Fire Weather is a compulsively readable journey into our fiery times - by turns a propulsive account of the Fort McMurray Fire burning an oil town to ash; an investigation into the gas-guzzling economic systems that make wildfires so hot they melt steel (and so large they form their own weather); and a meditation on the human relationship with combustion. At the centre, Vaillant gives us fire itself as a character - fast, hungry, and evolving to shape the warming decades to come -- Bathsheba Demuth, author of Floating Coast
In May 2016, a Canadian oil town was overrun by wildfire, turning entire neighbourhoods into firebombs and driving 90,000 people from their homes.
Through the gripping story of this apocalyptic conflagration, John Vaillant explores our relationship with fire, an energy source that has been our partner in evolution for hundreds of millennia, shaping our culture and civilization. Now, in our age of intensifying climate change, its destructive power has been unleashed in ways previously unimaginable.
Fire Weather is an astounding account of this century's most intense urban fire, and an urgent examination of humanity's future in an ever-hotter, more flammable world
