Never mind what happened at Fort McMurray. The world is on fire and John Vaillant is ringing all the alarms. You might say he’s on fire, too.
He came to Park City for the first time in his life last week to do his duty as keynote of the community read, the author of “Fire Weather.” The story is about Fort McMurray, the city of 88,000 in northern boreal Canada overrun by a giant wildfire in 2016. And so much more.
There’s the wildfire, which Park City residents worry about happening here in dry, windy, wild northern Utah. And there’s the world ablaze, which seems too big to think about, leaving mostly a burned-out melancholia if the subject comes up at all.
Global warming didn’t factor in any of the questions and answers during the Park City Council candidate forum the week before at the same venue, the Santy. Other than maybe a stray reference to fire safety. Voters and candidates were consumed with more surface matters: growth, traffic, the role of resorts, whether councilors should be friends or not.
Vaillant, though, he went right there, a biblical prophet. Well, as biblical as a succession of charts pointing toward end times on a big screen can be. I heard gasps several times as the spikes in the past decade flashed by: emissions, global temperature, number of acres burned, size of individual fires.
Maybe the most interesting chart to me was the 40-degree angle upward of Mauna Loa Observatory’s measurements of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere from 1960 to 2020. It only steepened after the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the Copenhagen Protocol in 2009, the Paris Agreement in 2015. You know, those wonderful heartwarming moments when the world’s nations came to together to sign their pledges to shut off these emissions for the good of humankind.
No wonder the prevailing feeling these days is of a burnt stick in a wasteland of burnt sticks.
Hope? Hope in that moment was like that photo Vaillant showed of the hose stream in McMurray vaporizing before it could reach the house it was supposed to cool.
OK, an inspirational quote or snappy slogan then? Vaillant put this one up on the big screen. It’s from an Ernest Hemingway novel. “How did you go bankrupt?” one character asks. “Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly,” the other answers. That last showed on the screen in the end. Gradually and then suddenly. Tick. Tock.
The book makes the point of something so big, so beyond what we can imagine paralyzing us. The boreal fire drawing a direct bead on Fort McMurray was so inconceivable even as it loomed that the residents went on with their routines, going to work, sending the kids to school, the fire chief downplaying the fire in resonant calm notes with a radio reporter even as they could watch the beast out the window from the downtown station.
Then it hit, taking homes to the studs and melting those every few minutes as it marched and the roadways clogged with people trying to flee. All this energy, all these atomic bombs going off by the minute in terms of energy release, the cumulus poking into the stratosphere.
The narrative is apocalyptic, but somehow helicopters are able to make water drops and air tankers do their work, as well, and planes are helping the evacuation. All 88,000 residents survive even though the fire reaches the traffic jam out. That was a true miracle. In the end, between 10% and 15% of the homes in the city burned.
OK. I’m almost a believer. It just doesn’t entirely line up with my own experience, other than every fire in my time fighting them was “raging” in the press accounts. The firenadoes, the pyrocumulus piling up into the stratosphere, the atomic bombs going off when a big fire made a run. All that had never happened before then, too.
The Santa Ana winds shoving wildfires toward the ocean in southern California sometimes were too rough for air tankers or helicopters. I remember the line of biblically awesome columns of smoke from other fires we saw from Mount Baldy while pecking away at line behind our own blaze one rainless fall and winter. Years later, the people caught in traffic in a northern Sierra foothills town like mine an hour north died by the dozens in the intensity of the flames that hit them.
No one stops or gets in the way of the head of these fires. You can only work the flanks, maybe, and make progress as long as the wind doesn’t shift too much. There’s nothing new about that.
The statistics do show fire seasons tend to run longer now. The weather is warmer, more blazes are bigger and more acres burn.
Global warming is significant, the most significant factor, but it’s not the only thing going on here. Our firefighting practices for more than a century have caused the wildlands to overgrow so that the fires more easily become conflagrations we can’t catch at just the wrong times. We’ve built kiln-dry homes full of eaves and attic vents in fire’s territory, including into Alberta’s boreal forest and California’s brushlands made to burn over many millennia. California’s population went from 20 million in 1972 to 40 million by the turn of the millennia. Where do you think their homes were built?
We’re a species out of control, and then we blame the fires. But we can’t abide smoke, either, so good luck with burning down the fuel load on our terms in any meaningful way.
We wring our hands, we get depressed, but then we go on building into the wildland-urban interfaces, and as Vaillant’s book makes abundantly clear, we continue our reliance on fossil fuels, even the problematic ones like the tar sands McMurray was built into the middle of millions and millions of acres of that flammable boreal forest to tap.
Sure, we worry about all this in Park City more than many other places, but we’re way more passionate about going skiing. The world simmers, and Deer Valley Resort doubles its ski terrain while we count on Utah winning more Winter Olympics as the other locations get too warm.
In short, we’re not listening. What Vaillant is pointing out, well, it’s too much for us to take in. We go to work or play, send the kids to school. Do what we do. “Suddenly” hasn’t come yet.
Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.