by John Craig

A week or so ago I got the audiobook of the shocking, brilliantly written book “Fire Weather.”

Author John Vaillant is, by the way, a writer of astonishing skill. His language blasts home to us the earth-shaking implications of what has suddenly been discovered to be going on in the biosphere.

I have been listening to this book’s chapters again and again (via Audible), because I cannot get my mind around what it is telling us. What it is conveying is totally disrupting my mental functioning. If you know this book, or buy it and read it, please let me know if I am getting it all wrong.

What is seems to say is:

• The forests of Canada are now, irreversibly, a massive tinderbox of forest lands ready to erupt into ungodly firestorms of a kind never before seen or imagined on this planet, which are not unlike nuclear blasts in their impact.

• The forces human beings have unleashed on this planet have, it is now clear for the first time ever, disrupted the environment to such an extent that there is no way to reverse the imminent destruction of the biosphere as we have known it.

• If I understand this book correctly, this destruction will happen in the next few years, probably starting with devastating forest fires this summer.

• Shockingly, though the summer of 2023 was the hottest summer on record, it will – going forward – immediately be looked back on as the coolest summer of the new era we are plunging into, because the next few summers will be dramatically even hotter.

• When fires in Canada start this summer, nothing will be able to stop them. They may erupt into storms much like the McMurray fire described in the attached prologue. These fires may continue to blaze straight through the winter.

• The smoke and gases will soar into the stratosphere and be spread around the world. This will increase the heat and spiral the planet into a vicious unstoppable cycle of carbon production that will immediately accelerate still further carbon production, on and on with deadly impact.

• The book seems to indicate that all this can happen in just a few years. If any of you see that I’ve got this wrong, please let me know – so I can sleep at night.

This book is very much focused on professional firefighters, what they are encountering in their work, and how they are dazed and almost in shock regarding what they have experienced.

It all reminds me of a cartoon I once saw in The New Yorker. A doctor is talking to a patient in his office and says to him: “Let me put it this way: Eat, drink, and be merry.”

This is an extremely good interview with the author, John Vaillant, of Fire Weather by Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges with the Real News.

John Craig is a versatile thinker, writer, and activist focused on co-living, sustainable transportation, economic development, grass-roots political organizing, and social and climate justice. He serves as a guiding force for Leaders in Energy, highlighting key issues of our times. He holds a Master’s degree in clinical and psychological social work. John has a strong interest in this book and these issues. If you have any comments, you can reach him at jcyalie@gmail.com.