Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

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

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and The united states’s biggest foreign supplier, was once 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 once not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we should 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 at all times threatened to elude our keep watch over, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in up to now not possible ways.

With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillanttakes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North The united states’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives endlessly 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.