, but the secret to its continued success is that there is the “right” amount of it relative to other atmospheric gases. Fire has a hard time sustaining itself when oxygen levels fall below an atmospheric concentration of 15 percent. Meanwhile, in concentrations above 35 percent, dinner by candlelight would be ill-advised. Currently, atmospheric oxygen sits in the Goldilocks zone, just shy of 21 percent: exactly what we need to live and prosper, and exactly what fire needs to burn in ways that have proven extraordinarily beneficial to us—most of the time.

oxygen is the gas that powers the engine of motility. Any complex creature that moves for a living does so thanks to oxygen, and the reason animals move is, first and foremost, to find more food to consume and, ultimately, to oxidize—to “burn” in the form of energy transmitted to and through their blood. Fire is driven by the same need. In this sense, fire is not an “element” or a “reaction,” it is a hunter. Just like us.

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.

But hope is a human construct, a coping mechanism in the face of uncertainty that holds no sway in the natural world.

Hope—the willpower of positive thinking—is clearly adaptive to human survival.

But there is a fine line between hope and denial and delusion.

How do you talk about a fearsome thing without instilling fear? How do you prepare the public for a dreadful possibility in one breath, and encourage them to get on with their day in the next? Is it possible to prepare people to flee for their lives without inciting panic?

Chisholm Fire, which had set the record, worldwide, for head fire intensity.

The energy released during the fire’s peak, seven-hour run was calculated to be that of seventeen one-megaton hydrogen bombs, or about four Hiroshima bombs per minute.

This, now, is what fire is capable of on Earth. The chemistry and physics of fire remain unchanged, the trees themselves are no different than they were fifty years ago, but the air is warmer and the soil is drier—enough to make the latent energy living and dying in these forests that much easier to release.

Words possess spell-casting, shock-inducing power, even in this jaded age, and the English language has accounted for this: something that is “infandous” is a thing too horrible to be named or uttered.

Natural disasters may be hard to schedule, but a fire in the boreal is as certain as death: any given tree in the boreal forest can expect to burn once in a century, give or take fifty years. 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.

there is a critical moment when, with no snow left to cover it, and no foliage yet to shade it, the normally damp, dark forest floor is exposed to the novelty of direct sunlight. This period of a week or two, which occurs before the trees’ roots have fully thawed and their branches have budded, has a name—the “spring dip.” During this brief window of time, between the river’s break-up and the forest’s green-up, trees—coniferous and deciduous alike—are exceptionally vulnerable to fire. Under these conditions, leaves, cones, and deadfall take on the characteristics of kindling, and last summer’s grass will burn like newspaper. In 2016, the spring dip lined up perfectly with Fire 009.

Technically speaking, crossover occurs when the ambient temperature in degrees Celsius exceeds the relative humidity as a percentage.

The effect on a fire is dramatic—roughly analogous to a motorboat attaining sufficient speed to transition from pushing through the water to skimming over it. Once crossover is achieved, the fire is set free, able to move and grow exponentially faster and with far more agility.

The more extreme the crossover differential between high temperature and low humidity, the more rapidly the preheating and ignition are able to happen, and this can create a feedback loop—a spiral, really—of ever-increasing heat and wind. Once a crown fire like this is fully under way, it is unstoppable.

“I’ll just reiterate what Chief Allen stated at the press conference,” Schmitte said. “People should carry on their normal day, and also be prepared.” This advice, paraphrasing the British wartime slogan “Keep calm and carry on,” taps deeply into Canadian national virtues, which favor “Peace, Order, and Good Government” over “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

As a mathematician named Aubrey Clayton wrote, “The problem with exponential growth is that it means most of the change is always in the recent past.” For this reason, any kind of update—any kind of news at all—is, by its nature, a kind of incomplete history: by the time one has gathered, organized, and relayed it, the world has moved on. But in most cases, the world doesn’t move as quickly as it did in Fort McMurray on May 3. On that day, the inertia of the present was overmatched by the impatience of the future.

Birnam Wood

was in, and the price he and his city stood to pay. The most extreme designation for a wildfire is “past resources.” Also referred to as “beyond resources,” the term means that not only is the fire out of control, it is actively unsafe to be in its vicinity. “It’s pretty much the worst thing you can hear,” Ryan Coutts told me. “It means there’s nothing Forestry can do.”