“We are facing an out-of-control monster that we have created ourselves”

It was a warmer than normal May in the Canadian subarctic city of Fort McMurray, one of those places where the ground is ice for quite a few months. What began as a spring forest fire quickly became a historic catastrophe, forcing the evacuation of the city’s 88,000 residents. Miraculously, no one died, but it became a pyre into which house after house fell.

The extreme conditions created by climate change had created a trap. Conditions in which Fort McMurray had an important role: it is one of the great epicenters of the Canadian oil industry and the great economic engine of the region in which it is located, Alberta. John Vaillant addresses the history of this megafire in ‘The Time of Fire’, which Captain Swing has just published. A warning to boaters about the dangers of large forest fires.

-Your essay is close to apocalyptic history. Do you think this is something we’ll see more and more of?

-It happened eight years ago. In 2016, it was still something new, unusual. Since then, we have had many terrible fires in North America. What I saw in Fort McMurray was so extreme and strange… Remember that it is the Canadian subarctic and yet the heat was like that of southern California. The fire did things that no one would have imagined. If such extreme behavior can happen in northern Canada, it can happen anywhere. I think this is what our future is going to be. Impossible things, things that would have been improbable when I was young, are now possible. These disasters will only become more extreme, because we have overloaded them. We don’t really know how to handle them.

-We continue analyzing fires based on knowledge from the 20th century. Does this complicate facing these catastrophic events?

-Our imagination has not caught up with the new reality. We remain captives of the world we grew up in and nothing in our history has prepared us for change at this speed and on this scale. There is the mental dissonance. Then, on top of that, there is the technical answer. You fight fire with water, but the fires are so hot that the water evaporates 100 meters before it hits the flames. What are you doing? We are faced with a monster of our own creation, which is beyond our control. Firefighters in Canada and California say their firefighting has become one of saving lives. That is, they can’t fight the fire, so what they try to do is get as many people as possible to safety. And firefighters have already died trying.

-Contextualize the fire by talking about the powerful oil industry in Alberta. Can we as a society make a change?

-The oil industry has enormous influence on our communities, on the government, on the banks, and they will not leave it without a fight. The United Kingdom has just abandoned coal and even Texas, which is the oil center of the United States and has an official policy of climate change denial like Alberta – it is compared to Orban’s Hungary – is installing more wind and solar energy now same as anywhere else in North America. And then you see what China is doing, which is a dictatorship, and it’s trying to get off coal as quickly as possible. So progress is happening in surprising places and ways. As human beings, as a society, technologically we are capable of doing so.

-The Slave Lake firefighters, who had lived a similar experience, were the only ones who saw what was going to happen in Fort McMurray when the fire started, but no one listened to them. Is more humility needed?

-Basically, oil encourages and allows excessive behavior. Taking a step back to solar and wind energy is a kind of humility, of recognizing the power of nature as a source of energy. We recognize that there are limits to nature and what we can expect from it. What oil does is create the illusion that it doesn’t matter, that you can have it all all the time and it never runs out. Switching to renewables is a way of recognizing that we need to collaborate with nature.

-Even from a philosophical point of view it connects with how we are living right now. We never stop, everything is open all the time and we are always doing things. Do we need to change?

-Exactly, and it is not healthy. The interesting thing is that this is also how fires behave now, they burn all night and they didn’t used to. They used to calm down at night. There was a period of calm and then it picked up. It’s like when people didn’t usually work on Sundays, which perhaps helped us recognize that it was okay to have a day of calm. It is a symptom of a larger illness. One of the effects of climate collapse is that it is going to slow things down. When the power goes out, it forces you to stop. The pandemic was an interesting experiment. Much can be learned from that terrible time, which was a preview of the kind of disruptions that will be part of our lives in the future.

-The pandemic also gave us a lesson about the global nature of events. The smoke from the fires in Canada has also already reached the coasts of Spain, for example.

-This climate disruption is showing the same thing, yes, that it is a global issue. There is no safe place, because if it is not floods, it will be fires or perhaps drought and, without a doubt, heat waves. We are all connected. We cannot say that it is a problem for Australians or Somalis. We’re all sharing it, so there’s an incentive for everyone to confront this.

-The Fort McMurray fire happened 8 years ago. Have they learned from the experience? They are still extracting oil, so at first glance it seems not.

-They are expanding. They are expanding petroleum products. They have no plans or money to clean up the mines and have an official policy of climate change denial. They rebuilt the city the same way, so it could all burn again. So they didn’t learn anything. But elsewhere in Canada people are learning their lesson, building their homes differently. But it is such a huge and expensive project that most of us are staying where we were and hoping that it doesn’t happen to us, which is quite naive.