Fire Weather Quotes

“This is not planet Earth as we found it. This is a new place—a fire planet we have made, with an atmosphere more conducive to combustion than at any time in the past 3 million years.”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“But hope is a human construct, a coping mechanism in the face of uncertainty that holds no sway in the natural world.”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“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.”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“I propose Homo flagrans. Flagrans is Latin for “ardent, fiery, passionate, outrageous.”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“WUI” (rhymes with phooey), an acronym for “wildland-urban interface” (though some call it “wildland-urban in your face”). On a map, the WUI represents the fault line between the forest and the built environment, but over the past thirty years it has also come to represent the sweet spot in North American real estate development: hiking trails out the back door and a scooter-friendly cul-de-sac in front. Today, more than a third of American homes and more than half of Canadian homes are located in the WUI. It is a beautiful place to live, until it goes feral.”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“But reality does not require human belief in order to be real”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

“Through the fire’s countless acts of transformative violation, the ordinary was made grotesque; neighborhoods once distinguished by tidy uniformity now looked like suburban Hells rendered by Salvador Dalí.”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast

“If a tree burns in the forest and nobody sees it…”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“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. This is what Alberta has built and bet its economy on, with mixed results.”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“... humans are simply zombie hosts obediently disseminating their seeds, tubers, sparks, and gasses around the globe. In the end, the geologic record will show that it is we who served fire, who enabled it to burn more broadly and brightly than it ever has before. Fire, thus far, has mastered us. [Fire Weather; p. 303]”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

“inspecting the miles of conveyor belts and thousands of rollers carrying freshly dug bitumen from the ten-story, three-hundred-foot-long dragline shovel (which replaced the smaller bucketwheel) to the giant crusher at the plant.”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“inspecting the miles of conveyor belts and thousands of rollers carrying freshly dug bitumen from the ten-story, three-hundred-foot-long dragline shovel (which replaced the smaller bucketwheel) to the giant crusher at the plant. It was, literally, a dead-end job, and, with the company’s help, he trained up to millwright.”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“is difficult to characterise in a single phrase the devastation that the plausible evidence presented in this proceeding forecasts for the Children. As Australian adults know their country, Australia will be lost and the World as we know it gone as well. The physical environment will be harsher, far more extreme and devastatingly brutal when angry. As for the human experience—quality of life, opportunities to partake in Nature’s treasures, the capacity to grow and prosper—all will be greatly diminished. Lives will be cut short. Trauma will be far more common and good health harder to hold and maintain. None of this will be the fault of Nature itself. It will largely be inflicted by the inaction of this generation of adults, in what might fairly be described as the greatest inter-generational injustice ever inflicted by one generation of humans upon the next. (Italics mine.)[*2]”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“the Lucretius Problem is rooted in the difficulty humans have imagining and assimilating things outside their own personal experience.”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“the Lucretius Problem this way: “The fool believes the tallest mountain in the world will be equal to the tallest he has observed.”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“It raises a grave question: What role does the petroleum industry play in promoting and approving building materials that are supposed to shelter families from harm?”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“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.”

Excerpt From
Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World - Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
John Vaillant”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

“Even though we use the terms “oil” and “gas” in casual conversation, as if they were familiar to us, few of us ever actually see them. For most of us, they are abstractions, code words for what we’re really talking about, which is fire and money.”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“This phenomenon occurred so predictably that, in ancient times, the Dead Sea was known as Asphalt Lake.”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“It takes twelve oversized semi loads traveling with escorts to move the component parts of a single hauler. The tires alone are thirteen feet tall and cost $85,000 apiece.”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“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. Continuing west, over the Rocky Mountains, through British Columbia, the Yukon, Alaska, and across the Bering Strait into Russia (where it is known as the taiga), the boreal forest stretches all the way to Scandinavia and then, undeterred by the Atlantic Ocean, makes landfall on Iceland before picking up again in Newfoundland and continuing westward to complete the circle, a green wreath crowning the globe.”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“Human flatulence alone generates about three-quarters of a billion liters of methane per day, or 30 million cubic feet—enough to meet the daily cooking and heating needs of 140,000 northern city dwellers.”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“The National Weather Service issues a “Fire Weather Watch” when weather and fuel conditions may lead to rapid or dramatic increases in wildfire activity.”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future. —Marshall McLuhan, The Medium Is the Message”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“Nassim Taleb, a statistician, risk analyst, and author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, calls it the “Lucretius Problem.” Named”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World