In this episode, we had a chance to sit down with author John Vaillant, who recently published a new book about the 2016 Fort McMurray fires in Northern Alberta. The book, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, is an in-depth exploration of the fires, which released in June 2023. We not only spoke about his reporting process in the aftermath of a catastrophic wildfire, but we also touched on some of the book's major themes and how these were, in many cases, paralleled by the 2023 fire season in Canada.
We even did some deep diving into the oil and gas industry's role in increasingly catastrophic fire seasons, about climate change and how we keep having unprecedented fire seasons—but our processes and protocols aren't catching up with how extreme conditions and fire behavior have become in some cases.
We also highly recommend Fire Weather for those who haven't read it yet. You can pick it up from my favorite local bookstore, Village Books, here.
Timestamps:
06:00 - Introduction
08:14 - 2016's Alberta Fire Warning of the Future
09:42 - John's Thoughts on the 2023 Fire Season
12:28 - The Shifting Baseline for Fire Fighting Efforts
16:55 - Weather Conditions Affect How Fire Behaves
19:26 - People's Humanity Makes Evacuation Efforts Possible
23:40 - Humanizing the Evacuation Process
25:01 - Interviewing Evacuees
28:18 - This Evacuation Changed Everyone's Lives Forever
29:34 - The Oil and Gas Industry Connection to Wildfire
31:56 - Humans are a Fire Species
35:32 - Society's Wealth Comes From Fire
37:38 - Gaps in Conversation Surrounding Wildfires
40:11 - We Have to Rethink Our Relationship With Fire
42:39 - John's Lessons Learned
44:12 - Houses Are Made From Petroleum Products
46:49 - Firefighting 90s Style Will Not Help Us
48:40 - No Precedent for Recent Fire Events
51:40 - This Requires a Nuanced Conversation
53:45 - Outro
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