Fire Weather

Summary

An account of the catastrophic May 2016 wildfire that overwhelmed Fort McMurray in Alberta — forcing the largest wildfire evacuation in Canadian history and burning through the heart of the country's oil-sands industry — that uses the disaster as a lens for examining the relationship between fossil fuel extraction and accelerating climate change. Vaillant interweaves the experiences of firefighters, evacuees, and oil workers with the science of fire behaviour and the history of petroleum's grip on the global economy, producing a narrative that is at once a disaster story and a structural argument about cause and consequence. Published as wildfire seasons around the world broke successive records, the book was received as among the most urgent pieces of climate writing of its era.