Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 232: Fire Weather — with John Vaillant
Speakers: Samantha Walters, Am Johal, John Vaillant
[theme music]
Samantha Walters 0:05
Hello listeners I'm Sam with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this episode of Below the Radar. Our host Am Johal is joined by John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather, a national best selling book about the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, North America's oil industry, and our new century of fire, which has only just begun. They discuss how John approached the subject, the process of collecting and weaving stories from Fort McMurray, and how the book has been received. John will be joining us for a free public talk on the book on January 31st, 2024. Find out more in the show notes or on our website. Enjoy the episode!
Am Johal 0:52
Hello, welcome to Below the Radar, delighted that you could join us again this week. We have special guest John Vaillant with us today. Welcome, John.
John Vaillant 1:01
So good to be with you.
Am Johal 1:02
Yeah, John, why don't we begin with you introducing yourself a little bit?
John Vaillant 1:06
Well, I'm a journalist and author based in Vancouver. Most of my writing career, which is now 25 years old this year, has unfolded here in Western Canada. And that's kind of afforded me kind of a unique view on things, I think, different from a lot of my New York and Toronto counterparts.
Am Johal 1:25
Now John, I met you over a decade ago, where did a screening of a documentary that had influenced your work on the book The Tiger, and—
John Vaillant 1:37
Yeah, right.
Am Johal 1:37
Yeah. So it's great to chat with you again. And of course, in a couple of weeks, by the time this episode comes out, a couple weeks after, you'll be giving a public talk on your most recent book Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast. And I had this book recommended to me by my friend Amy and a number of other people. And it's so wonderful to read. And I of course went to Fort Mac, about three or four months after the fire. I'd been there the year before, I was working on a book with a friend of mine at the time, but wondering if you can sort of begin to tell the story of how this project idea came to you, you know, why were you interested in writing this book?
John Vaillant 2:18
Well, the tar sands, oil sands, Fort Mac petroleum industry kind of loomed large over the western Canadian consciousness. And so it was there, kind of an elephant in the room all the time. And as someone concerned about the environment, interested in extraction and nature and collisions between human ambition in the natural world, Fort Mac, Fort McMurray, would come up and. You know, I saw, you know, other journalists trying to write about it. And it's a really hard place to write about, I realized and have deepest respect for other writers' efforts to do so. Saw some good documentaries on it, but it's such a huge, sprawling, complicated place, it's kind of disguised by the fact that it looks like a kind of suburban northern city, that, you know, it's a hard one to get a grip on and the fire in 2016 really brought it into sharp focus. And that was such a... it just shocked all of us, you know, and I don't mean journalists, I mean Canadians you know that the idea that a place that potent, that had so much heavy machinery, that had had such a powerful and literally planet changing impact on the natural world. The idea that it would be overwhelmed by a natural force really created a kind of a dissonance for me and seeing it, you know, beyond all that, seeing it, the whole city disappear under that pyro cumulonimbus cloud on May 3rd, 4th, and 5th, you know, it was really frightening. And I don't know if you remember, but there was a period of time there during those first few days as cars streamed out, you know, like ants, you know, fleeing the, their nest, we didn't know who was left in there. And that was a really scary thought that there were, you know, Canadians kinda un— possibly unaccounted for, it was really hard to tell what was happening in there, how much of the city had burned or would burn. And that uncertainty and the power of that fire just stayed with me and proved to be a really potent way to explore the dynamics that are going on up there between human ambition and our boundless appetite for oil and the potency of the forest and the way that it has changed because of the huge amounts of co2 and methane we've injected into the atmosphere over the past 150 years.
Am Johal 4:50
In talking to people in the bar in Fort McMurray a few months afterwards, I heard so many different stories about that day of people being on the highway and trying to get— and the levels of mass cooperation that ensued in that moment, and I'm wondering if you could share from the book a few stories that you heard just from everyday people attempting to get out in that.
John Vaillant 5:16
Yeah, that was a really striking feature of the whole episode. And, you know, Fire Weather focuses more on fire and fire dynamics and trying to fight the fire and the bizarre and over the top things the fire did. The evacuation and the way the citizens banded together and got themselves all out safely is honestly nothing short of miraculous. And, you know, I believe in miracles up to a point and then I believe in people the rest of the way and people... the people of Fort McMurray really saved themselves and the evacuation alert came late. It came late. And people were playing catch up and people's neighborhoods were on fire. A lot of people found out that their community was burning, it's because they looked out the window, or because a neighbor called them or because a friend called them and said, well, you know, there's been an alert, not sure if it applies to us or not. And so there was a lot of uncertainty. So people had to take matters into their own hands. And in these new developments, Abasand, Beacon Hill, I mean, they're not that new. But they, a common feature of these new suburban developments is there's only one road in. And likewise with Fort McMurray, there's only one road in. If there's fire across that road, you're trapped. And so people had to negotiate that. And they had to do it in this very disciplined and orderly way. When everything around you was telling you to panic, really, you know, all the trees are on fire.
I talked to one guy, he was stuck in traffic trying to get out of Beacon Hill. And all the trees are on fire. His wife and daughter are in front of him. Fireballs of combusting black spruce gas are just rolling over the roadway. He showed me a photograph and you can't believe anybody in that photo lived. A deer on fire crashed into his truck and bounced off and went running away. And I asked this fellow, Paul Ayearst. I said, did you happen to notice the dashboard thermometer in your truck? And he said, I did. And I said, well, what was the temperature? And he said 66 celsius. You can't live in that temperature. That's a killing temperature for a human being. And yet he couldn't get out of his car because it was even hotter out there, out of his truck. And everything was on fire. And yet he had to keep it together. He couldn't communicate with his wife and daughter in front of them. Because everyone in the whole city was on the cell phone was— you know, just overloaded the towers, one of the towers burnt down. So there he is just managing his feelings. And his daughter had to do the same thing in her car. His wife had to do the same thing in her car. There are a lot of vehicles in Fort McMurray. So that really amazed me. And it would have been so— I got to wonder, what would have happened in California, what would have happened in Portugal, what would have happened in Greece, or another part of Canada? You know, would people have, you know, jumped the line, tried to cut around each other, you know, gone freelancing across the median, that could have caused another accident or caused them to become stuck and become a fatality. That— it never happened.
And the other thing that's really important to note that we don't think about often, especially from down south is in the 2016 census, Canadian census, the number of first languages being spoken in Fort McMurray was 80. 80 first languages in this really remote community, five hours drive from Edmonton, the nearest city. Really out there in the middle of the Northern boreal. And there, it's like Toronto up there. And so you have all these different religions, not obviously different languages, but also different worldviews and concepts of what risk is and how to respond. So you could imagine that being a recipe for disaster, of just innocent misunderstanding, turning into a tragedy, and yet somehow, the social communal net of that place closed so tightly, it caught everybody and got them out. And I'm not kidding. I really sort of have to— when I really think about it I just have to choke back tears. It moves me so much that people of such differences. But they're all in Canada doing this thing. And so, on the one hand, it's, you know, a disaster, most expensive, natural, quote unquote natural disaster in Canadian history. On the other hand, it really shows what Canadians can do, what Canada is. You know, it's a polyglot multinational nation, that when things get really dangerous and really difficult, people gather and look out for each other. People knock on the door next door to make sure that person got out. The police also did, the RCMP also did, the firefighters also did heroic, very dangerous duty, making sure that every house was empty. And you know, we can't overemphasize just the sacrifice that people made to make sure everybody made it out.
Am Johal 10:37
Yeah, before I bring up fire, and the beautiful passages in the book that talk about it as a chemistry, as a thing, as a phenomenon, as all of the kind of natural aspects that go into it, you brought up Fort Mac, which is so interesting, because it generally gets written about in particular ways in the paper. There's the oil industry kind of version of the narrative, there's the activist version of the neighborhood, and of the city. And then when you go there, as you said, like, it's an incredibly multicultural place, it's a place of working class people. It's got all of those narratives of any other, you know, small medium sized place in Canada, except the amounts of wealth running through the town are very different. And, but the petro culture that kind of drives it, if you go to the oil sands discovery center, it's that film that comes up and, you know, then there was oil, like, it's almost like a faith based projection. So this relationship between Alberta and Texas gets really underlined. But— and you speak sort of beautifully about the historical aspects of how long it takes to put this infrastructure into place, all of the stops and starts, the boom and bust, all the kind of larger than life Maverick characters involved. But wondering if you could speak just a little bit to how you found it when you went and this kind of, the various things that go into a complex place like Fort Mac.
John Vaillant 12:02
Yeah it's, it's hard to grasp from ground level, and I didn't have connections when I went up there. I went up there, you know, basically, with a notebook and a tape recorder. And I had one or two names, but I remember standing on Franklin Street, which is the main street that runs through downtown, and kind of looking around, and it was this really, you know, kind of innocuous place, it's not very distinctive, you know, just looks like a small Canadian city. And, you know, you don't see giant refineries, or it doesn't, you know, that day, the wind wasn't blowing southwards, so you couldn't smell the bitumen or the cokers going. So you could have been sort of anywhere in northern Canada. And I thought, you know, wow, how am I going to find my way into this place, and I went into the local MPs office and started talking to the lady at the desk, and turned out, you know, she'd been... had a place in Abasand, had to evacuate, her place burned to the ground. She had also worked for Fort McMurray Matters, the local paper, so she was a journalist, and really wanted to talk about it. And, and slowly, slowly, you know, I found people very, very receptive to meeting with me and talking with me, and I said, you know, I'm, I'm from Vancouver, I'm a journalist, and, you know, Vancouver journalists, you know, there are a lot of environmentalists out here and, and Fort Mac has, you know, taken a beating, you know, and some of it is justifiable, but there, people responded to me as an individual. And were very, very generous. And so I was kind of continually surprised and moved by how open people were with me. And again, there's really, you know, when you say, when you say, well, I'm a journalist from Vancouver, and I'm here to basically hear about the worst day in your life, you know, there's a two word answer to that, that is not— maybe not appropriate, but totally understandable. Nobody said that to me, nobody blew me off or was short with me. So I just started kind of constructing this understanding of the city through these different people I met.
You know, that woman, Carol, introduced me to some other people, and they introduced me to some other people, and people are sort of sizing you up. And then slowly, slowly, you start to kind of build this sort of pixelated picture through the interviews. And different people live in different neighborhoods, different people obviously do different things. And so you get to learn about these different pieces of the community. And slowly an image starts to form and it was really quite different from the images that I had, the more simplistic images that I had discovered, through the journalism that you, you know, talked about. You know, there's the energy angle, there's the activist angle, there's the political angle, and there are elements of all those things that are absolutely true, but it's more, it's not black and white. It's sort of smearing watercolors and. So I thought, you know, just out of respect for these folks and what they've been through, I really need to try to capture that nuance. And the bottom line is, you know, a lot of people have built quite beautiful lives for themselves up there. And in 2016, the median household income was $200,000 a year, you know, just nothing else like it in Canada, probably, even in North America, like maybe in Marin County, you know, in Silicon Valley, or in Westchester, you know, outside of New York City, you might find some municipalities comparable, but you really have to work at it. It's an extraordinary place, just in terms of, as you noted, in terms of the wealth moving through there, but still, everyone has made a sacrifice to be there. You know, you're really far from your home, whether you're from Somalia, or whether you're from Corner Brook, Newfoundland, you know, you're really a long way. People are probably not going to come and visit you there. And it is hard work that you're doing. And so everyone in that sense, has really made a choice. And a lot of it is financial. And you know, what you see when you start scratching away at it, and you know, these are folks who had really limited opportunities where they came from, moving into this place where there are these incredible opportunities. But it also really comes at a cost of isolation, and, you know, some pretty ferocious work hours, and just the conditions you're working under. And then, you know, there's more asthma there, there's more cancer there, there's no getting around the fact you're working in a very polluted and polluting environment. It's just the nature of it, you know, of fossil fuel extraction.
You know, so that gave me more compassion for them. And, you know, there's just nothing like sitting down, like, as we are doing right now, and talking to humanize a person. And, that's something else I really wanted to mention, we all bring baggage to the table when we go somewhere, and you know, you could, on the surface, you know, I sort of look like a kind of lefty liberal Vancouver guy. And I know that I'm that, you know, I recognize that in myself. And I recognize those biases and prejudices in myself. And I think part of doing good journalism. And frankly, part of being a human— good human being, is recognizing where you tend to weigh certain opinions and, and the ways that the opinions that jump to mind when you see or think about certain kinds of people. And I realized that I do that, and it's not helpful, it's not helpful to actually getting to know people. And so I really had to consciously say, okay, yeah, you do this. So we're going to leave that at the door. And you're going to go in here with an open mind and see what happens. And I was really, you know, surprised and gratified by what happened and richly rewarded. You know, I'm really reaping the fruits of that now. Because I think part of why Fire Weather is connecting with so many people who have nothing to do with Alberta, and nothing to do with Western Canada. Because they can, on some level, identify or are moved by the people I interviewed, you know, I gave them a lot of room to speak. I mean, some of them have almost whole chapters to themselves, where they're just, it's just a transcript of what they said, because it was so compelling what they were saying. And that's powerful, you know, people, people, really, the readers really get to meet people from Fort McMurray. And it's kind of a, you know, that's a kind of an amazing experience that they otherwise wouldn't have had. And those folks have really been through something and they have real wisdom to share about different forms the future can take, especially in terms of flammability.
Am Johal 18:37
So I wanted to talk to you about fire because you know, this sort of primal element, this thing that has combustion, this thing that's being accelerated and amplified by climate change, but this also, oftentimes we just hear it in the news; there's wildfires, this happened in BC, Lytton gets burned down. But the— how that actually happens, that's not fully, I think, understood, and you describe it so beautifully. I've got friends who are firefighters, one of them's a fire chief in Kelowna, another one works in wildfires. So when I heard them talk about the changing nature of fire, it used to be that you know, in the summers, they would hire university students from May to August and that would be the fire season. And now things just start earlier and they go later. And so what it might look like to get into year round types of planning and pre burning and these things that California, Australia, other places have done or Indigenous communities have done for that matter, but wondering if you can speak a little bit to the chapters where you write specifically about fire and how it happens.
John Vaillant 19:46
Yeah, I mean, just speaking to the round— the year round nature of fire, my understanding is right now in Alberta, there's a out of control grass fire that has resulted in some evacuation orders or evacuation alerts anyway and so this is, you know, December 6 that we're speaking. And that's pretty unusual, not unheard of but unusual. So the way the fire behaved in Fort McMurray was so extreme and so intense, that I realized I had to understand it better than the way that most writing about it describes it. And I really wanted to get at, what is— what is the deal with this energy? And why is it able to amplify in this way? And why is, what I'm calling in the book 21st century fire, different? Why does it burn differently now? And so in order to do that, I had to get to understand fire better. And as I started looking at, you know, fires wherever we are, there's— we're always surrounded by fire. And, you know, at the wildfire level, something like two thirds of wildfires within 50 miles of human settlements are generally started by people, you know, not by arsonists, but by people running ATVs, you know, with a hot muffler or being careless with a campfire, or a slash pile or burning trash or, you know, throwing a cigarette pot. And there's all kinds of ways, so we— we sort of trail fire behind us. And I started thinking about that, you know, when you go back far enough, there's evidence of hearths and cook fires going back a million years in South Africa. And so then I started thinking, well, so fire has been around, you know, been with us, you know, as long as dogs have, and dogs have actually only been domesticated, I think, for about 40,000 years. But we evolved together with dogs, and we evolved with fire. And so fire is, isn't just this energy, it's a, it's a companion of ours, it's an enable of ours.
In that sense, it's really kind of a superpower that we use. And I started looking at all the ways that we burn, whether it's, you know, the combustions in our engines, or the pilot lights in our stoves, or, you know, the rocket boosters, you know, in our rockets. It's, it's just everywhere, and almost every object, you know, I'm looking at this table here, everything. None of it could have been made without passing through fire hot temperature at some point in its manufacture. And so it's really, it's our superpower. And how I described it in the book is as a prosthetic energy. You know, it's not an artificial limb, but it's an artificial energy that we have almost mastered. And we've mastered it so well, we've made so many fires, especially through liquefied petroleum, you know, moving from solid coal into liquefied energy, fossil fuels, quantum leapt our whole civilization, but also our energy use. And so we're living right now in this period of extreme rapid expansion that's never happened before in history. And most of the co2 emitted, you know, that's in the atmosphere now, was emitted after 1980, you know, so really, in most of our lifetimes, we've seen this literal explosion. Like if you took all the energy that we've burned, we're basically a supervolcano in terms of— when you look at how we've harnessed fossil fuels, and burnt them, if you gathered all that energy together, it's an inconceivable amount of energy. And it's world changing energy in the sense that we've been able to move across the globe in ways we've never could, build in ways we've never could, expand and multiply our energy in ways you've never could. But we've also put more co2 into the atmosphere than has been there in millions of years. And we've done it not in hundreds of millennia, which is how normal co2 cycles fluctuate through the history of the Earth. We've done it in decades. We've done it in real time. And so we have superheated our upper atmosphere to the point that we are actually changing the world in this other way that we really didn't intend to do. And as we've done that, we've enabled fire.
So it's almost this quid pro quo. Fire has enabled us, amplified us, it's enriched us, it's empowered us. But in return, we've created conditions through extreme co2 and methane emissions that allow fire to burn where it's literally never burned before. There was a wildfire on Greenland in 2017. That's a polar ice cap. And there's a little fringe of greenery that sprouts, you know, probably in July and August. And that burned and that's never happened before and there are wildfires moving further and further into the high Arctic. Historically, fire is generally lightning caused, occasionally caused by volcanoes, by lava and maybe a rock, the spark from a rock fall would be very unusual. But now lightning, because it's warmer, that increases the incidence of lightning. And so when you look at lightning strikes now during the summer in Alaska and northern BC, there are more than there have ever been, and so more opportunities for fire. And then on top of that, there are 8 billion human beings. And there are literally billions of large livestock in the form of pigs and cattle that are emitting methane in colossal quantities. And methane is an extraordinarily potent greenhouse gas. And so we've created these explosive conditions that actually change the way fire behaves, we're changing its nature. And we really got to see that in really painful ways in Fort McMurray in 2016. In West Kelowna, just this summer, Enterprise, Northwest Territories burned to the ground in about 45 minutes. Lytton, BC, a couple of years ago burnt to the ground in about 45 minutes. You know, when it gets really hot, you obviously have more evaporation, so the fuels are all drier, and that means the fire has less work to do. It can just go right in there and combust, it doesn't need to evaporate damp wood, it doesn't need to get up to temperature, it's already extremely hot, it's already extremely dry. And that just creates this larger space for fire to manifest in. And that is having some disastrous consequences.
Am Johal 26:41
In the book, you give a very kind of long view of how long humans have known about climate change from the early scientists in the 19th century, even identified people like Charles David Keeling measuring at Mauna Loa, the record, but the scientific— the broader scientific consensus has existed since the 70s. And so when we look 50, 60 years out of just nothing but rapid expansion of co2 emissions, you give a very long historical take around, you know, how oil infrastructure developed alongside the co2 expansion, and you've been going to senate hearings and things talking about it since the book has come out. I'm wondering if you can just speak to, you know, your own connection to environmental movements and your most recent sort of submissions, and speaking to government agencies related to your work in the book.
John Vaillant 27:35
I think for a lot of us, climate change as such, kind of came on our collective radar, if we were alive then, you know, in the 90s. And, and then pretty much it's been a constant, you know, somewhere in the media through the 2000s. You know, that's us, the general public. And if you're a climate scientist, if you're an atmospheric scientist, if you're a fire scientist, it's been on your radar for quite a bit longer. And what, you know, one of the things, you know, one of the joys of doing the work that I do is you get to read history and learn about the origins of things. And what I didn't know was people understood the greenhouse effect in principle, by the 1770s. They didn't call it that, but they understood there was something about the vapor in the atmosphere that held heat at ground level in ways that didn't hold heat on the top of a mountain. And that's how these guys did their climate science. They climbed to the top of one of the Alps, took their temperature reading, went down into the valley, took another temperature reading, and, you know, it was quite primitive and basic, but these were very smart people trying to kind of solve a mystery. And then, by the 1850s, it was understood that carbon dioxide, first of all, they isolated. It was called carbonic acid gas then but carbon dioxide. They understood this woman named Eunice Foote, a citizen scientist from upstate New York figured out that co2— she did an experiment in which... proving that co2 holds heat more durably and hotter than regular air does. And she presented her findings at a big science conference. I mean, she couldn't do it because she was a woman. A man read her paper for her in 1856. And but— it was really the first modern climate science experiment.
And basically, ever since then, you know, our instruments have gotten better. You've talked about Charles Keeling, we can now measure co2 and parts per million. We've been able to do that since the 1950s, 100 years after Eunice Foote's experiment, but basically, all we're doing is confirming what she discovered back in 1856. Is that co2 is a really good heat retainer. And, you know, so is water vapor, to be fair, but these are naturally occurring things that when you put more of them into the air and higher concentration, you're going to change the climate. And so that was known. And then as another climate scientist in Sweden was speculating, that if we continue to burn coal at the rate that we were burning it in the 1890s, we could change the climate. And, you know, that was incredibly forward thinking, there was no data to support that yet, because we hadn't seen the changes yet. But by the 1970s, and 80s, even petroleum companies. Exxon and Mobil and GM, and Ford, also because they burnt so much fuel, grew interested in their environmental impacts of co2. And they hired their own scientists, and these are the biggest, wealthiest companies in the world. And so they can hire really good people. Well, they hired really good people who did a really good job. And so by the early 1980s, in house memos in Exxon, were showing their scientist's predictions, which is the world we have today, they literally saw this coming. Almost to the year. And they were just extrapolating out, if the economy keeps growing at this level, if the population grows at this rate, if the number of cars purchased grows at this rate, these are the changes we can expect to see. And it's chilling to look at their graphs. These are— this is 1970s science, that is literally coming true 50 years later in 2023.
Am Johal 31:29
Now John, this book took you seven years to write. There's an immense amount of material to sift through both in terms of the fire itself that happened, the interviews that you did, the historical materials you went through. And since we work out of an art school, one of the things of course, I wanted to ask you is about like your own creative process of how you approach these books that, you know, the kind of nonfiction book that requires a really big picture view, but also getting into the personal stories that sometimes it can be really paralyzing about knowing where to start. Or what you had in mind, when you started the project to where you ended up, ends up being a very different place. But wondering how you approached it with this book?
John Vaillant 32:15
Well, my greatest fear is not knowing enough to ask the right question. And, you know, if you look at my past work, every subject is totally different from the preceding one. You know, I basically have no expertise, you know, and so what I do is I go in and find the experts. I talk to the firefighters, talk to the climate scientists, talk to the people who got stuck in traffic trying to get out of their burning neighborhood. They're the experts on that part of the story. They're the ones who were there. And so I try to create a platform for them to share with the rest of us, you know, what they know, what they learned the hard way. And so that anxiety about not asking the right question is, you know, one way to overcome that is just by really spending time with people, and finding out what's interesting to them, because often their own enthusiasm or concerns will bring out the answers to that question. And even if you don't know what it is, you just sort of follow their lead and go where their energy is. And then, you know, eventually you'll be able to extrapolate out, because you'll talk to a firefighter here and a scientist there and an ambulance driver over here, and you'll start— then you'll start to be able to develop better questions. But as far as, you know, being in art school, there's a visionary quality to this. And so I conceived this book in a dream. And so what— I say that mostly to, don't discount any source of information. And you know, it might be a random word on a candy bar wrapper in the street at your feet, you know, at a crosswalk, and you just might see a certain word that will, you know, inspire you in some way.
And you know, but this, you know, I was seeing the news about this fire, you know, and it was so terrible and I thought, wow, you know, someone's gonna write a book about this, for sure. You know, this is one of the biggest stories to come out of Western Canada in a generation. This is a major national event with international implications. I could see that. But I didn't quite see a way in because I honestly, I just didn't want to write another disaster book. You know, I feel like really, honestly, the stakes are too high for planet Earth right now to just write another disaster book, you know, we need to go further somehow. And so I took a nap while I was grappling with this and it was a nap in the daytime and I sat up out of the nap. And I'd had this dream about these four mountain climbers climbing a mountain like the Matterhorn, you know, with flat faces, almost like a pyramid. And it was a tall mountain and each climber was climbing his own face, you know, mountain face solo, unaware of the other climbers, but they were all moving together. And they all summited at the same moment. And that's when they discovered that they weren't alone on the mountain. And I sat up out of that nap, and I was thinking about the mountain climbers. And I thought, oh, that's the petroleum industry, the automobile, climate science, and fire behavior. And so that gave me this, these themes, these strands that I needed to braid together, and no one's really written about those all together like that. And there's a good reason for that, it's really hard to do, they're so different, figuring out how they braid together is difficult.
And so, you know, you can sort of, I think, of Fire Weather as a little bit of a Frankenstein, where you can sort of still see the sutures and the bolts, you know, holding it together, but it walks, you know, it works. But it's, you know, it really took some brute force to get those pieces together. But it isn't just pure journalism, there's this, there's this artistic, aesthetic openness that you need to have. And that's part of too, to hear the poetry in what people say. And to see, to find the beauty in the science, and try to convey that, the elegance of it, the symmetry of it, the extremes of it to the reader. And, you know, in that sense, you know, I could just as easily be writing music or painting, you know, I'm really thinking in images, I'm hearing sounds and music and rhythms. And, and so, I just happen to be better at writing than these other two media that I just named, which I love so much, but I'm just not that good at it. So I'm just trying to do that with words. But it is an art. Absolutely. And I think that's another thing people are responding to, you know, is, you want it to be beautiful. And, but you also want it to be informative, and powerful and true. You know, so there's probably close to 1000 citations in there. That took a lot of time. But, you know, I'm feeling like it was worth it now.
Am Johal 37:20
When the book launched, of course, this was a year where there were fires in Hawaii, Northwest Territories, a lot of North America, almost the— parts of the entire continent of Europe, in some sense, just the sheer scale and size of the fires and how people were being impacted by smoke. But I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit to the reception of the book. Just in the past few weeks, it's already won a couple of awards and been mentioned in places, but as a writer, you know, you write it in a particular moment in time, the publisher takes a while getting it out, it gets out there, and you have no idea because you're kind of in the middle of it. And then you're hearing back from people after this temporal distance from it, but kind of how have you felt the reception to the book?
John Vaillant 38:03
Well, you know, for something that took seven years and that I, you know, I was kind of worried, you know, is it gonna go stale? You know, is everyone going to forget about the Fort McMurray fire? Are there going to be many worse fires so that Fort McMurray doesn't even rank anymore? It's still the biggest, most rapid evacuation due to fire in modern times, despite all the incredibly horrible fires that have happened since then in Australia and the Pacific Northwest and Hawaii and elsewhere. And the reception— I think at first, I mean it landed right as the Northeast was shrouded in Quebec and Ontario's fire smoke. So the skies turned orange in New York City for the first time in anybody's memory really. And Fire Weather showed up, but Canada really isn't on American reader's radar or British. And so it took a while for it to kind of filter through, you know, it got reviewed, because, you know, I'm a known quantity and I have good publicists, but, you know, some of those reviews were sort of qualified at first. And then what's happened more recently is that, you know, it got on some really big prize lists. So as a finalist for the National Book Award in the United States, which is a huge deal. Finalist for the Writers Trust and here in Canada, and it was also it won the Bailey Gifford prize in the UK and the Baillie Gifford prize isn't really known to people necessarily outside the writing world but it's kind of the Booker Prize for nonfiction. It's the biggest kind of weightiest non— dedicated nonfiction prize in the English speaking world. Five very erudite judges are on the panel and the other books that Fire Weather was with were, you know, are terrific works. So the fact that Fire Weather won, that gave it a huge boost in the British press, and a lot of that filters back to the states and then it started showing up on all these 'best of' lists in the States. And so then it was chosen by the New York Times to be one of its top 10 books of the year, and they only picked five nonfiction books. So that is, you know, that's really like winning another prize. And that carries enormous weight really around the English speaking world, you know, that like, I sold the Turkish rights off of that, you know, and, and many other international rights are going.
So this kind of an extraordinary, almost delayed reception. But as people find their way to it, and then read it, and I think people really have to get past 'why do I want to read a book about Alberta, I don't even know where Alberta is. And wait, this fire was in 2016. Wasn't that kind of a while ago?' And so there's natural resistance to the idea. But it's really the way the idea is handled, and then you realize, my goodness, 2023. Basically, the whole country got to experience what Fort McMurray experienced in 2016. What Slave Lake experienced in 2011, what Paradise, California experienced in 2018, all of a sudden, many communities were experiencing that. And I think, and the fact that the smoke went all the way down the eastern seaboard. This is not an abstraction anymore. This, I think something that's really key about human nature is we have a very strong temptation to separate ourselves from disasters happening to other people, you know, Bangladesh floods, well, that's Bangladesh, and, you know, bad things happen there all the time, you know, and California is on fire again. Well, you know, that's California, and well, they chose to live there. So I guess that's how it is, or, you know, Australia is on fire again. And so there's this tendency to sort of other these places, and well, that's their problem.
Am Johal 41:50
Even with the smoke, it was kind of like in the States, it would say 'the smoke is coming from Canada.' And when you'd put on the Canadian news, it'd be ‘the smoke is coming from Quebec,’ you know, it's this place.
John Vaillant 42:01
That's a really good observation. And I guess it's just natural that we don't want to own it. But I think after this summer, we kind of have to collectively own it, you know, and one way to think about it is, you know, we are all downwind. And flood wise, we are all downstream, you know, we're in this together. And there's something powerful in that, that you know, and again, you look at Fort McMurray, you look at the way they rallied, you know, everybody made it out. And sad things happened after but nobody was burnt in the flames the way people were in Lahaina, and Paradise, California, and Greece and Portugal and Spain, all kinds of places, really horrific things have happened. And Canada has been lucky. And luck has absolutely played a role. But also, there has been this kind of social cohesion, you know, when the chips were down, that has really saved lives. And that's, you know, the most important thing.
Am Johal 42:59
John, I'm wondering if you'd be willing to read a little bit from the book.
John Vaillant 43:02
Yeah, for sure. So this— so the fire... What a lot of people don't know is the fire burnt inside Fort McMurray day and night for many days, not just for a terrible 24 hours, it burnt for almost a week inside the city. And so firefighters sort of settled into dealing with it. And the other thing, you know, another sign of 21st century fire is it doesn't cool down at night as much as it used to. So the fire was able to expand and burn aggressively during the night. And it was doing this night after night so the firefighters never got to rest. You know, some of these guys have been up 48, 72 hours and so they're just staggering around but they're, you know, they have a job they have to do they're the only ones there, you know, the city will burn if they don't keep fighting it. So they did it. You know, it was heroic what they did. This is early in the— the fire entered the city on May 3rd. This is early in the morning in May, you know, while it's still dark on on May 4th, so it's probably three or four in the morning.
“Although it had been dark since the early afternoon, night had truly fallen now. From the air, the city was shrouded in smoke mottled with orange. A blemish on the atmosphere as lurid as a bruise. It was impossible to know what was going on down below. How much of the city was gone. How much was still at risk. What would be left in the morning. The city was effectively empty. A first in its 150 year history. And civilian life had ceased. Homes, shops, offices and schools, churches and restaurants, the Showgirls Nightclub, the Heritage Museum and the Boomtown Casino. In one single frantic afternoon, everyone had dropped what they were doing and made for the door. Left behind, were still live tableaus of lives interrupted, much like those discovered in the abandoned city of Pripyat, following the meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. In both cities, there were those who understood how truly grave things were. But many others had left under the wishful impression that they would be gone for only a day or two. Surely, firefighters would get the situation in hand by then. All night, trucks and crews roam the ghostly smoke bound city. Lights flashing, but otherwise unannounced, say for the growl and wind of their engines and heavy tires. With no traffic, and no one left to warn, there was no need for sirens anymore. Besides, what was the hurry? Visibility was at best a block. Often far less, and speeding under those conditions is dangerous. Night was hard to distinguish from day and as exhaustion and sleep deprivation took their toll, time and events began to blur inside the disorienting miasma. Meanwhile, the fire, this invading energy, had commandeered not just the physical laws of the land, but the bylaws of the city. Traffic signals with their bright colors and civic rhythms, stop, go, walk, don't walk, seemed in the stultifying gloom to be relics of another civilization. Nothing moved on the streets now. Even the ravens had fled. The firefighters, police officers, heavy equipment operators and water truck drivers who remain behind in this murky post-human limbo, had seen the movies and they recognize this place. They called it zombie land.”
Am Johal 46:59
Thank you so much, John.
John Vaillant 47:01
Thanks so much for having me on the show. Yeah.
Am Johal 47:04
Thank you so much. Wonderful to speak with you again and look forward to your public talk at SFU where we'll be in conversation again, but with an audience in front of us. Fantastic.
John Vaillant 47:15
Fantastic. I'm really looking forward to it.
Samantha Walters 47:21
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our episode with John Vaillant. Head to the show notes to read up on some of the resources mentioned in this episode and join us on January 31st, 2024 for our event with John Vaillant. Don't forget to subscribe to Below the Radar on your podcast listening app of choice. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll catch you next time on Below the Radar.