Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World - Softcover

Vaillant, John

 
9780525434245: Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0525434240 ISBN 13: 9780525434245
Verlag: Vintage, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION • FINALIST FOR THE PEN/GALBRAITH AWARD FOR NONFICTION • A stunning account of a colossal wildfire and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind from the award-winning, best-selling author of The Tiger and The Golden Spruce • Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, TIME, NPR, Slate, and Smithsonian

“Grips like a philosophical thriller, warns like a beacon, and shocks to the core." —Robert Macfarlane, bestselling author of Underland

“Riveting, spellbinding, astounding on every page.” —David Wallace-Wells, #1 bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.

Fire has been a partner in our evolution for hundreds of millennia, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways.

With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. John Vaillant’s urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JOHN VAILLANT’s acclaimed, award-winning nonfiction books, The Golden Spruce and The Tiger, were national best sellers. His debut novel, The Jaguar’s Children, was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. Vaillant has received the Governor General’s Literary Award, British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, and the Pearson Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. He has written for, among others, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and The Walrus. He lives in Vancouver.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

PART one

ORIGIN STORIES

The National Weather Service issues a “Fire Weather Watch” when weather and fuel conditions may lead to rapid or dramatic increases in wildfire activity.

In this great chain of causes and effects, no single fact can be considered in isolation.

—Alexander von Humboldt

PROLOGUE

On a hot afternoon in May 2016, five miles outside the young petro-city of Fort McMurray, Alberta, a small wildfire flickered and ventilated, rapidly expanding its territory through a mixed forest that hadn’t seen fire in decades. This fire, farther off than the others, had started out doing what most human-caused wildfires do in their first hours of life: working its way tentatively from the point of ignition through grass, forest duff, and dead leaves—a fire’s equivalent to baby food. These fuels, in combination with the weather, would determine what kind of fire this one was going to be: a creeping, ground-level smolder doomed to smother in the heavy dew of a cool and windless spring night, or something bigger, more durable, and dynamic—a fire that could turn night into day and day into night, that could, unchecked and all-consuming, bend the world to its will.

It was early in the season for wildfires, but crews from the Wildfire Division of Alberta’s Ministry of Forestry and Agriculture were on alert. As soon as smoke was spotted, wildland firefighters were dispatched, supported by a helicopter and water bombers. First responders were shocked by what they saw: by the time a helicopter with a water bucket got over it, the smoke was already black and seething, a sign of unusual intensity. Despite the firefighters’ timely intervention, the fire grew from 4 acres to 150 in two hours. Wildfires usually settle down overnight, as the air cools and the dew falls, but by noon the following day this one had expanded to nearly 2,000 acres. Its rapid growth coincided with a rash of broken temperature records across the North American subarctic that peaked at 90°F on May 3 in a place where temperatures are typically in the 60s. On that day, Tuesday, a smoke- and wind-suppressing inversion lifted, winds whipped up to twenty knots, and a monster leaped across the Athabasca River.

Within hours, Fort McMurray was overtaken by a regional apocalypse that drove serial firestorms through the city from end to end—for days. Entire neighborhoods burned to their foundations beneath a towering pyrocumulus cloud typically found over erupting volcanoes. So huge and energetic was this fire-driven weather system that it generated hurricane-force winds and lightning that ignited still more fires many miles away. Nearly 100,000 people were forced to flee in what remains the largest, most rapid single-day evacuation in the history of modern fire. All afternoon, cell phones and dashcams captured citizens cursing, praying, and weeping as they tried to escape a suddenly annihilating world where fists of heat pounded on the windows, the sky rained fire, and the air came alive in roaring flame. Choices that day were stark and few: there was Now, and there was Never.

A week later, the fire’s toll conjured images of a nuclear blast: there was not just “damage,” there was total obliteration. Trying to articulate what she saw during a tour of the fire’s aftermath, one official said, “You go to a place where there was a house and what do you see on the ground? Nails. Piles and piles of nails.” More than 2,500 homes and other structures were destroyed, and thousands more were damaged; 2,300 square miles of forest were burned. By the time the first photos were released, the fire had already belched 100 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, much of it from burning cars and houses. The Fort McMurray Fire, destined to become the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history, continued to burn, not for days, but for months. It would not be declared fully extinguished until August of the following year.

Wildfires live and die by the weather, but “the weather” doesn’t mean the same thing it did in 1990, or even a decade ago, and the reason the Fort McMurray Fire trended on newsfeeds around the world in May 2016 was not only because of its terrifying size and ferocity, but also because it was a direct hit—like Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans—on the epicenter of Canada’s multibillion-dollar petroleum industry. That industry and this fire represent supercharged expressions of two trends that have been marching in lockstep for the past century and a half. Together, they embody the spiraling synergy between the headlong rush to exploit hydrocarbons at all costs and the corresponding increase in heat-trapping greenhouse gases that is altering our atmosphere in real time. In the spring of 2016, halfway through the hottest year of the hottest decade in recorded history, a new kind of fire introduced itself to the world.

“No one’s ever seen anything like this,” Fort McMurray’s exhausted and grieving fire chief said on national TV. “The way this thing happened, the way it traveled, the way it behaved—this is rewriting the book.”

1

If a tree burns in the forest and nobody sees it?.?.?.??

In Canada, this is more than a philosophical question. Canada contains 10 percent of the world’s forests, vast tracts of which are uninhabited. But “vast” is an ineffective descriptor when it comes to Canada, its forests, or its fires. One way to grasp the magnitude of this country is to get in a car in Great Falls, Montana, and head up I-15 to Sweetgrass, on the Canadian border. Once you’ve crossed into Coutts, Alberta, reset your odometer and point your car north. Then, settle into your seat for a couple of days. With the Rocky Mountains on your immediate left, this route takes you up the western edge of the Prairies, through Lethbridge, Calgary, and Red Deer—wheat and cattle country. Once past the northern metropolis of Edmonton, you will find yourself increasingly alone on the road, surrounded by broad expanses of hardscrabble subarctic prairie—fields frozen solid or half drowned and barely fit for cattle feed.

On the main road, now no wider than a residential street, hamlets with one blinking light and a gas station slide by and not another for fifty miles. To the east and west, gravel range roads run out to the vanishing point, and man-made structures appear more and more as intermittent novelties. Here, a schoolhouse-sized Ukrainian church with its tin-sheathed onion dome stands alone against a windswept loneliness so profound it suggests the Russian steppe. There, a barn collapses asymmetrically beneath the weight of a hundred heavy years, fully half of them spent clenched in the fist of winter, the people long gone. Farther on, a ten-acre lake so startlingly blue that mere reflection, even of Alberta’s sky, seems insufficient to explain it. Somewhere along the way, you will cross an unmarked divide where deer give way to moose, crows give way to ravens, and coyotes give way to wolves. By the time you get to North Star, the wide-open spaces for which Alberta is famous will be filled in by low, mixed forest and bogland that bears a strong resemblance to Siberia. By the time you stop for coffee in a lonely place called Indian Cabins, it will be tomorrow and your odometer will be approaching one thousand miles, but you will still be in Alberta.

Up here, in the landlocked subarctic, things seem to occur in outsized dimensions: lakes can be the size of inland seas and the trout inhabiting them can weigh a hundred pounds; large wild animals, including the continent’s biggest bison, outnumber people. In Wood Buffalo National Park, the second-largest national park in the...

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Verlag
Vintage
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0525434240
ISBN 13 
9780525434245
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
414
Kontakt zum Hersteller
EDITIONS GALLIMARD
ufficio.anagrafiche@meli.it

Via Verdi, 8.
Assago Milano
20090
Italien

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