B.C. fire expert and bestselling author John Vaillant sounds off on wildfire risk — and what we should be doing about it
Recommended Videos
Vaillant has been a go-to voice about climate and fires since the spring of 2023 when he published
, a gripping and often cinematic account of the 2016 Fort McMurray fire where 2,400 buildings were destroyed, and close to 90,000 people were forced from their homes. The damage estimates of $10 billion made it most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history.
At the time of this writing, the L.A. wildfires have killed at least 25 people, destroyed more than 12,000 structures and burned more than 155 square kilometres. Currently 83,000 people remain under evacuation orders. The Los Angeles wildfires are on track to be the costliest in U.S. history with projections of economic losses surpassing the US$100 billion mark.
“Climate science ain’t rocket science,” said Vaillant. “When you make things hotter and drier, they burn more easily.”
Postmedia caught up with Vaillant and asked him to weigh in on the L.A. fires and the issues surrounding them.
Are you surprised by the extent of devastation caused by the L.A. wildfires?
Well, you know, it depends on which lens you look at it through.
To see destruction on this level and impacts on actual people, I guess it’s shocking, not surprising…When you look at the trend of fire on planet Earth, the trend of temperature on planet Earth, no, it’s not surprising in the least. And it’s so unsurprising that insurance companies who follow this information and data and temperature trends very closely have been pulling their coverage systematically from this region for the past decade. Yeah, so they know. It’s not a partisan thing. It’s not a political thing. They look at the data, and they look at the weather, they look at the temperature, they look at drought codes, they look at previous fire damage, they look at precedents, and they extrapolate out, which is what any kind of reasonable person would do.”
Could it happen here?
I don’t know if you saw that oped I wrote in The Globe and Mail in August about the fires we had in Vancouver. But Vancouver could have been in the headlines if the wind had been blowing 10 knots faster, or it had been five degrees hotter, those would have been national headlines. Yeah, that’s how close we came.
How are the 21st century fires different from before?
They are hotter, faster, bigger and harder to fight. And any firefighter will tell you that…What drives them are various combinations of elevated heat and drought. So, Los Angeles had the hottest summer in its history this past summer, followed by eight months of drought. Imagine if your backyard experienced the hottest summer it had ever experienced, followed by eight months of drought, it would look pretty bad. And if you were doing a cookout, you would be a lot more careful.
The insurance companies adjusted their models based on the fact these fires were an inevitability. What’s the disconnect between what they know and government action?
There is a colossal and lethal disconnect between what oil companies know, what insurance companies know, what governments know, and what markets want. I’m going to read you a quote that is really blowing my mind. There’s a guy named Jason Hickel. He writes on degrowth. He’s a very gifted writer and professor out of the U.K. But here’s a quote he uttered:
“The climate crisis reveals that our civilization has never really been organized around science, contrary to the usual Enlightenment narrative. It is organized around capital. Science is embraced when it serves the interests of capital, and is often ignored when it does not.”
And it does not serve capital, right now in its current form, the status quo of capital, to decarbonize, to change the building code, to make things more fireproof, to remove the super abundance of petroleum products that infuse and imperil every modern house. And that’s the rub.
The irony is the cost is greater in the long run when you tally the bills for these increasing disasters.
It’s a dissonance that we’re all living in…it’s destroying capital…the tab for this fire has already exceeded $100 billion and it’s not over yet. And that’s not nothing to consider. (What these) calculations don’t take into account is lost wages, from traumatized people, from now homeless people. A whole huge segment of the workforce has just been completely disrupted…The other thing you know, in terms of the legacy of these fires, the impact on mental health and physical health also pulls people out of the workforce. It pulls people out of the democratic process because they’re just so busy, busy nursing their own wounds or taking care of their traumatized kids or other family members. So, there all these ancillary effects to these disasters that are really against the best interests of even a profit-driven society like ours.
The level of misinformation has been incredible. Is the politicizing of this a way for the incoming U.S. administration to distance themselves from the bigger climate crisis issues and subsequent fallout of a less than robust climate plan?
You know, it’s easier to create distrust and it’s easier to destroy things than to try to move the needle in a progressive way, in a challenging way, and invite, encourage people to embrace new things. And so it’s easier to go to old fear and old gripes than to new ideas about energy and about social justice.
Are you optimistic things will change?
Yes. This movement toward renewable energy, it’s unstoppable. Now it’s not going to happen as fast as the uptake of the smartphone in 2007. This is a decadal or even generational project, but it is happening for sure…I have hope that we’re gonna move away from petroleum, but how much damage to systems, human and natural is going to be done in the process, is anybody’s guess, but it’s for sure, going to be significantly worse than what we already have right now. I mean, a whole bunch of things — the 21st century is really a new age in so many ways, and a lot of things are going to change radically and be broken and lost as we recalibrate to this new reality. The 2020s are already a historic decade, and we’re not even halfway through it yet.
What can we take from this and help us be better prepared?
What L.A. is showing us is that major cities can burn spectacularly, and Vancouver is not exempt from that…we were capable of generating a heat dome. So, imagine if it had been 37 C with 40 knot winds. The whole west side would have gone. All the Pacific Spirit Park would have gone, no problem. And that’s what L.A. shows us, is really how vulnerable we are, and it’s a very stern invitation to reevaluate the flammability of our neighbourhoods and how we engage with fire and how we measure fire risk, because it’s not 1990 anymore. We don’t live in a rainforest anymore. We’re living in something new, and it’s not as wet as it used to be.
