Speaker 1: Welcome to zero I am Akshatrati. This week the cult
Speaker 1: of Fire. On May third, twenty sixteen, a wildfire broke
Speaker 1: out in the boreal forests of sub Arctic Canada, some
Speaker 1: six hundred miles north of the US border. Forest fires
Speaker 1: are not uncommon here, but this one was different. The
Speaker 1: day it broke out, the temperature was several degrees hotter
Speaker 1: than the previous record, and thus the fire spread rapidly.
Speaker 1: Soon it had engulfed the city of Fort McMurray in
Speaker 1: the province of Alberta. The fire stood out for its
Speaker 1: size and its speed, but it interested writer John Valiant
Speaker 1: for another reason. Its location. Fort McMurray is a company town.
Speaker 1: At its heart is the oil industry. You might not
Speaker 1: have heard of tarsan's oil or bitumen before, but it's
Speaker 1: a sticky, viscous substance that requires extremely energy intensive steps
Speaker 1: to turn into usable crude oil. Canada sells millions of
Speaker 1: barrels of this stuff every day. The story of how
Speaker 1: fossil fuel extraction made Fort McMurray, and how a fire,
Speaker 1: supercharged by the effects of global warming nearly destroyed it,
Speaker 1: is the subject of John's latest book, Fire Weather is
Speaker 1: a best seller and Pulitzer finalist. It's a deeply reported
Speaker 1: work of nonfiction that taps into some of the contradictions
Speaker 1: of the way we live today. I got to talk
Speaker 1: to John about it a few weeks ago at the
Speaker 1: Charleston Festival, near Lewis in the English countryside. As we'll
Speaker 1: hear on this episode, the fire at the heart of
Speaker 1: the story is a thing of awe and terror, but
Speaker 1: it's also a distinctly man made disaster. When I read
Speaker 1: Fire Weather, I was struck by the sheer force it
Speaker 1: takes to extract bitchumen. Massive machinery, huge shovels, an enormous
Speaker 1: amount of energy, and human willpower, all of which in
Speaker 1: this story set the stage for a great deal of destruction.
Speaker 1: When I spoke with John, I asked him to begin
Speaker 1: our conversation by reading a passage from his book that
Speaker 1: describes just how bitchumen is extracted from the Canadian earth.
Speaker 2: According to Oil Sands Magazine, a typical oil sands deposit
Speaker 2: of the cond beneath Fort McMurray contains about ten percent bitsumen,
Speaker 2: five percent water, and eighty five percent solids. Those solids
Speaker 2: are principally quartzite. One of the hardest minerals in the world.
Speaker 2: Shortsite's sand is extraordinarily abrasive, and it is hell on machinery, shovels,
Speaker 2: dump truck boxes, and pipelines, not to mention the paint
Speaker 2: job on your truck and your kitchen floor. The process
Speaker 2: of excavating, separating, and then upgrading this pavement like substance
Speaker 2: involves elements of strip mining, rock crushing, and steam cleaning,
Speaker 2: the petrochemical equivalent to squeezing blood from stones. Because of this,
Speaker 2: there's really no comparison between the petroleum industry in northern
Speaker 2: Alberta and the petroleum industries in Texas, Saudi Arabia, or
Speaker 2: any other place on or offshore where oil is drawn
Speaker 2: from the earth by conventional means. A bitchumin mine is
Speaker 2: not a place you would let your child play, but
Speaker 2: it's excavated using equipment familiar to any four year old
Speaker 2: conversant in Tonka technology and with a similar grandiosity of ambition.
Speaker 2: In order to access the bitumen, the forest above it
Speaker 2: must first be removed. In industry parlance, this living material
Speaker 2: is referred to as overburdened, and the machine used to
Speaker 2: scrape it off is a Caterpillar D eleven bulldozer. The
Speaker 2: D eleven weighs more than one hundred tons and its
Speaker 2: blade is twenty two feet wise, it can plow down
Speaker 2: a forest like mowing a lawn, but this is entirely
Speaker 2: in keeping with the scale of things up here. Working
Speaker 2: alongside the D elevens are Komatsu D five seventy fives,
Speaker 2: which are even bigger. Once the forest has been removed,
Speaker 2: enormous electric shovels excavate the by two minutes, sand in
Speaker 2: boulder sized chunks that can weigh one hundred tons and
Speaker 2: occasionally contain complete dinosaur fossils from the Cretaceous period. These
Speaker 2: garage sized payloads are dumped into a hauler, and the
Speaker 2: Caterpillar T seven ninety seven is one of the biggest
Speaker 2: dump trucks in the world. It's three stories tall and
Speaker 2: weighs four hundred tons unloaded. There are hundreds of machines
Speaker 2: like this operating in the mines north of Fort McMurray.
Speaker 2: Far too large for ordinary highways, they must be transported
Speaker 2: north in pieces. It takes twelve oversized semi loads traveling
Speaker 2: with escorts to move the component parts of a single hauler.
Speaker 2: The tires alone are thirteen feet tall and cost eighty
Speaker 2: five thousand dollars a piece. When one of them catches
Speaker 2: on fire, something that happens more often than one might
Speaker 2: expect due to the terrific friction their loads generate, it
Speaker 2: must be deflated from a safe distance with a rifle bullet.
Speaker 2: Should one of these six ton tires explode on its own,
Speaker 2: it will impact its surroundings like a powerful bomb. I
Speaker 2: have read that one aloud. It's really that's thanks for
Speaker 2: the for the opportunity, But.
Speaker 1: Now the event itself is a disaster. It's a man
Speaker 1: made disaster, but it's a disaster in the making many
Speaker 1: many years. What in the history of Canada makes it
Speaker 1: possible for the oil signs industry to be willed into
Speaker 1: existence if it is so hard to make something valuable
Speaker 1: out of dot.
Speaker 2: I think Canadians have been trained since the seventeenth century
Speaker 2: to extract things that nobody else really wanted, and do
Speaker 2: it under the most difficult circumstances imaginable. And I really
Speaker 2: think the tar trade, you could call it, grew quite organically,
Speaker 2: if you want to call it organic, out of the
Speaker 2: fur trade, and where basically the European hat industry ran
Speaker 2: out of furs in the UK and Europe headed to
Speaker 2: Canada in the late seventeenth century, a really difficult place
Speaker 2: to work, freezing cold, and set about basically persuading compelling
Speaker 2: the indigenous inhabitants of Canada to denude the boreal forest
Speaker 2: of beavers. And it's a really hard thing to do.
Speaker 2: But the Hudgson's Bay Company is, you know, along with
Speaker 2: the East India Company, are really one of the first
Speaker 2: global corporations. And even though it took three years to
Speaker 2: do a full round of furs from the forest to
Speaker 2: Montreal to the UK, returning with trade goods into the
Speaker 2: Athabasca Wilderness for more beaver firs. That was a three
Speaker 2: year cycle, it still was incredibly effective, incredibly lucrative, and
Speaker 2: basically managed to harness the entire environment, human, animal and
Speaker 2: inanimate into this profit making machine. And I think that
Speaker 2: mindset and that skill set has informed the beitchuman industry
Speaker 2: in some really powerful ways.
Speaker 1: You also explain in the book that there is a
Speaker 1: term called energy return on investment, which is a very
Speaker 1: business term, and I bring it up with an important
Speaker 1: reason because oil in most places requires one unit of energy,
Speaker 1: gives you thirty units of.
Speaker 2: Energy roughly, yeah, the way.
Speaker 1: You describe, Butitjamen, it takes between one unit of energy
Speaker 1: to get only three units of energy out.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It's again, no normal developed country and no person
Speaker 2: who'd been to business school would ever do this. It's
Speaker 2: insane and really it just doesn't make any sense. And
Speaker 2: when you think of, you know, natural gas, that is
Speaker 2: a viable fuel, say whatever you want about its impact
Speaker 2: on climate. It comes out of the ground, ready to burn,
Speaker 2: ready to generate energy. And that's why we're mostly interested
Speaker 2: in petroleum is because it burns so In Canada, in
Speaker 2: the borel Up in Alberta, they take this excellent fuel,
Speaker 2: natural gas, and they burn it by the billions of
Speaker 2: cubic feet to melt bitchumen out of quartzite sand. I'm
Speaker 2: really sitting here like I don't even I can't even
Speaker 2: believe I'm saying it, you know, really, it's so it's
Speaker 2: so hard, you know, to do, and the temperature swings
Speaker 2: up there, it goes to minus fifty, it goes to
Speaker 2: plus ninety five. Machines don't like that. Heavy machinery doesn't
Speaker 2: like that. Human beings don't like that, and they do
Speaker 2: it anyway, and so it's so what.
Speaker 1: Makes it a wild business.
Speaker 2: It's I think Canadians do have a capacity for suffering,
Speaker 2: and a lot of the employees, uh in the in
Speaker 2: the Tarsans minds, are from Newfoundland, really depressed place, you know,
Speaker 2: that lived off the seal industry, in the cod industry
Speaker 2: until you know, one of them became politically unpopular and
Speaker 2: the other one collapsed. So there are a lot of
Speaker 2: Newfoundlanders in for McMurray. So some of it is that.
Speaker 2: Some of it, I think is because we know where
Speaker 2: the bitchumin is. There's there are no exploration costs, it's
Speaker 2: literally under the ground. The natural gas is cheap, the
Speaker 2: subsidies are generous, and by selling it at a discount
Speaker 2: into the US market, which is voracious for petroleum in
Speaker 2: all its forms, there's a way to turn a profit,
Speaker 2: a marginal profit. And Putin has been, you know, the
Speaker 2: best friend the bitchumin industry ever had, because it was
Speaker 2: really in a hail spin before Russia invaded Ukraine and
Speaker 2: spiked petroleum prices around the world.
Speaker 1: But this oil industry was willed into existence by the
Speaker 1: state right by providing the land for free, by providing
Speaker 1: natural gas for very cheap, by providing subsidies to make
Speaker 1: the industry happen, by going out of its way to
Speaker 1: create the politics to attract capital from America to currently building.
Speaker 1: The Canadian government is building the pipeline that would take
Speaker 1: these tar sans to those places they finish. It could
Speaker 1: not have existed without essentially the government taking the lead
Speaker 1: on this industry. So let's flip the script here, because
Speaker 1: one thing that we do need to do is to
Speaker 1: try and build an industry that does not produce greenhouse
Speaker 1: gas emissions but still produces energy because we all need it, right.
Speaker 1: So if the Canadian government could do that for tar sans,
Speaker 1: as you describe, such a difficult industry to make profitable,
Speaker 1: could it not do it for clean energy solutions?
Speaker 2: It absolutely could. And this is where kind of the
Speaker 2: antidote to fire Weather, which is not an unhopeful book,
Speaker 2: but it's a hard book in certain respects. The antidote
Speaker 2: to it is oxhot Rothi's climate capitalism. I'm really I mean,
Speaker 2: it really shows the way forward. And when I think
Speaker 2: about Canada, it's the second largest nation by geography in
Speaker 2: the world, second after Russia. We have infinite wind, we
Speaker 2: have infinite solar. We have three oceans of title to
Speaker 2: draw on. We've got everybody beat on that score. And
Speaker 2: then we also have endless geothermal, a lot and enviable hydropower.
Speaker 2: So were it to be a priority, were it to
Speaker 2: be subsidized and pursued with the zeal with which the
Speaker 2: bitumen industry has been pursued, Canada could power the continent
Speaker 2: of North America no problem. By itself. We could power
Speaker 2: the United States, and that is a matter of priority,
Speaker 2: and we've already demonstrated we can do the impossible by
Speaker 2: turning bitchumen into money. It is a dog of the
Speaker 2: petroleum world. It's the only petroleum that sinks. You know,
Speaker 2: oil is supposed to float, and bitchamin doesn't. Bitumen sinks.
Speaker 2: So exactly, it's really it's political will, and you know
Speaker 2: right now the petroleum industry is the tail wagging the
Speaker 2: dog of the nation.
Speaker 1: After the break, John and I look for solutions in
Speaker 1: the aftermath of fire, and he explains how he broke
Speaker 1: the conventions of science reporting, giving fire agency and personality.
Speaker 1: And by the way, if you're enjoying this episode, please
Speaker 1: take a moment to read and review the show on
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps us their listeners find
Speaker 1: the show. Thanks for mentioning the book, because one thing
Speaker 1: I look at is how to get businesses incentivized to
Speaker 1: make the green transition happen. I'm sort of interested in
Speaker 1: what is possible and profitable and practically possible within the
Speaker 1: politics that we have today. But some of the stories
Speaker 1: in your book are about something else. They're about sacrifice,
Speaker 1: heroism that in many cases defies rational thought. Firefighters who
Speaker 1: left their own homes to burn in order to try
Speaker 1: and focus on trying to stop the spread of fire.
Speaker 1: But when we talk about climate and we hear the
Speaker 1: words sacrifice, few people want to give up their car,
Speaker 1: their burgers, their flights. So how can we bring sacrifice
Speaker 1: to our understanding of what we need to be in
Speaker 1: the twenty first century? Yah?
Speaker 2: I think, I mean I think about that all the time,
Speaker 2: and your book really shows us how to get there.
Speaker 2: And I think if you're living in Newfoundland and your family,
Speaker 2: whole family has been on the doles since nineteen ninety
Speaker 2: two when the cod fishery crashed, you are not going
Speaker 2: to care if Fort McMurray is digging bitjumin or building
Speaker 2: solar panels or building windmills, you're going to go where
Speaker 2: the work is. A beautiful counterbouance to that is Texas,
Speaker 2: which is pretty hostile to the federal government, super conservative,
Speaker 2: always been a kind of rancorous, independent minded place, and
Speaker 2: they have installed and it's also the center, you know,
Speaker 2: the ground zero of the American oil industry in the
Speaker 2: early twentieth century. They have installed more wind and solar
Speaker 2: in the past year than the nation of Canada has
Speaker 2: in its entire existence. So you can have climate denial,
Speaker 2: you can have hideous politics that punish women, that punish immigrants,
Speaker 2: and you can still somehow move forward into twenty first
Speaker 2: century energy. And some of that is because of President
Speaker 2: Biden and subsidies to build this energy. But also it
Speaker 2: makes sense for Texas. It's a huge place, it's got
Speaker 2: a lot of wind, it's got a lot of solar,
Speaker 2: it's got a lot of empty space, and so they
Speaker 2: are laying on the gigawatts by the month now, so
Speaker 2: it's totally possible. Whereas in Alberta, the twin sibling to Texas,
Speaker 2: they have put a moratorium on wind and solar to
Speaker 2: examine the environmental impacts as they expand bitchmin production. So
Speaker 2: Canada had its worst fire season ever in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 2: At the same time, the petroleum industry was make can
Speaker 2: get abundantly clear that it wasn't going anywhere. Sun Core
Speaker 2: and one of the biggest players up in for McMurray,
Speaker 2: sold off its renewable energy arm, laid off fifteen hundred people,
Speaker 2: and expanded its production. And every petroleum company that I've
Speaker 2: seen quoted, you know, I've read Financial Times, Wall Street
Speaker 2: Journal has made it really clear we're here for the
Speaker 2: profits and we're not going anywhere. And they've almost given
Speaker 2: up greenwashing. You know, they've been called out on that,
Speaker 2: and I think they will not be allies in this transition.
Speaker 2: We have to go around them, and that is happening.
Speaker 2: We are in an energy transition right now. If you
Speaker 2: kind of need some hope on this score, young people
Speaker 2: are not going into the petroleum industry. That's not where
Speaker 2: the energy is, so to speak. That's not where the
Speaker 2: future is. And so what I see is a very powerful,
Speaker 2: very entrenched industry, like the tobacco industry, trying to wring
Speaker 2: every last dollar out of its model before it collapses.
Speaker 2: And it's you know, it's obviously it's a huge part
Speaker 2: of our world. It's a complicated question. We could talk
Speaker 2: about it for an hour in terms of the way forward.
Speaker 1: Now, there is a phenomena you describe in the book
Speaker 1: where this is a new kind of fire, where the
Speaker 1: weather is changed by the fire. Fire creates its own weather.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a type of fire cloud called a pyrocumulonimbus cloud,
Speaker 2: and they were essentially unknown in Europe until very recently,
Speaker 2: and they were generally seen only over erupting volcanoes. And
Speaker 2: we've seen them in images from the Old Testament. You
Speaker 2: see the black cloud billowing up into the heavens out
Speaker 2: of the volcano, and there's lightning and black hail. It's
Speaker 2: written about an exodus, for example in the Old Testament. Well,
Speaker 2: this actually happened, and atmospheric science hasts had not really
Speaker 2: ever seen it happening over a forest fire until nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety eight. The most closely studied one happened in Alberta,
Speaker 2: quite close to for McMurray in two thousand and one.
Speaker 2: And these fire systems puncture the stratosphere. They're forty five
Speaker 2: thousand feet tall, they generate their own winds, They turned
Speaker 2: the way a hurricane does and because they generate their
Speaker 2: own lightning, This pyrocumulonimbus fire system essentially turns into a
Speaker 2: self perpetuation machine where it can start its new fires
Speaker 2: twenty or thirty miles away from the central fire. So
Speaker 2: this was an extraordinary rarity, really written about in the
Speaker 2: late nineties and early two thousands as a kind of novelty.
Speaker 2: It didn't really enter the literature of fire science until
Speaker 2: around twenty ten. But this pyrocumulonimbus fire system I was
Speaker 2: a companion of the Fort McMurray fire for many, many days.
Speaker 2: This fire burnt in the city, not for days, I think.
Speaker 2: Actually the Great Fire of London in sixteen sixty six
Speaker 2: lasted for about five days, but obviously that was an
Speaker 2: extraordinary historic phenomenon driven by wooden houses and other things.
Speaker 2: This fire, this was a modern city, and the fire
Speaker 2: was burning in and out of the city, driven by
Speaker 2: winds for a week or so, And part of this
Speaker 2: was due to this giant fire system swirling above that
Speaker 2: was starting new fires again twenty to thirty miles away
Speaker 2: from the center, but also generating its own winds and
Speaker 2: sucking up all available moisture not just from the forest
Speaker 2: but from fire hoses from any attempt to put this
Speaker 2: fire out, and the houses and the trees of Fort
Speaker 2: McMurray basically came back to earth as black hail, and
Speaker 2: it really was a kind of biblical scenario, and that
Speaker 2: was one of the things that made me want to
Speaker 2: explore this more closely. And then I realized that this
Speaker 2: the fire, the heat being generated again. Everything is extraordinary dry,
Speaker 2: extraordinarily hot, and it created this kind of new set
Speaker 2: of parameters for the fire to grow and expand in
Speaker 2: So the heat coming out of the forest into Fort
Speaker 2: McMurray was five hundred celsius. That's the radiant heat, and
Speaker 2: radiant heat that's the heat that tells you not to
Speaker 2: touch the candle. It moves at the speed of light,
Speaker 2: and so the fire can be way over there, but
Speaker 2: the heat is desiccating everything in front of it and
Speaker 2: heating it above combustive temperatures. So as soon as an
Speaker 2: ember lands on it and embers were flying in the
Speaker 2: tens of thousands that day, it bursts into flame. And
Speaker 2: that's why homes half million, three quarter million dollar houses
Speaker 2: built to the state of the art, and they were
Speaker 2: burning to the baseman in five minutes and when firefighters
Speaker 2: told me this, I thought, well, you're exaggerating talking to
Speaker 2: a journalist. You're a lot of adrenaline that day. I
Speaker 2: can see why things would be accelerated for you. No's
Speaker 2: three minutes over here, five minutes over there, eight minutes
Speaker 2: over there. And finally I talked to a physicist who
Speaker 2: specializes in domestic combustion in the burning of houses, and
Speaker 2: he said, well, yes, that is possible, and why don't
Speaker 2: you go and study the Hamburg firestorm of nineteen forty
Speaker 2: three if you want to understand the mechanics better. So
Speaker 2: that's basically what was recreated in for McMurray from an
Speaker 2: organic wildfire.
Speaker 1: And the Hamburg firestorm is where the Allies bomb southeast
Speaker 1: of Hamburg, perhaps the most number of infendiary bombs that
Speaker 1: were dropped in any one place during the entire World War. Now,
Speaker 1: you do a thing in the book in a very
Speaker 1: interesting way. You give fire agency, You personify it. There
Speaker 1: is a character in their book who calls it a beast.
Speaker 1: You write about fires seeming to have a drive of
Speaker 1: its own. And it's an intriguing choice to me because
Speaker 1: I trained in the sciences. So why do you make
Speaker 1: fire a character? This way, what does the beast want?
Speaker 2: Well, it's a really touchy subject, especially among scientists. You're
Speaker 2: not allowed to anthropomorphize natural processes. And also in nonfiction,
Speaker 2: I'm not allowed to take those kinds of liberties. I
Speaker 2: wrote a book about a tiger, I'm not allowed to
Speaker 2: anthropomorphize the tiger, even though I do try to get
Speaker 2: into its head to figure out what its motives are.
Speaker 2: Fire is even more difficult and kind of more fraud.
Speaker 2: But the beauty of not being a scientist and being
Speaker 2: locked up in a room for seven years as I
Speaker 2: was working on this book is you can kind of
Speaker 2: really let your mind wander. And I wondered, humans and
Speaker 2: fire are so closely entangled, and we always have been.
Speaker 2: And I think you think about humans and dogs. You know,
Speaker 2: we've been together for forty or fifty thousand years, and
Speaker 2: you know, what is it about dogs and humans that
Speaker 2: make such good companions? And so I pose the same
Speaker 2: question of fire, even though fire is not animate and
Speaker 2: alive in the same sense, And I thought, do we
Speaker 2: have a common ancestor? And again this is not scientific,
Speaker 2: but we do have a common molecule, and that is oxygen,
Speaker 2: And oxygen is the engine of life, and anything that
Speaker 2: depends on oxygen, whether it's a human or a dog,
Speaker 2: or an octopus or a wildfire, is a hostage to
Speaker 2: that molecule and has to keep moving in order to
Speaker 2: feed itself. And so fire will die. If we just
Speaker 2: lit this table on fire and the table burned up,
Speaker 2: the fire would go out, but there's all all this
Speaker 2: plastic whatever it is here, and that heat would try
Speaker 2: to release the hydrocarbons from that, and it would try
Speaker 2: to keep moving. That's what it wants to do. Its
Speaker 2: default is not to die. Its default is to try
Speaker 2: to perpetuate itself, to try to expand, to try to grow.
Speaker 2: And I made a list of all our common attributes,
Speaker 2: and there's about a dozen of them. And so fire
Speaker 2: is not alive, it's certainly not sentients, but it's lively
Speaker 2: and it's ambitious. And after this fire refused to leave
Speaker 2: the city for three or four days, the fire chief
Speaker 2: called it the Beast, and that's what it became known as.
Speaker 2: And it's really the first time I think in post
Speaker 2: contact North American history that a natural phenomenon has been
Speaker 2: given that kind of sort of animate power and identity,
Speaker 2: and yet to see it behave to talk to firefighters
Speaker 2: about it. It felt like an address area that was
Speaker 2: behaving in a willful and intentional manner.
Speaker 1: And then you flip the script and you say, we're
Speaker 1: not homo sapiens anymore, Homo sapiens being sapiens being wise,
Speaker 1: you know, no longer wise we are homoflagerants. We are
Speaker 1: a burning man.
Speaker 2: Why well, when you I just again had seven years,
Speaker 2: you know, to think about it and not healthy. I
Speaker 2: don't recommend it, really, but I did get a book
Speaker 2: out of it, and I hope yours took less time.
Speaker 2: The question helped me with a question.
Speaker 1: Humans created the environment we live in anymore. Right, we
Speaker 1: are using fossil fuels to be able to power our lives,
Speaker 1: but it's also creating these fires. And now you're saying
Speaker 1: those fires are going to make us we become homo flaggers.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, this engagement we have with fire and the
Speaker 2: fact that first of all, I had to make the leap.
Speaker 2: So we think about petroleum, We most of us recognize
Speaker 2: that most of what goes on in our world, in
Speaker 2: terms of our mobility, in terms of our economy, heating
Speaker 2: is driven at root by some form of petroleum product,
Speaker 2: and it took me a long time to understand that
Speaker 2: the petroleum industry is a fire industry. And I made
Speaker 2: the mistake of counting the number of fires that humans
Speaker 2: make every day, and it's actually in the trillions when
Speaker 2: you count the combustions in our engine. And so I
Speaker 2: imagine being an extraterrestrial looking down on planet Earth as
Speaker 2: it is now, with eight billion humans lighting fires wherever
Speaker 2: we go, and I thought, wow, this is a planet
Speaker 2: that follows a fire cod everywhere we go there is
Speaker 2: fire of some kind or another. And then I started
Speaker 2: thinking about the petroleum industry a fire industry. And then
Speaker 2: I took it a step further and came to understand
Speaker 2: that the petroleum industry is a wholly owned subsidiary of fire.
Speaker 2: Fire is the ultimate expression of that domestication of desire.
Speaker 2: We are it's servants, and I think we are operating
Speaker 2: under the kind of illusion that fire is our servant.
Speaker 2: But when you look at the fact that now fire
Speaker 2: burns more intensely, more broadly across the world than at
Speaker 2: any time in human history, and when you look at
Speaker 2: the geologic record in terms of the impacts of this
Speaker 2: obsession with liquid fueled fire, I think the geologic record
Speaker 2: will show that it's humans who served fire rather than
Speaker 2: the other way around. The twenty first century is going
Speaker 2: to be a really different experience for all of us.
Speaker 2: All of us are going to see this. And there's
Speaker 2: a small town in British Columbia that burnt to the
Speaker 2: ground in forty five minutes in twenty twenty one during
Speaker 2: the heat dome and the mayor, sixty year old man,
Speaker 2: was being interviewed about it and he said, yeah, I
Speaker 2: thought climate change was a problem for future generation, and
Speaker 2: now I'm the mayor of a town that no longer exists.
Speaker 2: So we are kind of reckoning with these changes at
Speaker 2: the same time that we see this really powerful awakening,
Speaker 2: especially among young people, but among all kinds of people
Speaker 2: that seeing the necessity of renegotiating and revivifying our relationship
Speaker 2: to the planet. Fort McMurray was just evacuated again last
Speaker 2: week due to fire, and people don't want to work
Speaker 2: in that environment. So they're these kind of systemic cultural
Speaker 2: changes and this way of understanding nature and our role
Speaker 2: in it that is new and challenging and happening, and
Speaker 2: that I'm really excited to be part of that. It's
Speaker 2: going to be really quite pain. We are going to
Speaker 2: lose things. We're losing things right now. But we can
Speaker 2: handle this. And the question is how, how quickly and
Speaker 2: how and then how enlightened a way can we address it?
Speaker 1: Thank you, Jong, Thank you, thanks a lot, Thank thank
Speaker 1: you for listening to Zero. If you liked this episode,
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Speaker 1: is composed by Wonderly Special. Thanks to the organizers of
Speaker 1: Charleston Festival, Takira bindrim Anamazarakis and Alisia Clinton I am
Speaker 1: Akshadharrati Back soon.