Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

Canada, an immense country spanning half the North American continent, contains 10% of the world’s forests. These “boreal” (meaning northern) forests contain several different kinds of trees, including spruce, pine, poplar, aspen, and birch, and are uniquely vulnerable to forest fires because of the amount of flammable carbon they contain. The trees rarely reach higher than 60 feet because of the regularity of forest fires, which are a vital part of the healthy ecosystem. Patchwork fires occur every 50-100 years and often rage out of control, burning thousands of miles of forest and creating smoke plumes so large that they lower average temperatures worldwide.

Fort McMurray, a town that grew to house workers on the Athabasca oil sands of Alberta, in 2016 existed in a “hot zone,” an area that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration deemed most likely at risk of wildfire. Surrounded by boreal forest and on the edge of petroleum fields, the town had 90,000 residents, most of whom moved there for the lucrative oil-processing jobs. Some described Fort McMurray as a colony of oil companies, producing nearly half of all the oil imported to the US. On May 2, the town’s residents saw the smoke on the horizon, but in Fort McMurray, “smoke is simply a feature of the boreal landscape” since small fires regularly occur in the spring (13). The forestry department’s firefighters are regarded as some of the best in the world.

The author introduces Shandra Linder, a citizen of Fort McMurray and a labor relations adviser for Syncrude, one of the area’s largest oil companies. She left her house on May 2 feeling carefree and optimistic about the warm spring day. Like everyone else, she saw the smoke but paid little attention.

Chapter 2 delves into Alberta’s history and its association with bitumen. More commonly known as tar or asphalt, bitumen requires extensive processing to extract usable oil. A huge producer of oil and gas, Alberta is crisscrossed with thousands of miles of pipelines. Fort McMurray’s oil production involves “bitumen recovery, upgrading, and transport” (16). The oil sands near Fort McMurray are about the size of New York State and are one of the world’s biggest known petroleum supplies. However, bitumen requires massive processing. After huge bulldozers raze the forest above the deposit, enormous boulders of the sand are loaded into dump trucks as tall as three-story buildings and dumped into crushers. It takes roughly two tons of crushed bituminous sand to make one barrel of bitumen, which is then heated past the boiling point and mixed with toxic thinners to keep it liquid. Bitumen oil extraction is expensive and produces more environmental damage than other types of oil extraction, contaminating billions of gallons of water and releasing huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Cancer rates in nearby towns are “abnormally high,” but few residents complain about the smoke and toxic chemicals since their livelihoods depend on the businesses that make them. The government of Alberta has close ties to the oil industry: The Syncrude and Suncor oil companies staked “billion-dollar claims in these northern woods” (26), along with ExxonMobil and Chevron. Even with government subsidies, however, the bitumen industry has struggled to turn a profit. Most crucially, it has released massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, significantly contributing to climate change.

This chapter explores the global history of bitumen and Canada’s history of oil discovery. Bitumen deposits exist worldwide. Paradoxically, bitumen is flame retardant in its natural form, becoming combustive only after much processing. Its first uses were to weatherproof surfaces, as mortar in construction, and as a general adhesive. First Nation peoples in the Fort McMurray area, mostly of the Dene tribe, used bitumen to waterproof canoes and drinking vessels. Europeans became aware of the bitumen deposit in 1775, when fur traders journeyed north to trade with the Dene for pelts and trap their own beavers and otters. They regarded the bitumen as a curiosity and a nuisance: It floated to the surface of the river and forced them to canoe around it. These fur traders were so relentless and thorough that by 1840, the fur market declined due to the lack of fur-bearing animals. Vaillant notes how this “colonial model” of commodifying natural resources and recruiting local people to trading systems that benefited only a handful of people overseas is essentially the same as the oil industry in Fort McMurray now.

After the fur traders drove the animals they were hunting to extinction, the tradesmen and their companies searched for new profitable ventures in Canada. At that time, whale oil was the main fuel for lamps and candles but had become prohibitively expensive, so explorers and scientists sought alternatives. In 1858, oil was discovered in Ontario, and the land attracted investors. Once processed, crude oil was a much less expensive and abundant alternative to whale oil, so the value of crude oil sources rose sharply. By 1920, investors sought to exploit petroleum in all its forms. Although most considered bitumen-rich land worthless because of the labor-intensive processing, investors nevertheless convinced the Alberta government to subsidize their development. Supported by taxpayer dollars, the formerly small trading post of Fort McMurray quickly became a “boomtown” as investors and laborers arrived in pursuit of riches.

J. Howard Pew, the chairman of Suncor, was a devout evangelical Christian and considered the oil industry a way to generate wealth to enrich Christians. He convinced the government to post bonds to support his new bitumen mining and processing plant while investing the lion’s share of initial funds himself. Calling his project the Great Canadian Oil Sands, he invited more than 600 government officials, executives, and journalists to witness the opening of the massive plant.

Despite the grand opening, Pew’s project lost money from the day it started. Undeterred, he made plans to expand, believing that God wanted him to enrich humanity through destroying the earth. His original plant still stands but is now dwarfed by other operations, which copied Pew and set up their own plants. These projects are now so vast that they are visible 3,000 miles above Earth.

In 2006, Fort McMurray was “in the midst of an historic boom” that would have pleased Pew (52). Oil prices were at an all-time high, and bitumen plants paid top dollar for drivers and skilled laborers; even food service employees received more than twice the minimum wage. Although the money was good, the conditions were poor and dangerous. Drivers faced deadly risks carrying huge loads of oil or industrial chemicals on icy roads. Since the industry incentivized young, reckless drivers to go fast, Fort McMurray’s thoroughfare, Highway 63, quickly earned the moniker “Highway of Death” (55).

Chapter 5 explores fire as a phenomenon. Although fire is a chemical reaction, humans do not tend to interpret it as such because its behavior resembles a living thing. While other visible chemical reactions are more controlled and contained, fire depends on a process called “pyrolysis,” by which it spreads toward other volatile gases in as many subjects as possible: In a hot enough fire, “even a bulldozer will burn” (59).

Vaillant points out that fire has given humans a superpower throughout their prehistoric lives and into the present. From mundane tasks like cooking to historic moments like launching rockets to the moon, the conscious and focused use of fire has imbued humanity with an outsized ability to realize its dreams.

In pursuing those dreams, humans have harnessed the power of oil and gasoline. Underground oil is a form of hydrocarbon, a category of volatile substances that fire can ignite. Fire requires hydrocarbons as fuel and oxygen as a catalyst: Were Earth’s atmosphere not oxygenated, neither humans nor fire would exist. Like fire, most living things on Earth require oxygen to live. Vaillant argues that fire could be considered “alive” in a sense, and he notes that fire and humans share a key trait: Both “tend to consume whatever is available until it is gone” (69). He thus proposes changing the human species name Homo sapiens (meaning “wise man” in Latin) to Homo flagrans (or “burning man”).