I was walking outside very early this morning. Ryder, our young golden retriever recovering from surgery in a cone collar, was insistent. Fortunately for me, the morning was exquisite. That unusual term for a morning describes a strong, sometimes overwhelming, physical or emotional sensation. This morning was all that. Wispy, pink eastern clouds with enough sunlight to cast long tree shadows and illuminate the morning dew as prismatic jewels. The air was cool and moist with a slight breeze creating leaf music in the treetops. Multiple bird songs accompanied in a boreal orchestra. It quieted my mind and filled my heart with gratitude for something gloriously larger than my small self. Ryder and I walked among a verdant biomass of long grasses, blooming wildflowers, and generously mixed trees. All was alive, thriving, and capable of overwhelming my lawnmower and chainsaw. My wife and I dearly love all the living things with which we share our land.
In contrast to the living green was the dying brown of balsam and spruce killed by an extensive budworm infestation. Dead and dying forest-fire fuel lined our ponds and filled sections of our forested land. Dying trees remind me of the dynamic change we inevitably participate in. In a broader sense, humans think we “own” the land. We log it, plow it, and change the natural flow of water to suit our needs. We remove mountain tops for the coal beneath and dig deep holes to reach iron, copper and gold. In this Petrocene Age, we pump billions of tons of greenhouse gases into our protective atmosphere. But humans are wrong in our sense of a controlling ownership. We are, in reality, simply dependent participants of a biological and natural process we don’t fully understand and cannot control despite our best efforts. The recent double earthquakes in Venezuela are examples of how fragile human impact can be.
On the other hand, modern “progress” has certainly impacted our world in big ways. Mainly through our ignorance of dynamic earthly processes beyond our conception in enormity and subtlety. Human innovations in meeting the needs of an expanding population in conjunction with individual desire for great wealth have changed the nature of our air, water, food supply, and weather. The nature of large forest fires has also changed. These fires are so intense that they create their own weather. It is a recent development called “fire weather.” The National Weather Service issues a “Fire Weather Watch” when weather and fuel conditions may lead to rapid or dramatic increases in uncontrolled wildfire activity.
The author John Vaillant published a book in 2024 called “Fire Weather—On The Front Lines Of A Burning World.” The book was passed to me by friends in southern Minnesota who do prescribed burns for their prairie restoration projects. They have spent time with us at our boreal forest home, so they thought the topic of the book would be of interest. They were right. What a book!
It is the well-researched story (thirty-six pages of notes) of the Fort McMurray fire in northern Alberta, Canada that devastated that oil-producing community in May, 2016. Reading the book (twice!) really opened my eyes to a number of things. First off was the enormous and sophisticated development in far northern Alberta. We have friends whose adult children work there, so we had a familial perspective without any real idea of the Fort McMurray infrastructure. Vaillant’s research revealed the most sophisticated and well-financed municipal fire department in all of Canada. It was financed by the multiple International companies extracting oil from the vast tar sands. The bus system that transported workers from the city to the oil fields had more buses than all of Greyhound of Canada. Vehicles used six-lane expressways with clover-leaf interchanges. The influence of tar sands extraction in far northern Canada was, and continues to be, simply stunning. A Google Earth search of the bulldozer-stripped boreal forest, wastewater holding lakes and Fort McMurray itself will shock you also.
“Fire Weather” is filled with city stories and personal interviews of its firefighters and citizens. The firefighters were a well-trained and equipped urban team with multiple fire halls. What overwhelmed all of them was something called the Wildland-Urban Interface or “WUI” for short. Many flammable materials make up any urban development, and Fort McMurray was no exception. The high land values meant homes and businesses were tucked closely together in the area’s dramatic topography. Fort McMurray’s flammable “Urban” development “Interfaced” a very flammable “Wildland” as is happening worldwide. Within hours of the forest fire’s outbreak, the urban firefighters and citizens of Fort McMurray realized they were unprepared for something they had never seen, experienced, or trained for. Fire Weather. Urban firefighters focus on individual structures. Forest firefighters work an entire landscape by intentionally destroying unburnt fuel load to prevent the fire’s spread. The strategies conflict. The Fort’s urban firefighters had to change tactics when their extensive training failed to suppress the conflagration. They transitioned into forest firefighters in their own city. They began creating fire breaks by intentionally destroying some homes as fuel load, trying to regain control of the monstrous fire.
That transition of tactics was suggested by Jamie Coutts, who, as fire chief of Slave Lake, Alberta, experienced a devastating wildfire in 2011. That fire destroyed one-third of his town before they changed urban firefighting tactics to forest fire tactics. He and his experienced firefighter son Ryan drove to Fort McMurray to offer assistance and advice based on their experience five years earlier. The Fort’s fire chief and crew were grateful for the equipment the Coutts brought but not their advice. It wasn’t till late in the day that the tactics developed in Slave Lake were adopted by Fort McMurray’s desperate firefighters.
Vaillant’s book really caught my attention because my wife and I live in the boreal forest and have already followed “Firewise” practices of construction and landscaping promoted by the US Forestry Department and the State of Minnesota. We installed an exterior fire suppression system around our buildings as is done up the Gunflint Trail. Several years ago, the US Forestry Department declared the Superior National Forest the most likely to burn that summer. Arrowhead volunteer fire departments were training and practicing evacuation tactics. The book and my local experiences got me to thinking and wondering about our community awareness of wildfire preparedness in addition to relying on our volunteer firefighters and federal firefighters whose budgets have been seriously cut. I wonder how prepared we are as individual property owners and as village communities. What could we do in advance of forest fires to help prevent such catastrophic destruction as Fort McMurray, Slave Lake, and California’s 2018 Camp Fire, which destroyed Paradise, Concow, Magalia, and Pulga?
“Imagine the unimaginable, then prepare for it” is a foundational concept in crisis management, risk assessment, and futurism. It is used by disaster response experts but is something all of us can use on a personal and local level. Independent self-reliance as well as community engagement are inherent to living in Northern Minnesota. I encourage reading John Vaillant’s book “Fire Weather” for a spell-binding read filled with awareness of a changing world that impacts us all living within our beloved forests. Being informed is the basis of preparedness. Read the book.
