How Canada’s wildfires reflect a ‘fire-dependent civilization’

Canada — and the world — are stuck in a feedback loop of fire, argues bestselling Canadian journalist John Vaillant.

The wildfires currently blazing across Eastern and Western Canada represent the mainstreaming of a level of power and destruction that was once extreme, Vaillant told The Hill last month, before the smoke drifted south and blanketed much of the eastern United States. 

“Fire now is capable of behaviors on a regular basis that would have been considered totally anomalous in the 1990s,” he said.

In his recently-published book “Fire Weather,” Vaillant — whose journalism has appeared in magazines like National Geographic, The New Yorker and The Atlantic — tells the story of fires that all but erased the oil-mining capital of Fort McMurray, Alberta in May of 2016

He describes the disaster as a fiery equivalent to Hurricane Katrina, and argues it served as an opening act to the current era of large scale destructive wildfire.

For the last two months, destructive wildfires have burned across Canada, leading to pollution and social upheaval on a staggering scale. In early May, when Vaillant spoke to The Hill, nearly 25,000 people in Alberta had been forced to evacuate in the face of 103 fires, burning across 26 square miles. 

That was roughly in line with the 10 year average — but by this Wednesday, the situation had metastasized by a factor of more than 500. With the Alberta fires spreading across the West, and new flame fronts opened in the eastern province of Quebec, more than 14,000 square miles were aflame. With Canadian firefighters bogged down fighting more than 60 fires, another 186 raged uncontrolled.

That’s a level of destruction 13 times the ten year average. And it’s something that the Canadian government, through its heavy support of one of the world’s most polluting oil sectors, has helped to subsidize, Vaillant argued.

As a Massachusetts native who emigrated to Canada as an adult, he was struck by the stark environmental politics behind the country’s placid public face. In the country’s oil and timber industries, Vaillant found “an 18th-century inefficiency” reminiscent of the era when millions of sea otters were killed for the fur trade. 

“That is the Canadian legacy,” he added. “I mean, it’s a colony. It was a fur colony, and it still thinks and acts that way.”

Vaillant’s protagonists are the latter day descendants of the fur traders: timber scouts, hunters and oil-miners who are drawn into conflict with the vast, hidden powers of the boreal forests — a force that they love, even as they make their lives eroding it. 

And, in Vaillant’s telling, the conflict ultimately consumes them.

That’s a figurative fate in “The Golden Spruce,” another Valliant non-fiction tale follows the story of a corporate timber surveyor who desecrates a sacred Haida Nation tree and disappears into the waters of the north Pacific — apparently driven crazy by his role in clear-cutting the woods he loved.

It’s more literal in the case of “The Tiger,” which tracks a loose band of Russian trappers in Siberia who accidentally offend an enormous Amur tiger — with horror-movie results.

“Fire Weather” brings these themes together in a perfect storm. As car-sized chunks of ice still floated on the local waterways in May 2016, Fort McMurray was struck by a spell of record heat that dried out woodlands into firewood.

Over three hellish days, the fires — the first major crisis of current premier Justin Trudeau’s tenure — forced 88,000 people from their homes, burned down more than 2000 buildings, and ultimately consumed an area of forest about half the size of Rhode Island. 

Putting it out cost more than $9 billion, making it Canada’s most expensive natural disaster — at least, until today.

Survivors were struck by the speed and ferocity of the flames as much as the scale of the damage. “It’s almost like people had just sprayed gasoline around, that’s how quickly the fire was moving,” Vaillant said.

The speed came with a frightening explanation. Like the later 2018 fire that wiped out Paradise, Calif., the 2016 Alberta fires had congealed a fire so large that its plume touched the border of space. 

This kind of fire is often characterized by the formation of a “pyrocumulonimbus,” or what NASA has called “the fire-breathing dragon of clouds:” a fire-fueled thunderstorm so big it can significantly alter the weather and powering storm systems that drive the fire on. 

Facing such a force, in the accounts of survivors, sounds less like fighting a conventional wildfire than going up against Godzilla. 

As disasters go, the “Fort Mac fires,” as Canadians call them, represent a painful irony. Fueled by climate change, the fires ravaged the center of Canada’s tar sands, a particularly climate-disrupting annex of the oil industry.

But a closer look at the Alberta outbreaks of seven years ago, Vaillant argued, sheds new light on the process powering the new age of destructive fire: our species’ overwhelming, long-running obsession with flame.

Midway through his research into the Fort Mac fires, Vaillant had an epiphany about the shared aspects of wildfire and the fossil fuel age. Oil, gas, coal and trees — these, he realized, were just fuels, in the same way that “emissions” or “greenhouse gasses” were outputs.

But between hydrocarbon and emissions, Vaillant realized, lay a process so well disguised by technology that it’s easy to forget: fire.

“Why have we little tiny human beings been able to actually change the chemistry of the planetary atmosphere?” he asked. “It’s because we burn trillions of fires every day.”

Those fires are largely hidden beneath gas stovetops, the steam turbines of power plants and — particularly — beneath the hoods of the vast majority of cars, which are powered by internal combustion engines.

That mastery of fire has been a gift, Vaillant emphasized. The ever-more-advanced command of fire has given ordinary people the command of a level of horsepower — literally, the amount of power generated by a draft horse — that was once available only to the very rich, he said. 

But that has come at a price. On the global scale, the thousands of fires lit each year by billions of people represent “a super volcano erupting constantly, day after day after day, year after year — and now century after century.”

In Vaillant’s terms, Fort McMurray was the economic heart of the Canadian fire industry — or as the country’s oil executives would call it, the oil sands. 

Mixed into the earth and rock beneath the forest and wetlands of Northern Alberta lie the equivalent of nearly 2 trillion barrels of bitumen.

While the Canadian oil sector describes it as “heavy crude,” bitumen is more like a chemical cousin of asphalt, and it is also a product with a staggering environmental and climate toll. As Vaillant writes, mining bitumen is akin to an attempt to squeeze oil from a highway exit ramp. 

To do so requires not only clearing the forests and pulling out the tarry sand beneath — but also burning billions of cubic feet of natural gas per day to further separate out the bitumen.

When mixed with condensed natural gas, this sludgy mixture becomes sufficiently liquid that it can move through a pipeline, although in the case of a leak these ingredients tend to separate, with catastrophic results.

Such environmental concerns gave the Alberta bitumen mines a starring role in the new era of American land conflicts around pipelines. 

But the greatest toll of the Canadian bitumen industry — and of the fossil fuel industry more generally — has been on the global climate, Vaillant argued.

Just as Canada’s forests, fisheries and fur-bearing mammals — all of which were once viewed by settlers as limitless — have largely collapsed in the face of industrial-scale exploitation, Vaillant argued that a century of burning has eroded the capacity of the global atmosphere to soak up the greenhouse gasses produced by all our fires.

“We have been supercharged by fossil fuels, you know? We can fly in jets. We can drive in cars. We’ve become enormously powerful.”

But, he said. “In doing so, we have also inadvertently empowered the atmosphere in an analogous way.” 

The result, he said, has been the current era of wildfire.

After Fort McMurray, pyrocumulonimbus firestorms reared up again and again, in a grim litany of new records. The following winter brought unprecedented fires to Chile; then in the summer of 2017, dozens were killed that summer along a highway in Portugal as they tried to flee the flames. 

Over the past five years, these fires have wrought staggering changes across the world’s forest — and in many cases they have “deleted ecosystems” entirely, one leading wildfire scientist told The Hill.

Climate change is far from the only cause behind Canada’s current fires. Trudeau has taken flak for leaning too hard on the climate angle, which critics have argued is an excuse for his government’s near-decade of neglect of conditions in the nation’s forests.

But the trillions of fires that power human civilization are the problem driving all the others, Valliant argues. 

“We have to stop burning,” he said. “We’re a fire-driven civilization and there are 8 billion of us on Earth and it’s going to take a long time to recalibrate that.”

Doing so, he added, is “a path that we can choose to take. And that I think it’s clear to most people that it is a path we have to take.”