As nature ignites, wildfires are becoming more common. Here’s how we must adapt to our fiery future

If you’ve never had to flee a wildfire, the idea can seem like something out of a disaster film. But as the climate gets warmer, thanks to humans burning fossil fuels, wildfires are becoming larger and more common. Earlier this summer, millions of people in North America awoke to orange skies and blankets of smog from Canadian wildfire smoke that was drifting thousands of miles away. Even if the idea of ever having to deal with wildfire flames seems remote, especially living in a city or suburb, it’s clear that few will be able to avoid the fallout, especially as society fails to meaningfully address greenhouse gas emissions.

In his new book “Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World,” journalist and author John Vaillant tells the story of the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire. That event may seem like old news, but it burned 1,456,810 acres while forcing almost 90,000 evacuations and indirectly leading to two deaths.

The Fort McMurray wildfire also, as Vaillant explained to Salon, foreshadowed and epitomized our current collection of climate change-caused crises. As new wildfires scorch the planet from Hawaii to Greece, it has become more imperative than ever before for humans to examine past disasters and learn from them. When speaking with Salon, Vaillant offered practical tips for surviving wildfires and reviewed stories he had chronicles from the Fort McMurray wildfire. He also offered a refreshingly unvarnished take on the motives of those who continue to deny that human use of fossil fuels is the primary culprit behind climate change today.

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

What practical advice do you have for people who are directly exposed to wildfires or live with the consequences of wildfires? I keep thinking about this issue in terms of how it will impact ordinary people, and I’m curious, based on your research, what advice you would have for the vast majority of our population, as I suspect the vast majority will either directly or indirectly be impacted.

Living with the consequences of wildfires and living with the risk of it are pretty different things. But most of us North Americans live in flammable places. About half of Americans live in the WUI, also known as the wildland–urban interface, and that’s where forest and wildlands butt up against the built environment. Suburbia is a pretty prime place to live these days because people like to be near nature, but nature is where wildfires come from — and in our increasingly hot and flammable world, they come out of there more frequently and with greater intensity.

This is what a lot of Canadians are doing right now. They’re looking around at the place they think of as home and sanctuary, and I’m inviting them to look at it as potential fuel for a fire.

You’re looking at your beautiful wooden deck, which is where you sit with friends and take in the sun and enjoy your flowers, as I like to do. It’s actually super-flammable and very well-suited to burning your house down. That’s what we need to look at in terms of what’s its relationship to other fuels, like trees. Where’s the fire going to come from? We’ve done a very good job of keeping our own houses from catching on fire. We’ve got that pretty well dialed in, so that that’s a really anomalous situation. But a fire coming in from the outside, which is what’s happening all over Canada now and in parts of the Western United States, that’s something we have less control over, but we can create a barrier. 

I think one way is to look at your yard. Look at your community. How could it be a fuse for a fire? The short answer is I would invite readers to go to Fire Smart. It helps you look at your property through the lens of fire. It offers many different ways that you can not fireproof your property, but reduce the likelihood of fire spreading to your property. 

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I want to focus for a moment on people who are directly impacted by wildfires. If your community receives an evacuation notice or is informed that the sky is now going to be orange because of a fire 100 miles away, or anything along those lines, what do people need to do? It’s almost like I’m asking them to prepare for a disaster movie or apocalypse novel scenario.

It’s really real. People are going through this literally daily up here in Canada, and the orange glow in the sky, that could be from a fire that’s 20 miles away from you. And so if you see smoke, or a glow in the sky, you definitely want to dial into the weather.

Take note of which way the wind is blowing. Unless you’re a sailor who cares which way the wind is blowing, it doesn’t make any difference, but here it’s really the big difference between life and death, the difference between your home being burned to the ground or surviving. That’s what people up here in Canada are doing; they’re watching the sky and when it’s turning cloudy with smoke or turning orange, they’re dialing into the weather and getting a grip on how far away that fire is, how fast is the wind moving. 

That’s what’s either an imminent threat or no threat at all. What’s tricky with the wind is that it could change in half an hour. You could have a wind blowing away from you — and this is something that’s really key to understand — and the fire can be huge, but if the wind is blowing away from you and away from your community, it’s almost impossible for the fire to get to you. But if that wind should turn, the fire can get to you.

But what’s much more important — and this is really what is bringing communities down and putting citizens on the back foot and pushing them into panic mode in ways that are really surprising them — are the embers. You can be looking across the valley and there’s a raging fire over there, and you think, ‘Well, there’s a valley, there’s a river, there’s a lake between me and this fire.’ But the embers don’t care.

And if the wind is blowing toward you, those embers can blow right across the river, across the valley, across the lake as they’ve been doing in Kelowna, British Columbia, a city of 150,000 people that’s now under partial evacuation and with fire all around it. These embers can just fly right over and land right in your yard. And because it’s so hot and dry in so much of North America right now, those embers don’t just fizzle out. They actually turn into fire with surprising speed.

That’s what burned down a lot of Fort McMurray in 2016. What I wrote about in “Fire Weather,” that’s what has burned down several different towns and neighborhoods just in the past week here in Canada. It’s not the actual flames, which are really distracting. My God, those flames are a hundred feet tall, they’re huge. What should I do? Meanwhile the embers are sailing to the air. They could be landing behind you. They could go right over the top of you and the fire could come at you from behind.

I wrote about this in the book. Think about people are doing battle on the ground, but hiding back in the woods are archers with the flaming arrows, sending them right over the top of the battlefield, right into the village and right into the castle. That’s what fire certainly can do.

When you describe wildfires in your responses, or when you describe them in your book, it seems almost as if you are writing about living monsters rather than something non-sentient. Is this an intentional or unintentional stylistic choice on your part? 

It’s really not a stylistic choice. It’s observing what’s actually happening. Fire doesn’t have a brain. It doesn’t make decisions. But it is an appetite. It is a reaction.

You and I are appetites too. We’re burning oxygen, we’re looking for food, we’re generating heat. That’s what mammals do. That’s also what fire does. It’s breathing oxygen, it needs fuel, it generates heat. The reason it generates that heat is to release the hydrocarbons from your fence or from your nylon gym shorts or from the rubber tires on your car.

That’s how fire feeds on vapor. It doesn’t feed on solids. Imagine having a liquid diet. Well, a fire has a vapor diet, and in order to release the vapors, it needs to heat up its fuels, heat up those hydrocarbons. So that’s what it wants to do, and it will do it at any cost. And it’s just as happy setting your nylon clothes on fire as it is setting dry grass on the Kansas prairie on fire. It doesn’t care.

How do you feel emotionally when you encounter individuals who sincerely argue that fossil fuel use is not causing climate change, and by extension exacerbating these wildfires? 

I feel frustrated. I feel sad. I feel angry. I feel scared. I feel it’s hard not to see them sometimes as enemies. We can say, ‘Oh, they’re misguided.’ But some of it is refusal to acknowledge the fossil fuel component in worsening climate situations, worsening weather, and that feels like it’s an intellectual choice. It’s a political choice, and that feels cynical and wrong. And frankly, it’s dangerous.

You know, one of the reasons we’re in the situation we are today is because action on climate and on fossil fuels was not taken when we first had the data in the 1960s. We’ve lost two generations of time to act on this in a meaningful way in part only because of cynical actors, very powerful politicians and industrialists and companies and governments, who chose not to act and chose a path of misinformation rather than sincere efforts on behalf of the well-being of human beings and the planet. Cynical, venal choices were made. 

Now I want to segue to Fort McMurray, specifically to the narrative in your book. In the broader history of Earth as a planet that is grappling with climate change, how significant are the events of May 2016 when it comes to understanding the larger story of what is happening? 

The Fort McMurray fire is a textbook case. For anybody who’s interested in climate issues in the 21st century, wildfire issues, in the collision between our headlong rush to exploit hydrocarbons in all their forms at all costs and the impact that is having on us in real time, it’s all there in Fort McMurray.

In that two week period of that fire, basically May 1st to May 16th, you can see the whole story. And the other thing that I found really instructive about that fire is the response to it so closely mimics our response to the threat of climate disruption. In other words, we had really good data ahead of time. We saw the threat coming, we acted inadequately, and then we were forced to panic.

And so you could take the three days, May 1st to May 3rd when the fire first ignited, and then until it came into the city and people fled and panic through the flames; and then you could [compare] it to 1950 to 2010 when we started getting really good data on climate change, we started seeing evidence of it in the 1990s and early 2000s, and now we’re in this reactive mode dealing with these catastrophes almost weekly. 

Are there any visuals from the Fort McMurray fire that linger with you most when it comes to recalling this?

It’s really what people described to me because I wasn’t there. Shandra Linder’s description of coming around the bend on Highway 63 and seeing the wall of fire and smoke where her city should have been, and it was so big that you couldn’t see the sun anymore, so this wall of smoke and fire where there had been a lovely city and a blue sky, that sudden contrast. She’d only been gone a couple of hours and to return and see that total transformation, just the shock, the existential and perceptual shock of that really stayed with me.

The other is Paul Ayearst’s photo over his dashboard when the temperature was 66 Celsius on his thermometer. And he’s photographing over the dashboard at his wife and daughter in cars that are being completely covered over by fireballs from the surrounding trees. And you can’t believe anybody survived what’s in that picture. They thankfully did. But that is really seared into my mind and just imagining the terror and powerlessness they must have felt.

Are there any important points you would like to make about either Fort McMurray or wildfires in general that I have not given you an opportunity to make through this interview so far? 

Folks in the northeast of the United States, we’re cloaked in orange smoke and people understood that it was from Canada. The takeaway from that is, first of all, we’re all downwind, and second of all, we’re all susceptible to these fires. This is not a Canadian problem. It’s not a California problem. It’s not a Western problem. It’s not someone else’s problem. At this point in our history, the entire continent and all the neighborhoods and cities in it are more susceptible to destructive fire than they ever have been in our lives. And we need to act accordingly.