The California wildfires are a stark example of how climate change is making its presence known. Author John Vaillant joins host Krys Boyd to discuss these fires – plus other recent outbreaks in Texas, Canada and Australia – and to explore what it will take to keep densely populated areas safe. His book is “Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] Even those of us who live far away from Southern California have struggled to get our heads around the scale of the destruction and human suffering caused by this latest round of fires. Did you see the video that was either a fire whirl or a full blown fire? Tornado racing across a hillside in Pacific Palisades. Scientists who once thought this phenomenon was vanishingly rare are realizing it’s happening more and more. Given the conditions we have created on this rapidly warming planet. From Kera in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. Recent years have seen out-of-control blazes in Australia and Texas and also in places where they might once have seemed impossible. The Amazon rainforest, the coast of Maui, parts of Canada, just a few hours south of the Arctic Circle. The fires that tore through Fort McMurray, Alberta, were the focus of journalist John Vaillant’s book, “Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World.” It was nominated for a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. And in addition to sharing the facts of how one small city found itself in unprecedented danger. The book also tells a wider story of why so many communities are now in the potential path of devastating conflagrations that once sparked are exceedingly difficult to bring under control. John, welcome to Think.
John Vaillant [00:01:18] Hi, Krys. So glad to be with you.
Krys Boyd [00:01:20] People fortunate enough to have no direct experience with these kinds of fires might be surprised at how long it has taken to bring the California fires under control, let alone get them extinguished entirely. The fires you document in your book burned and smoldered and burned again for more than a year. Right?
John Vaillant [00:01:39] That’s true. And fire is a really durable entity and it wants to propagate and continue burning, continue oxidizing just about as badly as we do. And so in its own way, it fights for its life and will persist under all conditions as long as possible.
Krys Boyd [00:02:03] You anthropomorphize fire in parts of this book, give it human characteristics and I gather this is something firefighters do as well. How can fire seem like a living insatiable monster with a will of its own?
John Vaillant [00:02:17] Well, it’s when you get to know it. And I do want to kind of issue a caveat here. I’m a a professional journalist, a nonfiction writer. I write a lot about science and one of the cardinal sins of responsible nonfiction and science writing is anthropomorphizing things that are not human. And so I wrote a book called “The Tiger” also in which I really explored deeply the, you know, what we can know about the character and ambitions of a tiger. And I did the same thing here with fire. But I would never go so far as to attribute human emotions or thoughts to fire. But it is ambitious. And because it is oxygen driven just as we are, it is motivated to feed itself because it will it will go out, it will die otherwise. And just as you and I and the listeners are all breathing steadily, fire needs to do that too, or it too will suffocate and die. And just as it needs to find the fire needs to find more fuel, more hydrocarbons to burn, whether that’s your running shoe or an oak tree or prairie grass or a house. We need to find more food to feed ourselves and allow us to continue. So in that sense, I think it’s helpful to see these commonalities because it helps us understand in a way our adversary, which has also been such a potent ally for us, and in the case of the Fort McMurray Fire, which will probably get into that, was the focus of my book. But it really represents the characteristics of many fires we’ve seen since then, since 2016. That fire that swept through the petroleum town of Fort McMurray in northern Alberta was named the beast by the firefighters fighting it because it would not leave it burnt in the city through the city day and night, day after day, attacking them from all angles like an adversary. And these types of fires, these big events like the smoke house fire that ravaged northern Texas, the spring biggest fire in Texas history, took the life of a fire chief in Texas. And like the L.A. fires that are still burning, these are called siege events, which which invokes a kind of military assault. And that is what it’s like when you’re battling these very aggressive, determined entities.
Krys Boyd [00:04:55] A small city carved out of the forests of Canada that sits below the Arctic Circle would seem nothing like Southern California. What risks having followed the coverage and covered the Fort McMurray fires, did you find that these two places had in common?
John Vaillant [00:05:12] They actually have a lot in common, Krys. And we’re seeing this all over the world where these really explosive, stubborn fires are breaking out. And this is a global phenomenon now, basically, anywhere there are hydrocarbons and that could be bushes, grasses, houses, forests, these fires can now propagate successfully. And in the case of Fort McMurray, Alberta and Los Angeles, they’re 2000 miles apart. But what they have in common is a recent history of severe drought, a recent history of record breaking temperatures and a landscape that burns naturally and has, you know, for since historical times. And so what you have is is is an environment that’s already prone to fire naturally. That’s part of its natural regime. And then you have elevated heat, which means an often elevated, increased drought because, you know, obviously the hotter things are, the drier they will get. We certainly know about that in Texas. And when you add fire to a landscape like that, when you’ve got really low relative humidity and high heat and a lot of fuel, that creates explosive conditions for a fire. So a fire that 20 years ago might have been severe but still containable now becomes uncontainable simply because it’s that much hotter and that much drier. And this is climate change.
Krys Boyd [00:06:48] We should talk about the terminology here. I mean, a lot of us call these things wildfires. In both of these cases that we’re talking about today, a huge contributor seems to be the ways we have changed the planet. So how are these fires different from the kinds of natural fires that are regular and even healthy part of ecosystems, as you just described?
John Vaillant [00:07:09] You know, the best analogy I’ve heard for climate change is imagine a baseball player. And he’s a real slugger and he has a reputation for knocking the baseball right out of the park, for hitting home runs. So you already have this very powerful player, if you will. And then you put that guy on steroids and now this player who can already hit the ball really far is able to hit the ball farther, then hit it more often out of the park. And that’s what climate change does to natural events. So climate change does not create a hurricane. It does not create a wildfire. It does not create a drought, But it makes those events more powerful and more durable and harder to respond to with our traditional 20th century methodologies. And so that’s a feature of only this this slight heating that is that is measurable on planet Earth. 2024 was the hottest year in in recorded history. And Los Angeles had its hottest summer just this past summer, followed by eight months of drought when the fire that swept through the city of 100,000 in Fort McMurray, Alberta, back in 2016 the relative humidity up there was around 10%, which is drier than a matchstick. And the temperature for that day of May 3rd broke the standing record by about ten degrees Fahrenheit. And so you have these anomalous extremes, and then you add a fire to that. And suddenly what would have been a severe fire becomes an out of control firestorm. And that’s literally what happened in both those cities, not to mention Lahaina, Hawaii or Paradise, California. Spain, Southern Italy, Greece, Algeria, Russia have all had fires like this that were lethal.
Krys Boyd [00:09:17] Fort McMurray may not be Malibu, but there is enough oil wealth there that the place was sometimes referred to as Fort Mcmoney. And it strikes me, John, that another similarity here is the reality that wealth is no guarantee of safety.
John Vaillant [00:09:32] Well, that’s really true. And we should just say a little bit about Fort McMurray here. It’s the petroleum hub of Canada. So it’s almost like the Houston of Canada. There’s a huge petroleum project there, but they’re not drilling oil the way we do in Texas. They’re mining bitumen, which is a very, very heavy relative of oil that needs to be melted and processed and rendered into liquid form that can then be processed by American refineries. And so Canada, namely Fort McMurray, is the largest source of foreign imports of petroleum into the United States right now, to the tune of about 4 million barrels a day coming out of northern Alberta into specially fitted refineries on the northern US border. A number of them owned by Koch Industries. And so it’s a it’s a major player. It’s a big part of the Canadian economy. And it’s a it’s a very wealthy city with a lot of infrastructure. And they imagine themselves to be invincible, essentially. Wildfires are really very common in the Canadian boreal forest. It’s famous for its enormous fires, like 1000mi² is really no big deal in the Canadian far north. But it’s a really big deal when there’s a city in the way. And that’s what Fort McMurray found out the hard way on May 3rd. And I think, well, there is this illusion and I think we see it among our, you know, the new emerging billionaire class that, you know, Zuckerberg is building his kind of invincible fortress on Kauai in Hawaii. And Peter Thiel is building something like that in Honduras. And it’s an illusion. Nature is really calling the tune in our lives and it’s making that increasingly clear with these multibillion dollar disasters that are now no longer anomalous events, but are actually becoming not even just annual events in the United States, but seasonal events.
Krys Boyd [00:11:37] I just want to go back for a moment to something you mentioned a few minutes ago, which is that the the humidity in this area that burned in Alberta in 2016 was at 10%. I’m from El Paso, Texas, which is part of the Chihuahuan desert. It is very dry there. I just looked this up and the average relative humidity there in the desert is 32.3%.
John Vaillant [00:12:00] Krys, I’m so glad you brought this up, because we don’t think about humidity very often. I mean, if you’re in Houston in the summer, you’re feeling the humidity and it’s no fun, But low humidity, which is really common in the desert, really common in southern California, in southern Europe, in northern Africa, you’re right, 20 and 30% is normal. And I was I didn’t really understand the significance of relative humidity to fire until I started studying the Fort McMurray fire and came to learn that the humidity that day, May 3rd, 2016, was around 11 or 12%. And again, the northern boreal that this huge forest system that actually circumnavigated the northern hemisphere goes all the way across Russia, northern Europe, all the way across North America and is a big part of Alberta is is the wettest biome on Earth, even wetter than the tropical jungle. So there’s so many rivers and lakes and bogs and musk eggs up there just and so that’s what made this statistic so anomalous. And on the day that Fort McMurray caught fire, you’ve got 11% humidity. And I didn’t know what that meant. So I started looking around, just as you now did, for where 11% might be normal or common. And I had to go to Death Valley in the month of July to find a comparable relative humidity. And so this is shocking dryness. And what this dryness does, it does almost the same thing for fire that wind does. It empowers it by removing all the moisture from the fuel. That means that the fire has to do no work to dry the fuel out. It’s just ready. It’s ready to ignite. And that means flying embers which were in their millions in the L.A. fires and still are as we speak, and were in Fort McMurray anywhere a single ember ignited could expand into another fire and stead of fizzling out.
Krys Boyd [00:14:04] John, you just mentioned that given the conditions in 2016 in Fort McMurray, that the fire that swept the landscape was effectively unfightable at times. Obviously, a fire that consumes an entire landscape means there aren’t like conveniently located hydrants to tap into everywhere. Tell us a little bit about how the process of fighting this kind of fire is different from what we may have witnessed. Firefighters extinguishing a single home or a single building that catches fire from the inside.
John Vaillant [00:14:36] Yeah, I think, respectfully, the presence or proximity of hydrants has very little to do with with the response to this kind of fire. When you have one house burning, it’s clearly obviously a localized event and you can gang up on it. You know, if you there will generally be a hydrant available, you know, unless it’s, you know, on a ranch or somewhere. But you can bring a pumper truck, you can bring a second pumper truck, you can hook up another pump, you know, to a stock tank or a local lake or a swimming pool. But when it’s five houses burning or ten houses or in the case of Fort McMurray and Los Angeles, hundreds of houses, an entire neighborhood in flames, it creates its it starts creating its own weather in there, the wind in these types of conflagration, a conflagration is multiple houses burning. That’s the technical term for it; creates a very different localized weather dynamic. And so the winds can be blowing 30, 40, 50 miles an hour. The heat coming out of these fires can be a thousand degrees. And so radiant heat, which is the heat that tells you not to touch the candle moves at the speed of light. And the wildfire that swept into Fort McMurray in 2016 was radiating heat that was roughly a thousand degrees. And so everything in front of it, even before the fire arrives, is being heated up way beyond combustible temperatures. So it’s dried out instantly, superheated. And again, when it once an ember lands on it, it doesn’t just catch on fire, it explodes into flame because the reason why fire is hot. Is not to keep us warm, but to release hydrocarbons from future fuel. And so it’s not the log that’s burning or the plastic chair that’s burning or you’re running shoe that’s burning. It’s the hydrocarbons that the heat from the fire is causing those objects to off gas. So what you have to imagine from fire’s point of view, fire does not have either does not have a point of view. But what the fire is responding to is not the object, but the hydrocarbon gases emanating from that object. And so that’s what the heat is for. And when you have a thousand degree heat coming across a multi mile wide front, as we had in the smokehouse fire in northern Texas this spring or in California a couple of weeks ago and still ongoing today, or in Fort McMurray, you have miles of fuel, literally miles of fuel being superheated and off gassing. And so by the time the fire gets to it, it encounters this cloud of hydrocarbons. So imagine gas vapors coming out of a gas can. That’s what the fire is running into in the forests. And then the houses, which might have tar shingles or vinyl siding or vinyl windows or a plastic swing set, all that stuff is super flammable, including your mattress, including your sofa, including your, you know, Lululemon, yoga pants, all that stuff, once it gets hot, becomes explosively flammable. So that’s what’s different. It’s not just something burning. It’s it’s it’s combusting aggressively. And so the houses in Fort McMurray, these are three quarter million dollar houses owned by very well-paid petroleum workers built to the state of the art with all the bells and whistles that people like these days. These houses were burning from the roof to the basement in five minutes, so they burning almost as fast as a milk carton being thrown into a bonfire. That’s how hot it was and that’s how combustible the contents of the modern house are.
Krys Boyd [00:18:49] Fort McMurray is very much a one industry town, right. All about petroleum extraction to the people there broadly acknowledge the role of their business in climate change, in fire vulnerability.
John Vaillant [00:19:02] You know, that’s a really interesting and very touchy question, Krys. They know which side their bread is buttered on. And so to criticize the petroleum industry, their employers in any way could really undermine their position in the job, but also even more importantly, in their community. And so Alberta, not unlike some American states, and now the official American policy has has a policy of climate denial. So Alberta is, you know, really the Texas of Canada. It’s it’s has a long and storied history and cattle ranching and cowboys and also in petroleum. And there, you know, over the past decade or so, they’ve also or 20 years have developed a policy of refusing to acknowledge the role of fossil fuels in climate change, which makes life a lot more dangerous for the citizens, but also for first responders who have to go in and fight these fires. And so when I interviewed a lot of Fort McMurray folks, firefighters and citizens alike, they were lovely. They told me incredible stories. They were super brave, excellent community members. And but climate was not on the table for discussion. And I think what we have to recognize is that when you work in an industry that causes these kinds of harms and you can say this for the weapons industry or the tobacco industry, you are in a community of people who are doing that. And if you show disloyalty, which which criticism can be interpreted as, even if it’s honest, legitimate criticism, you can compromise your safety and security in the in the in that community. And I’ll give you a really harsh example. I met a Alberta pipefitter and he worked in the petroleum industry and he was concerned about the CO2, the vast quantities of CO2 that that industry emits. And he told a colleague about it and that colleague posted on his social media site, If I hear you, and he named the guy, if I hear you talking about that again, I’m going to drop a five ton chain fall on your head. I’m going to kill you. So that’s a harsh example. But that’s and we think of Alberta and everybody thought Canada. Everybody is really nice and polite. But when you start potentially threatening people’s livelihoods, even if for the most honest and legitimate of reasons, this is one of the responses you can get. It’s really serious.
Krys Boyd [00:21:55] These fire whirls or fire tornadoes that I referred to in my introduction. And I believe the difference between them is a matter of size. But they were spotted around Fort McMurray. They were caught on video in Southern California. I have to tell you, John, as a Texan, I’m afraid enough of the traditional kind of tornado. How does it happen that a blaze spins up a swirling column of flame that can be like football fields wide?
John Vaillant [00:22:23] Boy, it’s new for the 21st century, Krys. So and it’s another feature of of climate change that that we’re not ready for. And it’s that’s you know, these are unforgettable phenomena. So we really need to differentiate as I saw you, you know, trying to do it successfully. I thought. The fire whirl is much more like a dust devil. So a fire whirl is to a dust devil what a fire tornado is to an actual Texan tornado. So a fire tornado you measure on the scale just like you do a Texas tornado and the fire whirls, you know, they can be dangerous. They’ll they can tear the roof off a shed or something. You certainly don’t want to be near them, but they aren’t going to do widespread destruction and they’re going to dissipate pretty quickly. There have been two recorded fire tornadoes in the 21st century and none prior anywhere on earth. The first was in Australia in 2003, outside of Canberra, came out of a big wildfire there that was an EF three that destroyed a bunch of houses. And then the second one was in Redding, California, just in 2018, two years after the Fort McMurray fire. And that was an EF three tornado. And I walked that ground. I wrote about that for The Guardian newspaper. And it’s a chapter in “Fire Weather.” And I walked that ground shortly after it happened. And this thing picked up F-150 pick ups with firefighters inside them, threw them through the air, crushed them and burned them. It tore a 100 foot steel transmission lines with multi ton cables attached to them out of the ground and threw them into the forest. Every house in the area was stripped to the concrete foundation. I found the parts of a five ton container van like the like a C can that you see on big freighters. And that thing had been torn apart like a Kleenex box and scattered across the landscape. And each piece that I found, I couldn’t even come close to lifting. It was energy and destruction on a scale that I’ve really only seen pictures of in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Krys Boyd [00:24:49] Walking that landscape so soon after that fire tornado went through. Presumably you smelled burnt wood. Talk a little bit about what besides just, you know, ashes, what is left on a landscape after a fire of this magnitude?
John Vaillant [00:25:05] Sure. I mean, in that sense, Krys, the fire is really just the beginning. It unleashes a whole lot of knock on effects. And and one of those, you know, of course, is the smoke and the contaminants that are released, especially by burning homes, burning trees. Are a bit more wholesome. The smoke is acrid. P2 particles are really, really bad for your health, you know, bad for your lungs to breathe in. You know, if there’s orange air, as you probably saw in the smoke house fire and we’ve seen in Vancouver, B.C., where I live and people have been seeing in Los Angeles, you know, that means it’s full of particulate from burning trees and grasses. And that stuff is really unhealthy for you. But on top of that, when you start involving houses or a chemical plant or something, the house in a way is a chemical plant. There are hundreds and hundreds of chemicals in the modern house in all the different components of that structure. When you multiply that by a thousand or in the case of Los Angeles by 10,000, you really do have the equivalent of a refinery fire, a chemical fire, you know, like like a whole plant is now burning in terms of the equivalent amount of contaminants that are released. And the first people to get that are the first responders, you know, the water truck drivers and the fire truck drivers and the police. And so they’re exposed to this aerosol cocktail of toxins that really will impact their health going forward. And then as the smoke, you know, plumes over the rest of the community, all the citizenry will will be breathing that, too. And it’s not just in the air. It will settle into the grass, you know, onto your furniture. And so now you’ve sort of basically been gassed with this really hellacious combination of of toxins. And for the Fort McMurray firefighters whom I interviewed at length, they were fighting this fire involved with this fire, which they nicknamed the Beast for two weeks inside the city before the fire finally moved on. And they are reconciled to the fact that their lives are now shorter as a result of all the house fumes that they inhaled. And then on top of that, smoke and ash goes into the local waterways and burnt forest, especially hillsides, becomes unstable, especially if the roots have burned, too. And so now you have these hillsides that were held in place by the root systems of the shrubbery, trees and grasses. If that’s all burned, especially burned deeply into the soil, now that soils loose and the next big rain will washed that down into rivers, into waterways, all the whatever toxins are in that soil will also wash into the river as it really impacts fish. It impacts the general health and flow of those waterways.
Krys Boyd [00:28:20] I was on a hike in New Mexico a few years ago, John, and this squad of wildland firefighters in training came roaring down the path, running through this very challenging terrain with heavy packs on. Talk about what you learned about the skill and the courage and the physical stamina required to do this work.
John Vaillant [00:28:40] Yeah, but I’m I’m really glad you brought that up, Krys, because I’m going to make a plug for a book that’s not mine. It’s by Jordan Thomas. It’s just about to come out. I don’t think it’s quite out yet. Jordan Thomas It’s called “When It All Burns” and he was an elite firefighter, and he’s also, though, now an anthropologist. And so he writes about fire like a scientist, like a firefighter. And then on top of that, he understands the cultural role that fire plays in our lives, not just our, you know, the lives of, you know, more recent settlers, but also of indigenous people. And fire is central to both our lives, but in different ways. And Jordan Thomas unpacks this really well. And so that would be a book I would guide people toward. And I blurbed it. Excuse me, I blurbed it enthusiastically. But it’s fighting. Wildfire is a very different physical task than than fighting a municipal fire. And their builds are different. So the the municipal firefighter is a bit more of a rugby player. It’s a very physical job. It’s a very muscular job. But you don’t have to run for miles and miles. And so you can have power lifters on on a fire department. And they’re great for carrying the hose and, you know, carrying people and doing whatever needs to be done. They wouldn’t do so well on a wild firefighting crew where you’re covering miles and miles of rough terrain, often steeply angled, you know, heavy duty mountainous terrain. You’re carrying a, you know, a. 30 pound chainsaw with you. And so it’s more like being a soldier in Afghanistan and you are covering ground often in very smoky conditions. It’s often brutally hot because that’s when the fires break out. And you’re often working on the fire line. So you’re breathing the smoke all the time. And I think it’s really one of the hardest jobs one can have in North America.
Krys Boyd [00:30:48] John, what is the wildlife urban interface sometimes called the WUI?
John Vaillant [00:30:53] That is a region all of us should know about, not just in Texas, but even in Maine, even in Washington State, even in Florida. The WUI wildland urban interface is where the wild environment and that could be grasslands, you know, it could be the Texas Panhandle or it could be an oak forest in Pennsylvania. It’s where the wild land meets the built environment. And what we’re seeing now all over the world are wildfires in the forest, in the grasslands, sweeping into communities, crossing over the wildland urban interface and moving seamlessly into houses. And, you know, the fires, much like us, are omnivorous. We can eat all kinds of food and keep going. Fires also they don’t care if it’s grass. They don’t care if it’s a tree. They don’t care if it’s a gas tank. They don’t care if it’s your fence or your house. It’s all hydrocarbons to that to the fire. And so the fire can move effortlessly and devastatingly from the wildland across the urban interface into our neighborhoods now. And we see that happening more and more often around the world. And some of that is due to the fact that now I think something like 50% or three quarters of of Americans live in some version of the WUI. I think it’s 50% for Americans and three quarters, 75% for Canadians. We we love the countryside, we love the forest. And especially with remote work now, we can live more and more where we want to. And as northern hemisphere people, the forest is kind of, you know, our happy place. It’s where we get nourishment and entertainment and comfort and esthetic beauty. And you can pick mushrooms in there, you can hunt game in there, can go camping in there. So that’s a normal environment for us. But it’s also increasingly a source of really intense fire. And our houses and our building choices are paying the price for that.
Krys Boyd [00:33:05] What is cross over in a forest fire?
John Vaillant [00:33:09] That is a moment when the fire becomes more empowered and it’s when the this is Celcius. You know, I’m from Canada. When the temperature hits 26 Celsius or so, which is in the low 80s and it matches the humidity, which is 26%. So if you have 26 Celsius and 26% humidity and then it starts to get drier, goes down to lower humidity and the temperature starts to get higher. And so as that gap widens, lower humidity and higher temperature, it creates an opportunity for fire to start to expand more aggressively. It’s imagined sort of turbocharging a car excuse me. Another analogy would be if you’re in a motorboat and you’re you’ve got it kind of on a on an a low R.P.M. and you’re just kind of plowing through the water and then you crank the throttle and you feel the boat stepping up and lifting up out of the water and it starts to skim over the surface. That’s what crossover enables fire to do as that differential between rising temperature and lowering humidity creates more space for the fire to expand and combust explosively.
Krys Boyd [00:34:38] What’s the equivalent as a fire moves into a neighborhood?
John Vaillant [00:34:42] Well, that’s flashover. And, you know, if you’ve seen Backdraft, that great municipal fire movie from a couple of decades ago, they talk about that. But flashover is more a phenomenon of the modern house. Again, the modern House has a really shocking number of petroleum products in it. So the bed you’re sleeping in, the sheets that are covering you, the sofa you’re watching TV on is probably, these days, mostly petroleum products. So when that starts to get hot, it starts to off gas hydrocarbons and flash October is when there are enough hydrocarbons off gassing in a room. Such that whatever is on fire in that room suddenly combusts totally and the whole room bursts into flame. And there’s a really frightening, but I think, important video that anyone can watch on YouTube. And if you look up UL, as in underwriter’s laboratories, UL living room fire test. You can see the comparison between an old fashioned living room with wooden furniture and wool rugs and cotton curtains. Compared to a modern home with more polyester and polyurethane and laminates and plastics. And they like the living rooms, these two living rooms at the same time. And it will blow your mind and curl your hair to see how they how differently they burn and how quickly the modern room. Moves into flashover, it takes about three minutes for it to explode into flame. It’s really frightening. Super dangerous.
Krys Boyd [00:36:27] In California, incarcerated firefighters have been called in to help battle those blazes. This didn’t come up in your book, I don’t believe, but I’m sure you’re aware of the practice and the fact that it is controversial. Do you have thoughts on the ethics of this?
John Vaillant [00:36:42] I do. I’m not an ethicist. I know that if I was in prison and I had the choice of being in prison or being out on the landscape actually helping people, I think I would want to do that. And I’ve actually when I was down in California researching this book, I met some incarcerated firefighters. And they’re I think they’re paid a dollar a day. I mean, it’s basically slave wages. But another way to think about it is you’re repaying your debt to society. Another way to think about it is you’re getting out of your cell and out of the prison, which is a toxic environment for most people. And there is real pride and solidarity in being part of a firefighting crew. And so I see upsides to it. I think there’s a case to be made for exploitation, not in favor of exploitation, but that that is an example of exploitation. But I don’t I’m not going to come down on either side of that. We need all the help we can get. Fire is a growth industry, unfortunately, in North America. We’re going to be seeing a lot more of it. We’re going to be needing a lot more help. And if there are able bodied people who are willing and able to help in the in the fight, I think we need them.
Krys Boyd [00:38:14] What about private firefighting contractors who make a whole lot more not only a whole lot more than a dollar a day, but a whole lot more than public service firefighters. A small fraction of homeowners in the California fires had the means to call on these folks. Should we worry that these, like lucrative opportunities to fight fires on demand as a contractor will draw people away from public service?
John Vaillant [00:38:40] I think that’s a really legitimate concern and it raises a whole host of ethical questions. You know, on the other hand, what if it’s a museum like the Getty Museum in Los Angeles? You know, should they have private firefighting service because there are priceless, irreplaceable artifacts inside inside the museum? You know, should it get special treatment? I think there’s a strong case for places like that that are that are truly irreplaceable, just like, you know, water infrastructure or hospitals and schools. They should also get special attention from fire fighters. But as far as you know, if you can afford it, you can have your own private army, your own private security, your own private firefighting service. That is, you know, just another way of kind of expressing the increasing wealth divide that we see across the United States. And there’s another side to this, though, Krys, that that was brought up in the in The New York Times recently. There was a pretty wealthy architect in Pacific Palisades, I think it was, who built a fireproof house. And he knew the area was fire prone. So he built a really beautiful hilltop property specifically designed to repel fire. And it did that. But everything else around that house burned. So there you are. You know, you saved your house. But you’re living literally in a wasteland that has driven all your neighbors away. And they’re really wondering now, this was in the article in The Times. Do we want to stay in a place like that? And that’s it. You know, you can just because you can save it. Then what do you get? You get. Okay, here I am in total solitude. Everybody else, you know, people are a lot of what makes our lives worth living is our community. And if they’re gone, what do you have? Okay, so you got your house. Great. Good for you.
Krys Boyd [00:40:49] I saw that same piece that you referred to in The Times, and I thought exactly the same thing. Like it. It might be rendered unlivable if everyone and everything else around you is gone. There is this question of, like, how people will rebuild. I mean, how much can building standards contribute to fireproofing buildings and neighborhoods if they are written appropriately moving forward?
John Vaillant [00:41:15] Krys, they can make an enormous difference and they can. And I believe in some places, if they’re applied, will make the difference between future habitability and future in habitability. And so, I mean, this is devastating to consider. It’s a terrible way to arrive at this point but Pacific Palisades and Altadena, California, which were both destroyed a couple of weeks ago, have the opportunity now to rise Phoenix, like from the ashes in a new form appropriate to the 21st century fire. And so if you and there are houses that that survived those fires that weren’t, you know, multimillion dollar homes, they were just built in a slightly different way that recognized how fire moves and works. And I think Bloomberg had had a good story on that. And so if we applied those building practices on a neighborhood scale, change the types of plantings. And another thing that saved some of the houses were, you know, they didn’t have palm trees and and conifers growing next to the house. They had succulents. They had ice plants which are full of water. They don’t burn very well. And so if you if we planted our gardens, our home, our yards in flammable environments in a different way, that would really reduce the fuel for those fires. And then if we had, you know, metal roofs and changed our soffit venting, which is how embers and fire gets sucked into the roofs of houses, you could really stifle a lot of fire. You’re not probably going to stop a firestorm. But frankly, most fires are not firestorms. They’re just fires. And then you can have an ember shower, you can have ashes flying and you can still stop the fire. And so there’s a whole lot we can do. But what we first have to admit to ourselves is that we have changed the world and we have made it more dangerous for human habitation. It is more flammable now, not just in Southern California, but in New Hampshire.
Krys Boyd [00:43:28] Reading your book made think about the classic conflicts in fiction that we all learn about in seventh or eighth grade. It is human against human, human against nature or human against self. I mean, these stories sound on the face of them like human against nature. But I have to wonder if if maybe at the heart of this, it’s human against self.
John Vaillant [00:43:51] I think all three of the above, including human against human. Because what if your neighbor, you know, insists on having a big seat or hedge, you know, around her house and you’ve gone to all the trouble to build in a more fireproof way and practice, you know, a much more responsible yard plantings. So that person, your neighbor who you might get along with great in every other way, could endanger the future of your home and your your life. So this is the climate change in a way, kind of like the pandemic did, really pushes all of our buttons. You know, at the most local family member, at a family member like, are you going to wear a mask or not to the school? You know, is it going to stay open? And how’s my child going to be educated to health care, to state and federal policy? And it just it hits all the nerves all at once. And it’s a massive undertaking. But I think it’s it’s an undertaking we we need to embark on. And I think it can be a positive. I think there really, you know, that there is solidarity in a lot of Altadena and and Pacific Palisades and there certainly was in Fort McMurray. They’d all been through the same thing. They’d all suffered together. They’d all lost a lot. And when you’re starting from zero like that and you rebuild together, there’s the potential for really deep and lasting bonds that could, you know, carry you through for the rest of your life, at least the rest of your life in that neighborhood. And that, you know, it’s hard to see a downside in that.
Krys Boyd [00:45:36] John Vaillant is a journalist. His book, “Fire Weather: On the Frontlines of a Burning World,” has been nominated for a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. John, thanks so much for being with us.
John Vaillant [00:45:47] What a pleasure to speak with you, Chris.
Krys Boyd [00:45:50] Think is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
