The journalist John Vaillant’s book “Fire Weather” begins in the spring of 2016 in the boreal forests surrounding the remote Canadian city of Fort McMurray, where a fire is growing. Although wildfire is a regular part of life in northern Alberta, this fire was destined to be different. “A new kind of fire introduced itself to the world,” Vaillant writes. 

Ushered in by soaring temperatures, drought and high winds, this wildfire obliterated thousands of buildings, forced 88,000 people to evacuate and turned downtown Fort McMurray into an apocalyptic hellscape. At the time, the Fort McMurray fire was unprecedented. But Vaillant saw it for what it really was: a harbinger of terrifying things to come. 

Inside Climate News spoke with Vaillant about what we can learn from the fires currently burning in Los Angeles; the parallels between this disaster and what happened in Fort McMurray in 2016; and what we should expect from what he calls our “century of fire.”

“We’re going to have to let go of a lot of the 20th century,” Vaillant said. “That’s what these events are telling us. The 20th century is over, and we really have to rethink how we do everything, from how we get our energy to how we build on a planet that we have made much more dangerous.”

KILEY BENSE: Can you talk about the connections between climate change and the fires in Los Angeles? What are the causes of these fires?

JOHN VAILLANT: We’ve seen a lot of local [blame]: It’s,“Well, the governor didn’t do this, and the mayor didn’t do that, and that reservoir wasn’t full.” None of that would have made a bit of difference. Whenever those 100-mile-an-hour winds are blowing, it just doesn’t matter who’s in charge. Who’s in charge is the wind; who’s in charge is the fire. And who made it worse is human beings by burning fossil fuels at an extraordinary rate for 200 years straight. 

My tendency is to look at things more systemically, and what climate change does is it takes naturally occurring phenomena and makes them more intense and more erratic, and also creates conditions for them to occur in places they didn’t normally occur. We all know Southern California is flammable. It’s part of the rhythm of this landscape. But they hadn’t, historically, had to deal with fires of this intensity with this frequency. And so that’s the other thing: these events are going to happen more and more often.

California really is in a position to move the needle globally on climate change, because it’s the fifth biggest economy in the world. If California took a particular stance on petroleum, took a particular stance on building codes, took a particular stance on insurance coverage in dangerous environments, it could set the tune. This is an opportunity for Los Angeles to be a leader in building for the 21st century.

BENSE: Your book focuses on the fire that happened in Fort McMurray in 2016, another disaster in a landscape where fire is a natural part of the rhythms of the ecosystem. Do you see any other parallels between that fire and what’s happening in California right now?

VAILLANT: They had two years of drought followed by record-breaking heat. And so an ordinary fire in Alberta turned into the worst fire in Canadian history. 

Here we had the hottest summer in Los Angeles history, followed by eight months of drought and, you could say, a freak wind event, but it’s historically possible. But again, the chances of such events occurring have been increased by climate change, by the heating and drying of the atmosphere. I see them as having almost identical causes: exceptional heat and drought took naturally occurring fires and made them catastrophic. 

BENSE: Has anything in Fort McMurray changed since the fire? What has been the reaction long-term? 

VAILLANT: It is really brutal. The utility of Fort McMurray as a lab for understanding a petroleum-powered civilization is that it’s a petroleum town, and the petroleum industry is at root, a fire industry. You cannot have a petroleum industry without burning stuff. And so they don’t want anything to change. They’ve actually increased production since the fire. They’ve rebuilt all those neighborhoods, and they’ve rebuilt the houses bigger, but otherwise basically the same way, so they have tar shingles and vinyl siding. 

There’s a bigger fire break around the city, but fire breaks don’t stop embers. Embers can fly hundreds and hundreds of yards, if not miles, when the conditions are right. Fort McMurray could burn again.

Alberta is kind of the Texas of Canada. It is a very right-wing conservative state run by people who are beholden to and dependent on the petroleum industry and are studious deniers of climate change. It’s becoming more hellish and less habitable by the year. They have terrible droughts up there now. There’s crop failure and all kinds of water failure and rivers going dry. But they won’t discuss that. They won’t address that. 

BENSE: Even though “Fire Weather” is about a fire that happened in 2016, you start telling the story of this fire in the 18th century. Why was it important to include that history?

VAILLANT: I think now that we are in an era of measurable, real-time climate breakdown, it’s irresponsible to write about disasters of this kind without putting them in context, without connecting the dots between wherever that incident occurred and wherever the reader might live, because we are all linked now. Our fates are tied together. 

And in the case of a book about fire, virtually any city on Earth can burn now—probably not Dubai, but just about any place that has a lot of hydrocarbons. Berlin could burn, New York could burn, Pittsburgh can burn. LA is burning. 

BENSE: Could you talk about how we have to rethink firefighting? Particularly for a fire like those in Los Angeles, what are some of the challenges that modern wildfires pose to firefighters?

VAILLANT: “Twenty-first century fire” is a term I coined in “Fire Weather” to try to encompass this new fire situation we find ourselves in, which is hotter and drier, makes fires able to ignite and move, propagate and grow, often exponentially faster. 

Exponential growth is a concept that humans have a really hard time with: the doubling, doubling, doubling, doubling, doubling, and how fast that happens. That’s what fires do. That’s how they can grow. 

We saw that to terrible effect a couple of nights ago. This blowtorch of embers descended on Pacific Palisades and Altadena, and you cannot fight a fire in those conditions. Even the planes were grounded. The winds were so strong they couldn’t even fly, and your fire hose is going to blow right back in your face when it’s blowing 70 miles an hour and the heat coming off, it’s like a blast furnace. Think of a bellows in a foundry. It’s huffing and puffing and intensifying. That’s what the winds, the Santa Anas, were doing. 

As I interviewed firefighters for “Fire Weather” in these catastrophe zones, they said the firefighting operation became a life-saving operation, and that’s really the only realistic thing you can do until the wind settles. The fire is simply unfightable.

When you have a wildfire coming into the WUI, the wildland urban interface, and entering a community across a broad front, often over a period of days, that’s called a siege event. It’s quite a militaristic term, but that’s what it feels like: You are being besieged by the fire. In those circumstances, firefighters don’t get any rest, and because it is so hot now, because nights no longer cool down the way they used to, you don’t get the dew that you used to get. It means the fire, in many of these cases, is expanding aggressively during the night. This did not used to be a common characteristic among wildfires. Now it is.

The difference between fires and firefighters: They both breathe oxygen, but one of them gets tired and one of them doesn’t. The fire doesn’t get tired, but many of these firefighters have been going for two days straight. It was the same in Fort McMurray. It was the same in Redding, California, in 2018, and in Lahaina. Our bodies aren’t made for that, and you’re doing intense physical work under the highest stress, operating heavy machinery, and you haven’t slept in two days, and you’re probably under-hydrated, you probably haven’t had time to eat, you could very well be hallucinating. 

It’s extraordinarily dangerous, and yet these men and women are duty bound, and in many cases, their own houses may be burning, and they are trying to save their community, and they won’t stop. This is an inhuman demand, an inhumane and inhuman demand to put on physical bodies.

When you have these mass conflagrations, which are much more common now, where you have hundreds, if not thousands, of houses burning, then you have in the air this kind of aerosol gas mix, not just of particulate wood smoke, but all the chemicals in the modern house. You have to go back to events like 9/11, where the first responders there have been coming down with all kinds of weird ailments, because so much was released that was inhaled by first responders. It’s one of the things that is going to be a legacy of this fire.

BENSE: In “Fire Weather,” you describe an experiment where they burned a room full of wooden furniture and then they burned a room of modern synthetic furniture, to show how much more quickly it burned. All of that plastic literally adds fuel to the fire, and it’s toxic in a way that burning wood just isn’t.

VAILLANT: That’s just such a graphic illustration of how the petroleum industry has integrated itself so thoroughly into our lives. We’re people of the hydrocarbon. I’m walking around my bedroom right now, and there’s so many plastic and laminated products just in this bedroom. It’s quite an explosively flammable place, and yet, you would never know it, because these products have been sold to us as being safe and stable. And normally, we don’t have catastrophic conflagrations whipping through our neighborhoods. But that was 10 years ago. We’re losing our innocence fast.

BENSE: We as human beings are really bad at conceiving of the unprecedented. Can you talk about that kind of failure of imagination in a crisis? What are we failing to imagine now when it comes to the wildfires of the future?

VAILLANT: That issue and tension has played out in brutal fashion in Los Angeles. You’re talking about the Lucretius problem, named for the poet-philosopher Lucretius. He recognized a glitch in human perception which kind of limits our ability to imagine things bigger or worse or more extreme than we have personally witnessed ourselves. 

I think that is a pitfall for disaster managers too. And this is where climate has an almost unassailable advantage over us, which is doing things we can’t imagine. No one imagined a fire tornado, burning and blowing and destroying neighborhoods in Redding, California, in 2018, and yet it happened.

We have the information to extrapolate and conceive of these possibilities. It’s very interesting that a whole bunch of insurers started pulling out of Pacific Palisades about a decade ago. They saw it coming, and even though a fire had not burned through there, they said, “Here are comparables, other fires that have burned similarly under similar conditions. It is only a matter of time before those conditions reproduce themselves here, and we don’t want to be there. We don’t want to be exposed with a bunch of insurance claims when that happens.” 

This is what you see all over the United States. Between 2020 and 2024, 50 insurance companies withdrew coverage from Florida and Louisiana alone because of hurricane and flood risk. Insurance is the foundation of capitalism. You don’t invest in something like a car or a house or a pipeline or a cruise ship unless it has insurance. And if the insurance company won’t cover it, are you still going to take that risk? You’re going to change your behavior, and it’s going to change our economy, which will change our civilization. 

We’re in a moment of cataclysmic cultural shift, driven in part by the politics of the moment and the enormous population we have and the appetites it has, but also by the limits to nature and the responses of nature to the pressures we’re putting on it. Nature is speaking eloquently now through higher winds and hotter summers and more destructive fires. 

BENSE: Your book ends on a note of cautious optimism, where you are talking about the Earth’s capacity for regrowth and regeneration. Do you still see reasons for hope?

VAILLANT: I think the way of life that we currently have here, in the richest 10 percent of the world, I don’t think it’s particularly sustainable. We are going to see mass migration. We are going to see mass crop failure. We’re going to see incredible destabilization. Jason Hickel, who writes about degrowth, says this is what nature is telling us: We need to lower our expectations. 

That doesn’t mean a worse life, it means a simpler life, and probably fewer shoes and fewer cars and smaller houses and maybe a different diet. But if we do that, I think we are totally capable of coming to an accommodation with nature that will support our population in a way that, for most people, will allow them to lead a productive and relatively happy and well-nourished life. 

This is where Fort McMurray is a perfect example of this refusal to acknowledge the change in nature’s behavior and the limits to the climate’s capacity to absorb CO2 and methane. The longer we stubbornly refuse to act, the worse the consequences are going to be. I suspect we’re going to have to go through some much worse consequences before our behavior changes. I’m afraid nature is going to force the change.