Speaker 1: Hello and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. Quite
Speaker 1: a start to the year here. If you haven't already
Speaker 1: listened to it, I recommend going back and listening to
Speaker 1: our season on Guyana. It has a lot to do
Speaker 1: with what's happening in Venezuela right now and in other news. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: the episode that we're bringing to you today is quite timely.
Speaker 1: Our Australia reporter Royce Kermelov's spoke with Canadian author John
Speaker 1: Valent at the Byron Ryders Festival last year about John's
Speaker 1: book Fire Weather. We were already planning to bring you
Speaker 1: that conversation this week, but now the entire state of
Speaker 1: Victoria is under an extreme fire danger warning. It's bringing
Speaker 1: back memories of the terrible fire season in Australia just
Speaker 1: a few years back. There are spotfires burning in New
Speaker 1: South Wales and South Australia as well. So I can't
Speaker 1: think of a better time to bring you this conversation.
Speaker 2: Hope you enjoy it. Here it is.
Speaker 3: Hello and welcome to the two pm session here at
Speaker 3: Byron Ryers Festival. I am royce Kermelovs. I will be
Speaker 3: your host for the session. I'm very excited to be
Speaker 3: here today with you to talk about this wonderfully written
Speaker 3: book that is both exquisitely written and, as one writer
Speaker 3: for The New York Times described it, unfortunately exquisitely timed.
Speaker 3: The book is Fireweather, a true story from a hotter world,
Speaker 3: which you can see here I'm holding up very conveniently.
Speaker 3: The story it tells us about a Canadian oil town
Speaker 3: that experienced a catastrophic bushfire in twenty sixteen. And though
Speaker 3: it describes events a world away, for many of us
Speaker 3: here in Australia, it'll be deeply familiar and for many
Speaker 3: people in this region.
Speaker 4: And this.
Speaker 3: Powerfully drawn book is about many things. It's harrowing, it's
Speaker 3: about fire, it's about climate change, and it's about the
Speaker 3: particular talent for self harm that we as a species
Speaker 3: appear to show for ourselves. The author of this fine
Speaker 3: book is John Valiant, who is here with me today.
Speaker 3: And for those who don't know whom, John is an
Speaker 3: author and a writer and has traveled halfway around the
Speaker 3: world to be here. So could you please all make
Speaker 3: him for warmly welcome Mbayron Bay. And just before we
Speaker 3: get into it, I want to be just heads up.
Speaker 3: We will be taking questions in this session, so in
Speaker 3: about forty five minutes a volunteer will come around with
Speaker 3: a microphone. So if you have your questions, hold on
Speaker 3: to them to then we do ask that the questions
Speaker 3: are a question and you know you're going to keep
Speaker 3: them short so we can get as many in as
Speaker 3: possible to kind of get as much good information as
Speaker 3: we can out. And if you want to have more
Speaker 3: of a conversation with John, you're more than welcome to
Speaker 3: do so. I wrote the book, signing tent with a
Speaker 3: copy of the book when after the show, So John,
Speaker 3: I wanted to kind of open this conversation with you
Speaker 3: by asking the question, I mean, there are many fires
Speaker 3: in many places, but what drew you to this one?
Speaker 4: Yes. First of all, I would like to say thanks
Speaker 4: to the Tasmanian Walking Company and also to all of you.
Speaker 4: I'm really glad to be here with you. And also
Speaker 4: I have to say off the top, I feel rather
Speaker 4: sheepish coming to Australia to talk about fire when Australia
Speaker 4: has kind of written the book on fire in many ways,
Speaker 4: and a lot of us are up north are learning
Speaker 4: from you and watching and fascination and horror you know,
Speaker 4: as you reach new heights of flammability. But we're keeping
Speaker 4: pace up in Canada. We're doing our part. And Fort McMurray,
Speaker 4: which caught on fire in May on May through twenty
Speaker 4: sixteen and drove the largest most rapid evacuation due to
Speaker 4: fire in modern times, caught my attention before any of
Speaker 4: us knew that really, because it disappeared from the face
Speaker 4: of the earth for a while, and I was I'm
Speaker 4: not a climate journalist. I'd write about every book is
Speaker 4: about a different subject. I've written about aman eating tiger
Speaker 4: in Russia and a botanically unique tree in British Columbia
Speaker 4: and other things. But so fire was not really on
Speaker 4: my radar. And I was working on a novel and
Speaker 4: in Italy at a very swank writer's retreat and made
Speaker 4: the mistake of looking at Twitter and this petroleum hub
Speaker 4: of Canada. Canada's the fourth or fifth largest petroleum producer
Speaker 4: in the world, and the hub of that industry had
Speaker 4: completely disappeared beneath a forty thousand foot tall pyrocumulonimbus fire cloud.
Speaker 4: And that was on May third, twenty sixteen, and nobody
Speaker 4: knew there were a ninety thousand people in there. You
Speaker 4: can see the cars streaming out. There's only one road out.
Speaker 4: They were streaming out like ants to the horizon, and
Speaker 4: nobody knew who was left in there, and nobody knew
Speaker 4: for days. It was really frightening. Kind of at a
Speaker 4: national level, it's a nationally important city. It is home
Speaker 4: to the highest wages in the whole city. I think
Speaker 4: you have some of that here. There's you have a
Speaker 4: great name for it, the pilberl, the uh okay and
Speaker 4: the name for the people who make spectacular wages working there.
Speaker 3: But oh, yes, the cashed out bogains.
Speaker 4: I think it's yeah, yeah, the cashed out boguins. Well,
Speaker 4: this is what Fort McMurray is famous for. And the
Speaker 4: median household income there, even after a global downturn in
Speaker 4: petroleum prices, was two hundred thousand dollars a year, making
Speaker 4: it one of the wealthiest municipalities in all of North America.
Speaker 4: And that's including you know, Marin County and Westchester, New York.
Speaker 4: So it's a very very powerful place in the idea
Speaker 4: that it could be wiped off the face of the
Speaker 4: earth in an afternoon was deeply threatening and terrifying. And
Speaker 4: I dropped the novel and started paying attention so on that.
Speaker 3: So, just to contextualize this place a little bit more
Speaker 3: for people in the audience who may not be familiar.
Speaker 3: I mean, we in Australia have the coal industry, we
Speaker 3: have the gas industry, we have centers of you know,
Speaker 3: mining and extraction such as the Pilber other places. But
Speaker 3: am I right that the specific industry on this place
Speaker 3: was the tarsans? So can you just explain what they are?
Speaker 4: The tarzans are total anomaly. There are tarzans in Venezuela
Speaker 4: also that produce petroleum. But tarsand is bitjumin soaked sand
Speaker 4: and bitchumen. If you don't know, it's what you seal
Speaker 4: your driveway with. It's what you seal a house foundation with.
Speaker 4: It's a tari liquid substance. You can't really burn it,
Speaker 4: you know, unless you heat it way a normal combustive temperatures.
Speaker 4: It's not oil or gas in the sense that most
Speaker 4: of us understand it. And it has to be mined
Speaker 4: out of the ground. And this industry has altered, basically
Speaker 4: destroyed a thousand square miles of the northern boreal forest.
Speaker 4: And as they use gigantic shovels, much like coal mining
Speaker 4: to dig this stuff out, and then in order to
Speaker 4: process it, you have to melt it with billions of
Speaker 4: cubic feet of natural gas just to render it into
Speaker 4: a liquid form that can then be piped a thousand
Speaker 4: miles south to an American refinery for processing, where it
Speaker 4: needs more natural gas to refine it. So it is
Speaker 4: probably the least efficient, most environmentally destructive, most costly petroleum
Speaker 4: product anywhere on Earth, and the math that makes it
Speaker 4: work is fuzzy to say the least.
Speaker 3: How much I mean, what kind of gravity does this
Speaker 3: place have? Because of the toss hands within Canadian politics
Speaker 3: and society.
Speaker 4: So Alberta is the Texas of Canada. It's a very
Speaker 4: conservative state. It's pretty much owned by the petroleum industry.
Speaker 4: The petroleum industry really across most of North America controls
Speaker 4: a lot of the political discourse to an unwholesome degree.
Speaker 4: The amount of lobbying hours and energy that goes on
Speaker 4: in Ottawa, the capital of Canada, or in DC is
Speaker 4: shocking to say the least, and so Alberta is kind
Speaker 4: of a beneficiary of that. I would say it's the
Speaker 4: way information is controlled there. It's sort of small f
Speaker 4: fascist and you know, I'm really sorry to say that.
Speaker 4: You know, I'm a Canadian, generally proud Canadian, but you know,
Speaker 4: Alberta is a problematic place in complete denial about climate change,
Speaker 4: like Texas, like Washington, d C. Now, and it's basically
Speaker 4: in servitude to this so far very lucrative but extraordinarily
Speaker 4: destructive petroleum industry. And it creates a very weird tension
Speaker 4: where incredible wages can be garnered, but also the same
Speaker 4: mostly men. It's about twenty five to one up there.
Speaker 4: Men to women also live in enormous procarty because they
Speaker 4: can be laid off at any time. They get on
Speaker 4: the hook for one hundred thousand dollars f one fifty
Speaker 4: or a house and then they can lose it all.
Speaker 4: And it's a very kind of hyper and unstable situation
Speaker 4: that has a lot of casualties come out of it.
Speaker 3: And so when I want to get you to explain
Speaker 3: what happened in a second, but just before we move
Speaker 3: into that, what you've described means that when we talk
Speaker 3: about this catastrophic fire and this place, there was a
Speaker 3: kind of poetry in what happened.
Speaker 4: Right, Well, it's strange circularity. So the bitchumin industry of Canada,
Speaker 4: of Fort McMurray, it's to put this in perspective, Canada
Speaker 4: is the largest foreign supplier of petroleum to the United States.
Speaker 4: It's the biggest source of foreign exports. About four million
Speaker 4: barrels a day of diluted bitchumen runs out of Fort
Speaker 4: McMurray down into American refineries. It's a colossal amount of
Speaker 4: potential energy. And so Fort McMurray is the biggest emitter
Speaker 4: in the country of CO two. And the idea of
Speaker 4: a climate enhanced wildfire that was behaving in ways no
Speaker 4: one had ever seen before, the idea that this fire
Speaker 4: would not only threaten but actually overrun the entire city
Speaker 4: was kind of on the nose, really, and yet it happened.
Speaker 4: And I think what was surprising is how hard it was,
Speaker 4: even when the fire was in front of people's faces,
Speaker 4: how hard it was for them to believe that this
Speaker 4: was actually happening and happening to them.
Speaker 3: And you do a very good job in the book
Speaker 3: of describing how and when this began, that the fire
Speaker 3: kind of began over the hill as a distant problem
Speaker 3: not to think about. Can you talk about how this
Speaker 3: began and what happened to this place.
Speaker 4: So the boreal forest of Northern Canada, it runs actually
Speaker 4: all the way around the world, so the Russian Taiga
Speaker 4: is basically boreal forest. It continues across into North America,
Speaker 4: across Alaska, all the way across Northern Canada. It's the
Speaker 4: wettest biome on Earth, wetter than the tropical jungle, huge rivers,
Speaker 4: small oceans, inland, seas of lakes, and it's terribly flammable.
Speaker 4: So there are species there, just like here, that will
Speaker 4: not regenerate unless they're burned. So it's normal for the
Speaker 4: boreal forest to burn. And this city is an isolated city,
Speaker 4: five hours driving from the nearest other major source of assistance,
Speaker 4: which is Edmonton, terribly isolated, and so fires surround it
Speaker 4: every summer and every spring, and so there is this
Speaker 4: strange comfort with smoke plumes on the horizon, but also
Speaker 4: this magical compact that they seem to have that well
Speaker 4: the fire, Yeah, the fires burn out there, but they'll
Speaker 4: never come into our city. And that had worked for
Speaker 4: fifty years. And nature, you know, is not here to
Speaker 4: make agreements with human beings or their ambitions. Nature is
Speaker 4: here responding to the forces that influence it. And what
Speaker 4: we had on May third, twenty sixteen was a temperature
Speaker 4: record for that day broken by six degrees celsius, and
Speaker 4: we had relative humidity of eleven and that, you know,
Speaker 4: might make your eyes roll back. And it's not an
Speaker 4: interesting subject to me until I started looking at where
Speaker 4: eleven percent humidity is normal, and eleven percent humidity is
Speaker 4: normal in North America in Death Valley in the month
Speaker 4: of July, the driest hottest place on the continent. And
Speaker 4: now those conditions have been transposed to one of the
Speaker 4: most flammable ecosystems on Earth, and we've had two years
Speaker 4: of drought, and so those trees didn't just catch on fire,
Speaker 4: they exploded into flame. And at about one in the afternoon,
Speaker 4: a ten kilometer wide wave of fire one hundred meters
Speaker 4: tall swept into the city and it came fast and
Speaker 4: burnt through the city day and night for a week.
Speaker 4: And it's I think the only other fire that's lasted
Speaker 4: that urban fire that's lasted that long as the Great
Speaker 4: Fire of London in sixteen sixty six. And those were
Speaker 4: some different conditions, and so how did the people respond?
Speaker 4: First off, Well, one person I interviewed. There's this very
Speaker 4: heavy duty, angry looking black plume on the other side
Speaker 4: of the river from where she lives, and there had
Speaker 4: been four other big fires around the city. People were
Speaker 4: already being evacuated temporarily. This woman, who lived right in
Speaker 4: the middle of town was hosting one of these evacuated couples,
Speaker 4: and they were taking pictures of the plume across the river,
Speaker 4: but it was a novelty to them. It was like
Speaker 4: a rainbow. And then she went off to work in
Speaker 4: her Porsche and it was a bluebird day, unseasonably hot,
Speaker 4: and so she dressed for the weather. She wore a skirt,
Speaker 4: which she hardly ever did, because it's a city of men,
Speaker 4: and being a woman working there is a very weird,
Speaker 4: overdetermined experience, and it's a little bit like maybe being
Speaker 4: a female prison guard in a prison, like there's this
Speaker 4: unwholesome energy is directed at you. And in spite of this,
Speaker 4: she dressed it in a festive way and went off
Speaker 4: in her Porsche. And when she came back down into
Speaker 4: town for lunch, the city had disappeared behind this black
Speaker 4: and red curtain, and she didn't even understand what she
Speaker 4: was looking at It had happened so fast, it was
Speaker 4: so huge that what a lot of people experienced was disorientation.
Speaker 4: They simply didn't have the space in their head to
Speaker 4: understand what was happening. So and that was really interesting
Speaker 4: because you know, I have my feelings about the petroleum
Speaker 4: industry and people who work in it, and there's a
Speaker 4: policy of climate denial in Alberta. And this wasn't denial.
Speaker 4: This wasn't people being obtuse. This was something so enormous
Speaker 4: side their experience that they simply didn't have the cognitive
Speaker 4: capacity to process it in a rational way. It was
Speaker 4: just not computing. It just yeah, it basically kind of
Speaker 4: created more of a short circuit. And so and then
Speaker 4: you know, ash was falling. Sky was completely orange. By
Speaker 4: two or three in the afternoon. You could only function
Speaker 4: in the city with headlights because it had turned black.
Speaker 4: It was so dark from the except for things that
Speaker 4: were burning. And everybody realized, you know, not from the authorities,
Speaker 4: but from their neighbors saying, you know, my house is
Speaker 4: on fire, you should probably leave. Then this very hirky jerky,
Speaker 4: disorganized evacuation began, and with a miraculous outcome which we
Speaker 4: can get into But.
Speaker 3: I want to talk about the evacuation a second, but
Speaker 3: we'll take a step back, because one of the things
Speaker 3: you do so well through the book is you draw
Speaker 3: out these moments of absurdity, almost this kind of sense
Speaker 3: where the reality people have faced does not compute with
Speaker 3: the expectation of the wall as it should be. And
Speaker 3: I think one of the scenes that and I want
Speaker 3: to ask you about the authorities reaction a second, but
Speaker 3: one of the scenes in particular I'm thinking about involves
Speaker 3: the authorities, and that was when I think it was.
Speaker 3: Was it the fire chief when the radio station.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, the he's he's in the radio station and
Speaker 4: he's being this is this at eleven am on May third,
Speaker 4: massive fire outside of town, and the fire chief and
Speaker 4: the head of the wildfire service are on the air.
Speaker 4: Who's listening. Everyone's gone to work, you know, everyone's in
Speaker 4: school or so to whoever's listening, they're saying, go to school,
Speaker 4: go to work. We've got we think we've got a
Speaker 4: grip on this. All is good. And then right after that,
Speaker 4: around noon, a journalist brought the wildfire guy into the
Speaker 4: radio station and it had a plate glass window that
Speaker 4: happened to look in the direction where the fire was,
Speaker 4: and you know, it was a distant you could barely
Speaker 4: see it, you know, at ten in the morning. But
Speaker 4: by twelve thirty it had achieved crossover, which is basically
Speaker 4: where the humidity and the temperature divide in a particular
Speaker 4: way that really energizes fire. You have that here in
Speaker 4: Australia too, for sure, And so that was happening and
Speaker 4: it changed the quality of the smoke coming up behind
Speaker 4: these neighborhoods. And so we see the interviewer who described
Speaker 4: this to me in detail. You hear this guy, the
Speaker 4: wildfire manager, just repeating by wrote these almost kind of platitude,
Speaker 4: like anodyne directives about what people should do, which was
Speaker 4: don't do anything, rash, go to work, do your thing.
Speaker 4: And we've got this in hand. But he's watching with
Speaker 4: his eyes as the smoke changes, and he knows, he understands,
Speaker 4: because he's a wildfire prison he understands what's happening. And
Speaker 4: then he kind of cuts the inner and hustles out
Speaker 4: of there. And that's when the first evacuation notices is issued.
Speaker 4: And so we see people, even the experts, even the
Speaker 4: people in charge, who understand the gravity of the fire conditions,
Speaker 4: how dry it is, how hot it is, two years
Speaker 4: of drought, all of that things that people in Australia
Speaker 4: and are very familiar with. And imagine the fire authority
Speaker 4: who understood that intellectually but still couldn't make the leap.
Speaker 4: My god, this is energy that could take over the city.
Speaker 4: And that's what you see kind of in real time
Speaker 4: as they start to put it together. And it's very
Speaker 4: hard to look at in retrospect. How could you not
Speaker 4: understand this when all the fire codes, the drought, moisture code,
Speaker 4: the temperature, the wind, everything was pointing to firestorm conditions.
Speaker 4: How could you not get it? And I think intellectually
Speaker 4: they got it, but they didn' get it existentially. And
Speaker 4: so that's what we see in this kind of tortured
Speaker 4: way as this city, you know, one of the wealthiest
Speaker 4: in North America, where people have enormous agency and enormous
Speaker 4: confidence in their ability to meet challenges, are overwhelmed by
Speaker 4: an energy they've never encountered and have no equipment to
Speaker 4: respond to.
Speaker 3: And I want to ask you about the evacuation because
Speaker 3: there's a concept in sociology called elite panic, and it's
Speaker 3: where decision makers. You know, in decision making roles across
Speaker 3: the board, assume that when bad news gets broken, the
Speaker 3: average person will freak out and behave very badly and
Speaker 3: you know, and break the rules and chaos will rain.
Speaker 3: But and you have your description of the evacuation of
Speaker 3: these places is vivid and haunting and in some ways
Speaker 3: beautiful despite the awful circumstances you are describing. Could you
Speaker 3: talk about what happened as people evacuated from these neighborhoods,
Speaker 3: as they evacuated from the city.
Speaker 4: So it's a Patrolilliam town. So everybody is there to
Speaker 4: do one thing. They might have different jobs, but it's
Speaker 4: all to serve the industry. It's a one industry town.
Speaker 4: It's a young town and a lot of them are
Speaker 4: living in very new developments. Some of these houses are
Speaker 4: only a year old because it's a supercharged, superheated economy.
Speaker 4: These houses are you know, start at half a million
Speaker 4: and go up from there again with these new developments.
Speaker 4: You probably have this in Australia too. There's only one
Speaker 4: road in people haven't really thought about, well, we should
Speaker 4: probably have an alternate exit road in case that one
Speaker 4: is blocked by fire. This is a really serious issue
Speaker 4: across a lot of the Western world and places in general,
Speaker 4: especially where there's new rapid development going in and so,
Speaker 4: and they are realizing that their community is on fire
Speaker 4: in a very uneven way. And again a lot of
Speaker 4: it is word of mouth. And what's extraordinary is somehow
Speaker 4: everybody did the right thing, and that statistically impossible. This
Speaker 4: is a city of eighty or ninety thousand people where
Speaker 4: you know, there are drug problems there, there are people
Speaker 4: who have worked, you know, pulled two or three twelve
Speaker 4: hour shifts. People are sleeping at odd hours. This industry
Speaker 4: runs around the clock, so you have people sleeping in
Speaker 4: the daytime, and you also have many different languages and
Speaker 4: ethnicities there, and it's kind of a melting pot. And
Speaker 4: so what to cut to make a long story short,
Speaker 4: there was a one hundred percent success rate with the evacuation.
Speaker 4: No one knew this for days. They kept as they
Speaker 4: you know, eventually started sifting through these burnt basements, of
Speaker 4: which there were thousands. They were expecting to find bones
Speaker 4: or something. They never found any. And they've they've you know,
Speaker 4: they've realized we had a one hundred percent successful evacuation.
Speaker 4: And of course, you know, that's because it was Canadians
Speaker 4: who and.
Speaker 3: So.
Speaker 4: But here's the thing, and so I could feel really
Speaker 4: really good about that until I found out what a
Speaker 4: Canadian was, which made me feel even better about it.
Speaker 4: Because in twenty sixteen, the year of the fire, there
Speaker 4: was that census that revealed the median household income of
Speaker 4: two hundred thousand dollars a year. Also, the other thing
Speaker 4: that that census revealed was that there were eighty eight
Speaker 4: zero first languages spoken in Fort McMurray in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 4: So it's like Toronto or Sydney in terms of its
Speaker 4: international nature. And so you have the languages, the ethnicities,
Speaker 4: the religions, the different concepts of what risk is, the
Speaker 4: different concepts of what community is. And yet somehow, between police,
Speaker 4: firefighters and citizens going door to door, every single person
Speaker 4: got out. And it's amazing. And this does not have
Speaker 4: This is not happening in Turkey right now, where we
Speaker 4: have a lot of fatalities. Didn't happen in la where
Speaker 4: thirty people were killed, didn't happen in Paradise where nearly
Speaker 4: one hundred were killed. Didn't happen in Valparaiso last spring
Speaker 4: where two hundred people were killed. People generally die in conflagrations,
Speaker 4: and there's been a lot of them over the past decade,
Speaker 4: and so Fort McMurray had this strange mercy visited upon it.
Speaker 4: And a lot of people work in the petroleum industry,
Speaker 4: so there have fire consciousness. But that doesn't explain a
Speaker 4: one hundred percent success rate. And I'm kind of hoping
Speaker 4: a sociologist will go up there and analyze the escape,
Speaker 4: because it's never been repeated and probably never will be.
Speaker 4: And so Canada got a pass. And their response to that, though,
Speaker 4: was to rebuild the city exactly as it was and
Speaker 4: to increased petroleum production and to be in complete denial
Speaker 4: about what happened on the evacuation.
Speaker 3: There are some incredible scenes, for instance, the people waiting
Speaker 3: in line in the car as the fire burned on
Speaker 3: both sides of the highway, and what you described was
Speaker 3: this incredible sense of solidarity and mutual aid. When the
Speaker 3: chips were down, people stepped up. For instance, the journalists
Speaker 3: you spoke of. I think he stayed until the very
Speaker 3: bitter end to evacuate to make sure the word got out.
Speaker 3: As Max, the guy in the radio station, was broadcasting
Speaker 3: to the last to make sure word got out. And
Speaker 3: the other thing I wanted to ask before I wanted
Speaker 3: to kind of pull the camera back and ask some
Speaker 3: bigger picture questions in the second. But the final thing
Speaker 3: is the response the firefighters, the people on the front
Speaker 3: line who were responding to this thing. You had an
Speaker 3: incredibly respectful, incredibly incredible stories that you spoke to these
Speaker 3: people about. Can you talk about some of how they responded,
Speaker 3: how they had to learn on the fly in response
Speaker 3: to what was.
Speaker 4: So no firefighter there had ever seen a fire like this,
Speaker 4: because there really has never been a fire like that
Speaker 4: we are burning in Canada before through a community that
Speaker 4: was generating the energy. And so the very quickly radiant
Speaker 4: heat is the invisible heat that tells you not to
Speaker 4: touch the candle. And when you have a wall of
Speaker 4: flame one hundred meters tall and ten kilometers wide sweeping in,
Speaker 4: it's projecting radiant heat of about five hundred celsius into
Speaker 4: the community. So it's desiccating everything. And if you have
Speaker 4: vinyl siding on your house, of course that's melting off.
Speaker 4: And because the modern house here in Australia too is
Speaker 4: composed heavily of petrochemicals, at that temperature, all those petrochemicals
Speaker 4: start to vaporize, and so what you have is a
Speaker 4: gigantic gas can full of flammable vapor. Except that's your house,
Speaker 4: that's your neighborhood, that's your city. And so the other
Speaker 4: thing that's happening with that kind of heat is it's
Speaker 4: generating ferocious wind, and so you have ember showers, you know,
Speaker 4: sort of fifty thousand embers per acre, landing on these
Speaker 4: unburned houses, and instead of the house catching on fire
Speaker 4: because of all the vapor, the house explodes into flame.
Speaker 4: And so I got through to some firefighters finally. You know,
Speaker 4: that's a sort of a closed environment and it's kind
Speaker 4: of hard to break in there, and I managed to
Speaker 4: do it with the help of another forest fire fighter
Speaker 4: and talking with these guys and I said, yeah, the
Speaker 4: houses were burning down in five minutes. And I was
Speaker 4: sure that this guy was exaggerating or you know, like
Speaker 4: five minutes, and I pressed him and I said five minutes,
Speaker 4: Like what do you mean from no fire on the
Speaker 4: house to fire in the basement with nothing standing in
Speaker 4: five minutes. And these are you know, half million dollar
Speaker 4: houses that weigh fifty tons, you know, these are proper homes,
Speaker 4: and they began to modify their firefighting technique. By there's
Speaker 4: no way they could get to a house quickly enough
Speaker 4: when it's burning five minutes, so they would basically figure
Speaker 4: out which way the fire was going and then count
Speaker 4: down the houses. And it takes twenty minutes to set
Speaker 4: up at a hydrant, and so they would count down
Speaker 4: four houses and start on that house, and the previous
Speaker 4: four would burn. And in many cases the heat was
Speaker 4: so intense that they simply had to issue a may
Speaker 4: day and just evacuate the fire trucks in everything, and
Speaker 4: to the point that they were leaving hoses in the hydrants,
Speaker 4: and which is something you never do. You know, It's
Speaker 4: like a soldier leaving their gun behind. You know, there's
Speaker 4: certain things that are just ingrained into your behavior and
Speaker 4: you do not leave any equipment behind or obviously any
Speaker 4: of your firefighting crew. And all they could manage to
Speaker 4: do was to get out with their trucks and they
Speaker 4: managed to, you know, bring the civilians. And this is
Speaker 4: something I think that you know, we hadn't hit yet,
Speaker 4: but Australians have where the firefighting operation turns into a
Speaker 4: life saving operation where all you can do is try
Speaker 4: to get as many people out as you can, and
Speaker 4: you can't. The structures are so involved with fire that
Speaker 4: there's nothing water can meaningfully do.
Speaker 3: And in describing some of those responses and that learning
Speaker 3: on the fly, you also talk with great respect about
Speaker 3: kind of working class knowledge and experience. You talk about
Speaker 3: guys from trades who are on these fire crews, you know,
Speaker 3: using like responding in real time to what was in
Speaker 3: front of them effectively, can you like?
Speaker 4: Where does like? And a lot of people would miss that.
Speaker 4: Where does that come from? That? One of the more
Speaker 4: interesting interviews I had was with heavy equipment operators who
Speaker 4: so that the fire burn't meant as for many days
Speaker 4: and nights. This is exhausting for firefighters. A lot of
Speaker 4: these guys didn't sleep for forty eight hours, fifty six hours,
Speaker 4: seventy two hours, So you're you're hallucinating by them. But
Speaker 4: they're fighting for their city. There is no help coming.
Speaker 4: They're on their own in there. In many cases they're superiors,
Speaker 4: don't even know where they are. They're kind of caught
Speaker 4: behind enemy lines trying to save a school or you know,
Speaker 4: some piece of a neighborhood, or maybe the airport and
Speaker 4: At one point, the fire was moving so quickly through
Speaker 4: this one housing development that they just realize the only
Speaker 4: way they're going to stop it, so basically, plow a
Speaker 4: fire break through the neighborhood, in other words, tear all
Speaker 4: the standing houses down to keep it from going into
Speaker 4: the next neighborhood. So this is day three or four.
Speaker 4: It's you know, four in the morning, pitch dark except
Speaker 4: for the fire, and these bulldozer and backo operators are
Speaker 4: brought in and told to plow every car they see
Speaker 4: in the street through the wall and into the basement
Speaker 4: of the nearest house and then plow the house down
Speaker 4: on top of it. And these are again six hundred
Speaker 4: thousand dollars houses that are literally brand new, finished that year.
Speaker 4: And so these guys are just kind of doing what
Speaker 4: they're told, and they don't have protective gear on the
Speaker 4: fire as they're raging, and their solidarity for each other,
Speaker 4: their concern for each other, and their bravery and their
Speaker 4: incredible expertise under pressure was kind of unmistakable and fascinating.
Speaker 4: And these are you know, these guys had never been
Speaker 4: interviewed by anybody before, and they're humble, working guys paid
Speaker 4: extraordinarily well but pretty low key people. And it's just
Speaker 4: a fascinating section of the book hearing these guys who
Speaker 4: are experts with heavy equipment talk about the subtleties of
Speaker 4: heavy equipment under the most kind of terrifying and dangerous
Speaker 4: circumstances that they've ever operated in. And so that just
Speaker 4: gave me a sense of who these people really were.
Speaker 4: And again, I live in Vancouver. It's kind of a
Speaker 4: lefty liberal viro scene that I come out of, and
Speaker 4: so I have a lot of baggage, you know, around
Speaker 4: the petroleum industry, and I quickly learned that that's not
Speaker 4: going to help me in my reporting, and so I
Speaker 4: really tried to leave as much of that behind as
Speaker 4: I could and just kind of approach these folks as
Speaker 4: human beings with a very specific kind of expertise. And
Speaker 4: that paid off handsomely because we get to meet people
Speaker 4: who normally nobody ever bothers to interview, and they helped
Speaker 4: save that city and it was heroic what they did,
Speaker 4: and so I feel really proud of them and lucky
Speaker 4: to have had the opportunity to interview them.
Speaker 3: There's almost a sense as well for people that when
Speaker 3: you give them a chance to be noble. Some people
Speaker 3: will take that opportunity under the most trying circumstances.
Speaker 4: Oh, I think most people will. You know, they have
Speaker 4: pride in their town. And ultimately, I think, and you
Speaker 4: hear this from soldiers all the time, I'm just trying
Speaker 4: to save my guys. And that kind of solidarity is
Speaker 4: what kept the fire department together and kept these support
Speaker 4: teams who are working with them, heavy equipment operators, water
Speaker 4: truck drivers and cops who are all trying to manage
Speaker 4: this absolutely chaotic and also, by the way, lethally toxic situation.
Speaker 4: So there's really few things more toxic than the cumulative
Speaker 4: smoke from a burning house. You know, there's a bazillion
Speaker 4: chemicals in there and one thing that's quite poignant. These
Speaker 4: firefighters who spent a week NonStop trying to fight this
Speaker 4: fire are all pretty clear that their lives have been
Speaker 4: shortened the same way the people who did who were
Speaker 4: clearing away the Twin Towers after nine to eleven, people
Speaker 4: who are clearing up after Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans,
Speaker 4: just the soup of poisons that are ambient and released
Speaker 4: from normally able and inert objects is overwhelming, and these
Speaker 4: guys who saved the city are going to pay the
Speaker 4: ultimate price for them.
Speaker 3: And this is probably a very good point where I
Speaker 3: want to kind of pull the camera back a little bit,
Speaker 3: because you do a great job throughout the book of
Speaker 3: talking about fire and humanity's relationship to fire, and I'm
Speaker 3: curious if you could talk a little about about how
Speaker 3: you see that relationship.
Speaker 4: So as I was writing along, I got more curious
Speaker 4: about the nature of fire because speaking with these firefighters,
Speaker 4: they ascribed a kind of personality to this fire. This
Speaker 4: fire was named the Beast while it was burning. It's
Speaker 4: really the only fire anywhere in the world that has
Speaker 4: been named in that way that I'm aware of. And so,
Speaker 4: you know, the Beast is up again. You know, I was,
Speaker 4: you know, battling with the beast over in this neighborhood.
Speaker 4: I was battling with it over there. And I started
Speaker 4: kind of pressing. And these guys are not poets, and
Speaker 4: they're not scientists. They're firefighters. But they had this relationship
Speaker 4: with this entity that clearly had agency and a kind
Speaker 4: of ambition. And so I asked a very unscientific question,
Speaker 4: just rhetorically, which was is fire alive? And the second
Speaker 4: question was do humans and fire have a common ancestor,
Speaker 4: and these are questions no scientists would ask, and you know,
Speaker 4: firefighters don't ask that question either, and that's why we
Speaker 4: have journalists to ask kind of unprofessional, improbable questions. But
Speaker 4: it led me to a much more nuanced understanding of fire,
Speaker 4: which has almost all the characteristics of a living thing
Speaker 4: except for sentience. So in terms of its power to reproduce,
Speaker 4: its versatility of diet, its ability to weight and to smolder,
Speaker 4: to be dormant and then to reawaken, I made a
Speaker 4: whole list of those qualities. And then that led me
Speaker 4: into you know, what's driving it and which is oxygen,
Speaker 4: And that's kind of our common ancestor. You know, we
Speaker 4: are burning events. Also, we just take eighty years to
Speaker 4: burn up and fires burn much more quickly, but we're
Speaker 4: all oxidizing. Fire is a rapid oxidation event and you
Speaker 4: are a slow oxidation event. But we're both we're all oxidizing.
Speaker 4: So that made me think about petroleum in a different way,
Speaker 4: and our kinship with fire, which accompanies us everywhere we
Speaker 4: go to the point that we don't even realize it.
Speaker 4: And so you know, when I turn on the hot
Speaker 4: water I'm activating fire, but to me, all I'm feeling
Speaker 4: is a nice, warm shower. When I get in the car,
Speaker 4: I get to go where I want to go, but
Speaker 4: hundreds of thousands of combustions are taking me there. And
Speaker 4: so I counted the number of fires that human beings
Speaker 4: make daily, and including internal combustions, it's on the order
Speaker 4: of tens of trillions. So if you could see all
Speaker 4: the fires that we make just going about our daily lives,
Speaker 4: it would be like galaxies, galaxies of fire, none of
Speaker 4: which would burn, and circumstances like this, My god, this
Speaker 4: is a very very impressive rain you've got here.
Speaker 3: It is very ironical. But so just and to focus
Speaker 3: in there. You mentioned petroleum, and one of the things
Speaker 3: you talk about is the way in which fossil fuels, coal,
Speaker 3: oil gas can be thought of as fire in a bottle.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it's and I think it took me seven
Speaker 4: years to understand. It took me seven years to write
Speaker 4: this book, and it took me seven years to figure
Speaker 4: out that the petroleum industry is a wholly owned subsidiary
Speaker 4: of fire. You know, that's its principal utility to us
Speaker 4: is its flat ability. And so we've devoted this a
Speaker 4: global infrastructure. A third of all international shipping is devoted
Speaker 4: to transporting fire energy. And that's what drives us, that's
Speaker 4: what empowers our economy, that's what it has enabled us
Speaker 4: to be together right now, That's what enabled me to
Speaker 4: join you from Vancouver. That's what has enabled most of
Speaker 4: us to achieve the wealth we have. You know, however
Speaker 4: humble that might be. Most of that is due to
Speaker 4: thanks to petroleum. So we owe an enormous debt to petroleum,
Speaker 4: even as its externalities, which have not been factored in,
Speaker 4: which CO two and methane are now actively taking those
Speaker 4: gains away from us town by town, city by city,
Speaker 4: forest by forest. And so we're in this very early
Speaker 4: stage of understanding both are the debt we owe petroleum
Speaker 4: and at the same time, I'm the collection process that
Speaker 4: a superheated climate is costing us. So where it's you know,
Speaker 4: we've never been here before, folks, and it's new, and.
Speaker 3: I think you have the word for is the piracy,
Speaker 3: and you describe it as it's right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's a really one kind of the The eminos Grease,
Speaker 4: the og of fire writing and science, is a guy
Speaker 4: named Stephen Pine who came out of Arizona State University,
Speaker 4: but started as a wildfirefighter in his teens. You know,
Speaker 4: in the Grand Canyon, which is now has one of
Speaker 4: the worst fires in Arizona history burning in it as
Speaker 4: I speak to you right now, the Dragon Bravo fire.
Speaker 4: So that's where he cut his teeth, and he after
Speaker 4: the Fort McMurray fire. In twenty sixteen, he wrote an
Speaker 4: article for Slate magazine and he coined the term the
Speaker 4: pyro scene and he basically said, that is the era
Speaker 4: we're in. So last twelve thousand years was the Holy
Speaker 4: Scene epic. It's what enabled it was the kind of
Speaker 4: relatively stable climate conditions that allowed us to build the
Speaker 4: civilization that we've come to know and enjoy. The piraccene
Speaker 4: what I call twenty first century fire. We're also seeing
Speaker 4: it in flooding in terms of drought and temperature peaks.
Speaker 4: Is a new world. It's a post hole a scene,
Speaker 4: and that's what we're entering now and having to come
Speaker 4: to grips with.
Speaker 3: Another dimension of this that I forgot to mention is
Speaker 3: you had a great I mean, your description of the
Speaker 3: relationship between humanity and fire was excellent, but you also
Speaker 3: use it as a metaphor to describe the way in
Speaker 3: which economic and financial systems operate. So not only does
Speaker 3: fire kind of emulate a living thing, we emulate fire
Speaker 3: in the way that we go about our process of extraction.
Speaker 4: Is that right? I think so? I think capitalism follows
Speaker 4: the model of fire. And so when a fire reaches
Speaker 4: a certain size, and this is something you're painfully familiar with,
Speaker 4: it is unstoppable and it's able to build end any
Speaker 4: situation to its advantage. You know, So if it's coming
Speaker 4: out of the forest and into a tent full of
Speaker 4: plastic chairs, it is going to rage just as hot
Speaker 4: because it can make those chairs off gas and combust
Speaker 4: and then it can move on, you know, to the houses,
Speaker 4: move on to the cars. It can it can manipulate
Speaker 4: any situation to its benefit. And this is what large
Speaker 4: corporations are also able to do. And again, the goal
Speaker 4: is growth and growth at any cost. And fire has
Speaker 4: no conscience and it has, you know, one job, which
Speaker 4: is to combust as broadly and charismatically as it possibly can.
Speaker 4: That's what oxygen compels it to do. But it's very
Speaker 4: interesting to watch a standard oil the under the leadership
Speaker 4: of John D. Rockefeller or Amazon under the leadership of
Speaker 4: Jeff Bezos, watch how they move across a landscape and
Speaker 4: it's really quite similar. And it really got me thinking
Speaker 4: as sort of a probably something for another book and
Speaker 4: maybe probably a finer mind, but looking at the connection
Speaker 4: between capitalism and oxygen, and I think the urgency of oxygen.
Speaker 4: You know, we're all calm now breathing, but if we
Speaker 4: were not to breathe for sixty seconds and then couldn't
Speaker 4: get a breath, our behavior would change radically and we
Speaker 4: would have some sense of the urgency of fire. And
Speaker 4: that's you know, fire is trying to keep the party going,
Speaker 4: to keep the combustion happening. And we see that with
Speaker 4: our current economic system, which is keeping this party going.
Speaker 4: And we see that the petroleum industry is a powerful
Speaker 4: driver of that in even flying in the face of
Speaker 4: really basic, well accepted climate science. It wants to keep
Speaker 4: the growth and keep the speed, and it's disastrous. And
Speaker 4: see what happened with the fire at The fire will
Speaker 4: eventually burn out, exhaust itself, leaving a wasteland behind it.
Speaker 4: And there are analogies to be seen there in terms
Speaker 4: of the impacts of capitalism on a landscape.
Speaker 3: Just before we go on in about five minutes, we're
Speaker 3: going to go to questions. So just while you think
Speaker 3: of some pressing questions to ask our guests, I want
Speaker 3: to ask you one final question before we kind of
Speaker 3: move to that, which is and this is something that
Speaker 3: I picked up on through the book and I have
Speaker 3: also found on my own work as a reporter and
Speaker 3: a journalist, is that you spent so much time talking
Speaker 3: to people who had, in some cases been close to death,
Speaker 3: who would experienced something terribly traumatic, who had been through
Speaker 3: incredibly scary moments. But in the process of doing that,
Speaker 3: you then recorded those conversations, and then you have to
Speaker 3: process those conversations and then write those conversations and wondering
Speaker 3: how you dealt with the kind of vicarious trauma of
Speaker 3: piecing that together and laying it out next to each other.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm glad you are. That's a real thing for
Speaker 4: people who are working in climate we're seeing terrible things,
Speaker 4: and the people who went through that fire, some of
Speaker 4: you may have gone through these fires. You've seen terrible things.
Speaker 4: And ten years ago, if you'd asked people in Canada
Speaker 4: if they knew anybody who'd been evacuated due to fire,
Speaker 4: it would be very spotty. And now I think you
Speaker 4: could ask any Canadian the entire country of forty four
Speaker 4: million people, and everybody knows somebody who's been evacuated, or
Speaker 4: else they've been evacuated themselves. So I would say that
Speaker 4: PTSD is now an epidemic in Canada. And if you're
Speaker 4: an empathic person, and you kind of have to be
Speaker 4: to be a journalist, that's part of how you get
Speaker 4: people to trust you and share the worst days of
Speaker 4: their lives with you. It's a perverse thing to want
Speaker 4: to do professionally, but I'm compelled to do it. I
Speaker 4: know Royce is too, and we have a role to play.
Speaker 4: But you're also taking in that trauma too and going
Speaker 4: to these places and seeing the totality of the destruction.
Speaker 4: What a modern fire can do. There was one in
Speaker 4: Redd in California two years after for McMurray that generated
Speaker 4: an e F three tornado. And I walked that landscape
Speaker 4: right after the fire, and it looked like photos i'd
Speaker 4: seen of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was. It was complete
Speaker 4: and total destruction on a vast scale, and nothing was left.
Speaker 4: And I did not have gray hair when I started
Speaker 4: this book and now I do, and it's and you
Speaker 4: take it in and people, you know, these you know,
Speaker 4: tough oil dudes are crying in front of me describing
Speaker 4: how scared they were and how scared they were for
Speaker 4: their family, and it's impossible not to shed a tear. Also,
Speaker 4: you know, you're being you're you're living this experience through them,
Speaker 4: and you might be the first person they've told the
Speaker 4: whole thing to. And sometimes these stories would take three
Speaker 4: or four hours to unfold as they described their evacuation process,
Speaker 4: which was grindingly slow because tens of thousands of other
Speaker 4: cars were also trying to leave at the same time
Speaker 4: and everything was on fire. I mean, it is an
Speaker 4: absolute bona fide miracle that nobody was killed because everyone's
Speaker 4: driving like at a Starbucks drive through lineup speed, trying
Speaker 4: to get out, and yet they kept it together. Did
Speaker 4: it change it absolutely? You know in that sense. I
Speaker 4: don't know if you're familiar with the rhyme of the
Speaker 4: Ancient Mariner, but that famous poem. It begins with this
Speaker 4: crazy old guy sitting outside of a church and he
Speaker 4: accosts this young man on the way into a wedding
Speaker 4: and says, I gotta tell you, And that's kind of
Speaker 4: I've been doing this for two years around the world,
Speaker 4: and I feel compelled to tell people because it's really
Speaker 4: bad and it can happen to us, and it feels
Speaker 4: incredibly urgent to me, and I honestly don't want other
Speaker 4: people to suffer the way the people I met and
Speaker 4: interviewed suffered.
Speaker 3: So yeah, it did change me. And with that, we're
Speaker 3: going to take a few questions now. So we have one,
Speaker 3: but we have many questions. Where shore again the volunteer.
Speaker 3: I think there's a mic. Do we have a roving mic? Oh,
Speaker 3: this one doesn't work. Okay, We're gonna get a substitute.
Speaker 3: Mike will be back. Okay, we're good. Apologies, we're live.
Speaker 3: So questions, got some in the front here. I'll let
Speaker 3: you do the honors you can choose.
Speaker 4: Okay, right here, there's a fellow front and center. Thank you, John.
Speaker 5: Your book is a warning to us all many of
Speaker 5: us were in twenty nineteen, and I was personally evacuated
Speaker 5: just fifteen minutes from Yeah, wow, I'm in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 5: Greg Mullins also warned our government and wrote a book
Speaker 5: called Firestorm Australian Condition you're calling it out. It happened
Speaker 5: again in Jasper last year. Our government just to proved
Speaker 5: the biggest carbon bomb in history. What is the Canadian
Speaker 5: government doing? Because we're not learning here.
Speaker 4: I really I'm living your reality too. And Canada is
Speaker 4: very heavily influenced, not quite owned, but pretty close to
Speaker 4: it by the petroleum lobby. The anxiety around the United States,
Speaker 4: driven by Trump's aggressive language about annexing Canada, has made
Speaker 4: it imperative for Canada to become more self sufficient energy.
Speaker 4: Petroleum is what they have to sell, and so they're
Speaker 4: actively seeking new pipeline permits and new markets for their
Speaker 4: fossil fuels as a of national survival strategy. And so
Speaker 4: we have a very probably the smartest, one of the
Speaker 4: smartest Prime ministers Canada has ever had, this guy, Mark Carney,
Speaker 4: very sophisticated guy, fully understands the climate risk that we
Speaker 4: find ourselves in. But he's also beholden to the petroleum
Speaker 4: industry that helped him get elected and to what Canada
Speaker 4: has that's fungible right now, which is petroleum product. And
Speaker 4: so we are really behind in the energy transition, which,
Speaker 4: by the way, folks, is happening and Australia is actually
Speaker 4: making great progress on renewable energy. Texas again, you could say,
Speaker 4: the Alberta of the United States, conservative climate denying oil
Speaker 4: state is producing more wind and solar and adding to
Speaker 4: that more rapidly than any other date in North America.
Speaker 4: And you'd think California would be the leader or New
Speaker 4: York would be the leader. Well, Texas is the leader,
Speaker 4: and so we find progress in some strange and unlikely places,
Speaker 4: which means I think we don't need to agree with
Speaker 4: everybody on everything in order to move in the right direction.
Speaker 4: But Canada right now is woefully behind. And I follow
Speaker 4: Australia and energy and climate issues kind of off the
Speaker 4: side of my desk. Australia gets a lot of attention
Speaker 4: in Part three of Fire Weather because you are so
Speaker 4: important to the fire story and the energy and climate
Speaker 4: change story, and we have a lot to learn from Australians.
Speaker 4: With that study, revealed to me is how similar Canada's
Speaker 4: and Australia's policies and lack of policy are. I think
Speaker 4: though honestly, I think Australia, believe it or not, is
Speaker 4: a little ahead of Canada, and I would have objectively
Speaker 4: assumed it might be the opposite, but it isn't.
Speaker 3: So we're struggling to kick our carbon addiction. I think
Speaker 3: is the yeah, the issue here, So one of the
Speaker 3: questions we're going to go pink, lady and pink.
Speaker 6: So just going on from the last question, have you
Speaker 6: noticed you mentioned that the fire was something that people
Speaker 6: had never experienced before, never had anything like it in
Speaker 6: Fort mc murray. Now, can you can you see any different,
Speaker 6: any change either in attitudes around that area, So not
Speaker 6: so much on Canada as the whole country, but has
Speaker 6: that triggered people a change and whatever change you can see.
Speaker 4: It's it's very spotty, but there's definitely action at the
Speaker 4: community level. And for example, Steamboat Springs, Colorado has a
Speaker 4: very proactive urban fire group who is really trying to
Speaker 4: improve evacuation policy, improve defensive space. I don't know if
Speaker 4: you use the same language here in Australia about this
Speaker 4: notion of defensible space around a house, around a neighborhood,
Speaker 4: around a community. And so we're seeing but I so
Speaker 4: far haven't seen provincial policy or national policy. And yet
Speaker 4: at the same time, we in Canada have a program
Speaker 4: called fire Wise, which is sorry fire smart, it's fire
Speaker 4: wise in the US fire smart where members of the
Speaker 4: fire departments will come into your cul de sac or
Speaker 4: backyard or community meeting and talk to you about how
Speaker 4: you can basically harden your community against wildfire impacts, and
Speaker 4: so that part is definitely happening. I think also what
Speaker 4: we're seeing because there have been so much fire in
Speaker 4: Canada over the past few years, that there's a lot
Speaker 4: more preemptive of evacuation. Because Fort McMurray was an absolute
Speaker 4: gong show, and again, it is a miracle that nobody
Speaker 4: died there, and a death toll of hundreds would have
Speaker 4: been totally plausible under the circumstances, and that would have
Speaker 4: been a national catastrophe that we would still be reeling from.
Speaker 4: And we got to pass that time. And a number
Speaker 4: of municipal leaders now and fire chiefs understand how lucky
Speaker 4: Fort McMurray was in terms of loss of life that
Speaker 4: there was none, and so now people are a bit
Speaker 4: more conservative in terms of getting people out sooner. That
Speaker 4: feels like progress to me. In terms of actually fighting fire,
Speaker 4: we don't really have the means. Water doesn't work against
Speaker 4: fires of this intensity, and you can lay down fire retardant,
Speaker 4: but the Dixie Fire in California a couple of years ago.
Speaker 4: It cast viablemer is ten miles They started fires ten
Speaker 4: miles away. There's no way you can build a fire
Speaker 4: break against that. Likewise, with pyrocumulonimbus fire clouds which occur here,
Speaker 4: which occur in places where they've never occurred before. Now
Speaker 4: they generate lightning same way volcanoes do, and so they
Speaker 4: can start a fire thirty or forty miles away from
Speaker 4: the center of the fire action. And again there's no firebreak.
Speaker 4: No amount of water is going to stop that. So
Speaker 4: we're entering this, you know, a truly different reality in
Speaker 4: terms of what fire is capable of doing, and we
Speaker 4: are catching up to that very very slowly. But there
Speaker 4: are individuals in different communities. I find them everywhere I go,
Speaker 4: where people have either taken the message of fire weather
Speaker 4: to heart or had their own experiences, you know, really
Speaker 4: hard one lessons learned, and you know, I think that's
Speaker 4: another place. So where I think Australia is probably ahead
Speaker 4: of the game, ahead of the rest of us, and
Speaker 4: where we have a lot to learn. I think Australia,
Speaker 4: and in terms of larger entities, I feel like Australia
Speaker 4: and California. That would be the two most progressive places
Speaker 4: and southern sorry, Southern Australia and California. And but it's
Speaker 4: it's a big question, but it's very erratic, very sporadic.
Speaker 3: Right now, I think we have time for one more
Speaker 3: quick question. Are we doing town?
Speaker 4: Yes? So, I if I have at the side of
Speaker 4: the ruello right there eagerly waving in a blue jacket
Speaker 4: directly in front of you, Yeah, yeah, yeah, thank you.
Speaker 7: And while we hate using North americanisms in Australia, I
Speaker 7: think perhaps we need to start calling them wildfires as
Speaker 7: opposed to bush fires, because they are ferocious. I just
Speaker 7: wanted to ask you, with your work, how much do
Speaker 7: you believe that heating is so baked into the system,
Speaker 7: whatever we do in the short term, that we're going
Speaker 7: to see many more horrific fires of this nature in
Speaker 7: unexpected places.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, I have to be pretty sanguine about that. Uh.
Speaker 4: You know, when you look at CO two, when you
Speaker 4: look at methane, when you look at temperature, uh, when
Speaker 4: you look at the US debt, Uh, they're all going
Speaker 4: in one direction and pretty steeply. And so when you
Speaker 4: look at what's happening in the south of France right now,
Speaker 4: pretty much the worst fire in their history literally right now,
Speaker 4: and you look at across the Eastern Mediterranean, lethal and
Speaker 4: catastrophic fire is burning in several different countries, and we
Speaker 4: got a ways to go this summer, so I think
Speaker 4: we can expect a lot more of it, And in
Speaker 4: terms of it being baked in, you know there there
Speaker 4: there's a lot of anxiety around, justified anxiety around on
Speaker 4: the state of permafrost in the far north in the
Speaker 4: and the amount of methane that is trapped there and
Speaker 4: that is released as it melts, and methane is a
Speaker 4: really potent greenhouse gas. So on the good news, it's
Speaker 4: looking like China's CO two emissions are plateauing and are
Speaker 4: probably going to go into decline as they catch up
Speaker 4: with renewable energy, which they've been leaning into harder than
Speaker 4: anybody else combined. And so you know a lot of
Speaker 4: naysayers will say, yeah, but look at all the coal
Speaker 4: plants they're building. They are building a lot of coal plants,
Speaker 4: but increasingly those are backups for the wind and solar,
Speaker 4: and the wind and solar is now finally catching up
Speaker 4: so that their emissions are are plateauing and are probably
Speaker 4: going to decrease, and whether that's you know, so that's
Speaker 4: that is historic planetary change given the size of their
Speaker 4: economy and energy needs. But then you have you know,
Speaker 4: the US, you know, going into regression, but the rest
Speaker 4: of the world is dialing into this energy transition that
Speaker 4: is on that is own root that I would say
Speaker 4: is inevitable. It's not going to happen as fast as
Speaker 4: the smartphone happened, but it's absolutely happening. The solar is
Speaker 4: the cheapest energy ever conceived, and it's being laid on
Speaker 4: at a rate that we've never seen before. So but
Speaker 4: we're going to see more fire too, and we have
Speaker 4: to get ready for it.
Speaker 3: We should also say as well that every ounce of
Speaker 3: common prevented fromentoring in the atmosphere does have a positive
Speaker 3: effect as well. So things are changing.
Speaker 4: So the last thing I would want to end on
Speaker 4: is Planet Earth's default mode is abundance and flourishing, and
Speaker 4: that's what it always returns to. After every fire, after
Speaker 4: every flood, after every drought, things grow back. It may
Speaker 4: not be the same things, but this is a ferocious
Speaker 4: growing engine that we are lucky enough to live on.
Speaker 4: It's extraordinarily powerful. And one of the things I learned
Speaker 4: from a book I wrote called The Tiger is as
Speaker 4: soon as you stop killing tigers, they breed like cats.
Speaker 4: They come back ferociously. You know, as long as there
Speaker 4: is a prey base, they will they will just expand
Speaker 4: and h and flourish. So and we've seen that when
Speaker 4: we've we've taken dams out of rivers in the United States,
Speaker 4: how quickly the fish come back and the birds come back.
Speaker 4: So there's a lot of very good and potent energy
Speaker 4: out there that we're part of and that we can
Speaker 4: participate in and enable.
Speaker 3: So with that, we're going to wrap the session. Before
Speaker 3: you go, don't just don't rush off. I want to
Speaker 3: say thank you to the volunteers today. Thank you to
Speaker 3: you guys for being here. And please, for those of
Speaker 3: us who work with words, this is our life, a heart,
Speaker 3: are living in our art. Thank you for being here
Speaker 3: to support this. Thank you for being here to support John.
Speaker 3: Please go buy the book. Queue out the door to
Speaker 3: get this, to get it signed, ask him all your questions.
Speaker 4: Be here for an hour.
Speaker 3: We appreciate you being here under these circumstances, and please
Speaker 3: make John feel very welcome.
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