Fire Weather

Did I truly want to read a 400-page book about a raging wildfire that caused $10-billion in damage and burned 2,579 homes to ash? Within a few pages, my answer was “Hell, yes!”

Centered on a record-setting disaster in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Fire Weather is as gripping as a Hollywood blockbuster and as magnetic as a Martin Luther King Jr. speech.

John Vaillant captures the shock and heartbreak of destruction—but also the cognitive dissonance that allows our species to burn enough fossil fuels to threaten our very existence. Cities like Fort McMurray wouldn’t exist without the oil industry. But nor… show more.

Living in California taught me how wildfires can cause widespread destruction. But it took Vaillant’s Fire Weather to show me how climate-worsened wildfires can unravel the world as we know it. 

The book reads like a thriller. It recounts the catastrophic wildfire that obliterated Fort McMurray in 2016 in Canada. That fire generated its own weather systems, caused billions in losses, and forced tens of thousands of people to flee.

Valiant shows how fire is the very element that makes modern society possible, but it also has the power to destroy it. The book provides a cautionary tale of what… show more.

On May 3, 2016, the entire population of Fort MacMurray, Alberta—an oil town of 90,000—was evacuated as a wildfire dubbed “the Beast” jumped the river, rolled through town, and laid waste to pretty much every stick of those people’s built lives, leaving incalculable grief and a dark cloak of portent over the 21st century.

Valliant’s read-it-through-your-fingers account of the fire itself, plus his dissection of the devil’s deals we’ve made with the petrochemical industry, make this book an instant classic. It’ll be talked about in 100 years. (If, that is, people are still around to talk about it.)

Okay, that’s… show more.