Fire alarm: Rethinking innovation in an increasingly volatile world

The wildfire that devastated Fort McMurray in 2016 burned more than 579,000 hectares of land, drove 88,000 people from their homes and caused nearly $10 billion in damages. It’s often seen as an outlier, a freak natural disaster. But extreme wildfires, like those that tore through Los Angeles earlier this year, are becoming more intense and harder to control. “We all saw the smoke, and too many of us have seen the fire,” says John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast. “Weather is different now, and fire is different now.” Hotter, drier weather is turning our forests into kindling, and emergency responders are struggling to handle our new reality: intense, unpredictable fires fuelled by a changing climate. In this special episode, host Manjula Selvarajah sits down with Vaillant to better understand how we got here and to see if there is any way out.

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John Vaillant: So by now, it’s clear that climate disruption, of which fire is just one manifestation, is the issue of our time. It’ll impact every aspect of our lives for the rest of our lives. If there was ever any doubt that this was so, the past two summers have settled it. We all saw the smoke, and too many of us have seen the fire. Weather is different now, and fire is different now.

Narration: That’s John Vaillant, giving a talk at MaRS in December. He’s a journalist and the author of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize–nominated book Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World about how in 2016, the community of Fort McMurray was overrun by wildfire.

John Vaillant: So I wrote Fire Weather not to pick on the petroleum industry or the tech industry, but to demonstrate how and why catastrophic urban fire is now possible in just about any city or town.

Narration: Fires, like those we saw in Los Angeles, are becoming more unpredictable, more unmanageable and massive in scale. As John said, what used to work doesn’t really apply anymore. There’s this concept of discontinuity John brought up, that’s really interesting, where our past experiences stop being useful as a guide to solving future problems. Firefighters have been experiencing more and more discontinuity in battling these blazes because fires are at a scale we’ve never seen before. So much so that researchers who study wildfires noticed a big jump in 2023. That summer, satellite data showed just how hot the Canadian wildfires burned. In terms of radiative energy, it’s estimated they released a whopping 42 terawatts.

John Vaillant: Terrawatts. That’s a trillion watts. That’s what you power cities like Beijing and Tokyo and Mexico City with. It’s a colossal amount of energy. You know, unprecedented is kind of a tired term now, but you can see how radical a departure that was.

Narration: I’m Ellen Payne Smith, producer of Solve for X. Now, this special episode was recorded live at the MaRS Climate Impact event in Toronto last December, where host Manjula Selvarajah sat down with John Vaillant after his keynote. Here’s their conversation on why we might need to rethink our approach to innovation (and adaptation) in an increasingly volatile world.

John Vaillant: A more positive and forward-looking way to interpret this moment is as a stern invitation to mature out of petroleum-powered, AI-enhanced capitalism’s dangerous delusion that a) nature is some kind of bottomless trust fund that we can draw on at will with no consequences, and b) that we are somehow in charge. I don’t care what business you’re in, virtual or actual, nature owns 51 percent of it — at least. Until we recognize the natural world as more than a full partner in everything we do, she will continue to remind us in progressively more violent ways, and she will continue collecting on that debt. Thanks a lot.

(applause)

Manjula Selvarajah: Thank you, John. I was so caught up in the fire of your words that it took me a minute to realize I’ve got to come up. Can we give him another hand?

(applause)

John Vaillant: Cheers.

Manjula Selvarajah: So you’ve talked about this idea of our assumption, this wrong assumption that nature is this bottomless trust fund. I want to tell you something about this building. You may know this already. So what’s interesting about this building is between right across the road and here is where Banting and Best discovered insulin. And what that makes me think of is that there is one bottomless trust fund that we can access, and that is innovation. So I know that you have said that you fear the idea of tech solutionism, but is there a space here for technology to innovate — innovate us, maybe not completely out of the issue, but perhaps help with some aspect of it, resilience, adaptation, whatever it may be?

John Vaillant: I think there, of course there is, and I think there’s… We are kind of relentlessly, compulsively creative as a species, and I think this room is filled with particularly creative people, and that process is so exhilarating and potent, especially when you you know just the folks who are up here before us, what they’re describing and the scale that they’re moving at and the future that they envision, that’s a really exciting vision and future that I would like to be part of. I want to live there, too. And I think, though, there are these hidden costs, even to our best ideas. And that’s where, you know, how do we square the energy appetites of the way we live now with the carrying capacity of the planet and the climate and, you know, the server farms and how they are powered is a real, you know, it’s an elephant in the room. It’s very far from this room, though, and so somehow we need to feel free and excited and positive to conjure up ideas and aim, you know, for the stars. But at the same time, we have to check in and ground ourselves and say, “Where is this energy going to come from, and what impact is it going to have on either the Earth or the climate?” And you know, we are in a climate crisis right now, and it’s unfortunate that our leaders don’t bravely acknowledge that. I’m saying it. I know some of you are saying it, and we need to act like it. And so there’s, there’s a tension there, I think between the creativity and the real cost.

Manjula Selvarajah: Now you talk about the ingenuity in the book, and the ingenuity of the oil and gas industry that is operating this massive system that supplies gas to us everywhere, every day. How do you think we can engage the oil industry to use that influence, reach and power toward things like adaptation and resilience? Can we?

John Vaillant: I do think we can. And, honestly, I think about that all the time. And I also think we owe the petroleum industry a massive debt of gratitude. And a room I would love to be in someday, and I want to suggest this to you too, is to be in a room with a huge whiteboard and each person individually lists the ways petroleum has touched and improved and enriched their lives. I mean, everything here is mediated through petroleum-fuelled fire and energy. And there are many, many petroleum products on our bodies, under our bodies, and we need to acknowledge that and I think be grateful for it. These are really excellent products. And at the same time, we also need to bravely call out the very cynical, often illegal and dishonest methods by which the petroleum industry seeks to perpetuate itself and stifle the kind of innovation that you all are promoting. And there’s a real tension there. And that’s a brave and difficult room to be in. I think we can do it.

But I think to come in saying, “You guys are terrible, you’re destroying the planet.” No, you built probably the greatest supply chain system the world has ever known. You know, when you think of how, I mean, most people here only run out of gas when they make a mistake and don’t fill their tank, and otherwise it takes a massive disaster, which there are more of now, to break that chain. But otherwise, the chain works day and night, year after year for almost a century now.

So that’s really amazing, and there’s a lot to learn from that, and there’s a lot to be grateful for in that. And so I think, maybe, to start there is, you know, what are  what has it given us so far? You know, in this, you know, obviously incredible wealth and mobility and all this. But it’s also, you know, obviously time to move on. The climate is telling us in more and more insistent ways that we need to do this. And so, I remember when, you know a number of big total, and I think BP rebranded themselves as energy companies, rather than, you know, petroleum companies. And so that’s a step in the right direction, but then you need to back that up. And that’s not what’s happening now, they are really doubling down on petroleum production, and that is a problem.

And so I don’t know where we find the leverage and the courage and the backbone to confront them directly and sort of with you know, on the one hand, “Thank you very much. This was really great. You have a lot of expertise that can help us move into the next phase. But now we actually need to do this. You are delaying action, and you are actually causing harm.” And so that’s… that’s where we need to go.

Manjula Selvarajah: What’s interesting, because that kind of confrontation that you talk about, you know, confrontation, or perhaps even the innovation that is needed, I think there’s a failure to act here, right? There’s a failure to act, there’s a failure to confront. And I wonder if that’s tied into this idea that came up in your book, and it’s a failure of imagination, right? And you call it the Lucretius problem. Can you explain that in this context?

John Vaillant: Lucretius was a Roman poet and philosopher active in the first century BC, and he noticed this glitch in human consciousness and cognition which still exists today, which is people basing their idea of future extremes on past experience. And, you know, Nassim Taleb, the guy who wrote The Black Swan book. He summed it up, you know, “The fool believes the tallest mountain in the world is the tallest mountain he himself has seen.” And this, you know, I think it hurt firefighting in Fort McMurray, where people prepared for a 1990s-style fire. And this wasn’t. It was a 21st-century fire that could do things no one had ever seen happen before. So you have the pyrocumulonimbus, you know, 45,000-foot, basically self-perpetuating firestorm sending lightning out, you know, 20 kilometers away, starting new fires. And you have houses, again, $600,000, two-storey houses burning to the basement in five minutes, burning like milk cartons. And no one had seen that before.

And we do hurt ourselves and put ourselves at a disadvantage to climate change, because we haven’t seen all the crazy stuff that climate change has in store for us, but there are examples of it around the world. And so we need to look at Australia and say, “OK, that’s not just an Australia problem that could actually happen in the Northwest Territories.” And so we need to have a kind of more global, open-minded, imaginative view. And you know, I think people do that creatively. People in this room are imagining things that haven’t existed before. We have that capability, but we also have this limitation that we stumble over periodically, and it can really hurt us.

So, you know, there’s just a tension we are… we’re these old animals with some out-of-date hardware and software moving into this extraordinary, accelerated future, and we are still primates. So we should have some compassion for ourselves, but we should also bravely acknowledge our common weaknesses and mistakes and that includes, you know, our kind of clannishness and our default impulse to kind of circle up with our tribe.

Manjula Selvarajah: You know, the other thing that struck me from the book is this idea, and this might be a scary concept for some of the people here, so I’ll say that right away, but that once you read the book and you get, you get an understanding of the conditions that were there, you start thinking, “You know, potentially, this could happen Stanley Park in Vancouver. This could happen with Rouge National Park in Toronto.” Can you explain to me what makes our cities so susceptible to this kind of fire, the 21st-century fire that you speak of?

John Vaillant: So 21st-century fire is, you know, generally exacerbated by rising temperatures. And fire likes heat, you know, so the hotter it is, the less work the fire has to do to get things up to combustive temperatures. And with heat comes evaporation. So hot air holds more moisture, so it will dry the forest out, it will dry all fuels out more quickly. And you know, the easy way to understand that is to think of your laundry on a damp, cool autumn day, it’s going to sit out there and mold, or you put it out there on a hot, August, breezy day, and it’ll be dry in half an hour. And that’s what the forest does too. You know, it’s really, I mean, climate science is not rocket science. It’s really quite simple. So in terms of this heating that we’re all experiencing that makes all of our forests, all of our fuels warmer, and therefore evaporation happens more quickly, more readily. The whole Northeast of the United States has had thousands of fires in the past month, and I just did a piece on that for The New York Times, because it’s unprecedented. And I grew up in New England, I know what it’s like. You know? You know what Toronto is like, what Ontario is like. Well, now it can burn in ways that we are not used to, that we have never seen before. And so we really have to recognize the Lucretius limitation and say, “Nope, this is now possible here,” and we need to act accordingly.

Manjula Selvarajah: And we’re building very dense communities, too.

John Vaillant: Yeah. I mean, so you know, we have to live somewhere. Wood is a great building material, but there is a lot of low-hanging fruit to reduce the danger that fire poses to communities. But you know, the first step is admitting to ourselves this actually can happen here. And that’s, you know, who wants to do that really, you know? Because we all liked it. A lot of us, most of us, liked it the way it was, you know, and it worked for us. And now we have to add this new vulnerability in there. And there’s a lot of those in our lives these days. It’s a lot to ask of an individual and of a group.

Manjula Selvarjah: It’s interesting because you’re calling for collective action. But one of the things that we tend to do around disasters is we look to who the party is that can save us from this. And in this case, and it happened in Fort McMurray as well, that they were looking at firefighting. Talk to me about if the firefighting tactics and equipment that we have in municipalities across the country here in Canada, do you think they’re ready to handle what we’ve just talked about?

John Vaillant: So…

Manjula Selvarajah: Where do things stand?

John Vaillant: I have a case in point, Manjula. If you look in The Globe and Mail from August 12, I published an op-ed in there about a terrible fire we had in Vancouver just in August. This was not a hypothetical fire. This was a six-storey condo that caught on fire because a torch-on roofing job went bad, and that fire took off. It was not exceptionally hot, it was not exceptionally dry, and you could see the flames of this building from 40 kilometres away in broad daylight, and it maxed out the Vancouver City Fire Department to the point that… so houses around it, it generated so much heat that trees and houses around this condo were bursting into flames. And there was so much energy that it was sending fire brands as big as our heads into Pacific Spirit Park. So now firefighters are in the park running around, chasing these embers down so that Pacific Spark Park doesn’t catch on fire. It got so out of hand, they were so over, over matched that they were giving high school kids fire hoses like, “You take that block.” That’s how intense it was. And this was just one local fire and then another fire ignited on the east side of Vancouver a few hours later, that was a three-alarm. Fifty more firefighters were tied up, and so between those two fires, Vancouver’s fire service — which is a good one — was maxed out, and they were having to bring in support from Richmond and Surrey and elsewhere. So we’re not ready.

Manjula Selvarajah: I mean, I remember hearing somewhere in an interview, you talk about the temperatures sort of in the centre of that fire in Vancouver.

John Vaillant: Well, there was, there was one of those huge construction cranes. They weigh 50 tonnes or whatever. It melted and fell over and collapsed across…

Manjula Selvarajah: So in the hundreds of…

John Vaillant: Well, 50 tonnes or so, I think is what they weigh. And it went across 41st Avenue, which is a main thoroughfare, you know, took out all the trolley lines, crushed the house on the other side. There was a person in the house who miraculously escaped. Canada’s been incredibly lucky so far. We’ve lost some firefighters, which is too many. We’ve lost a couple of civilians, which is too many. But compared to Paradise, California, or Lahaina or Valparaiso, Chile, where 200 people were killed in wildfires this spring, you know, we’ve really gotten off easy. And I feel like in a way, because we’ve been so fortunate, we’re not really attending to the real risk these energies pose.

Manjula Selvarajah: You know, in talking about ideas, I think of someone that I interviewed on the first season of the podcast, Solve for X. I spoke to Dr. Amy Cardinal Christianson. She’s a research scientist with expertise in Indigenous fire stewardship. Fascinating conversation. We talked about prescribed burns, the concept of good fire. She said that Indigenous guardians hold the key to reducing wildfires and their cost. What are your thoughts on this?

John Vaillant: Oh, I am so with that. And it’s a really exciting development out west. California, I think you know in so many ways, is kind of leading the northern hemisphere on how to handle fire. And you have, you know, prescribed burners, you know, people who go and set, you know, good fire on the landscape at safe times of year to burn out underbrush and just clear out a lot of ladder fuels, working with Indigenous people who are still in touch with their burning traditions that were suppressed along with language and culture and everything else, you know, as you know, the settler project kind of took over. And this is awakening now. And so this, this is real reconciliation, because this is also reconciling our relationship with the land and with the people who understood it best and who really helped shape it over the, you know, since the last Ice Age receded, so we have the opportunity now to relearn that. You know, that chain is not completely broken. And we’re very lucky that that’s not the case.

And so now there’s this beautiful melding of fire scientists and foresters working with Indigenous people to reconnect good fire to the landscape. And you know, we all grew up with Smokey Bear, and you know, “You should put out your campfire,” but fire is a natural part of ecosystems, including back here, including back east. So that is, that’s a new frontier for the 21st century that’s really exciting.

Manjula Selvarajah: There is a new era south of the border, which comes with a drill baby drill agenda. And we’re in an interesting space here. What we have here is a building that is full of startup energy. Across the road, we have this amazing university. And really, if you kind of walk out and walk around the corner, you have Hospital Row. So, nexus of innovation here, right? What’s also interesting about this room is you have a lot of people that are trying to solve problems of one kind or the other. You know, there’s someone who’s making completely compostable plastic containers on one side as an example. What is your message to this room?

John Vaillant: Well, I’m a dual citizen, and the first round of Trump felt like a hallucination, and this second round is so shocking to me. I think a lot of the guardrails have been dismantled. And so I just think about Don’t Look Up, and the meteorite is coming. And you know when it’s going to hit, it’s going to be January 20, and this is going to be different than the last one. And there is a lot of anger in this incoming administration. There is a hit list, an enemies list, and it is a government sort of by and for oligarchs, and that we’re going to see some very painful things.

And that same energy is abroad in Canada. And, you know, without naming names, you know, there are people very much aligned, you know, with Trump’s mission, and you know, which is, you know, to dismantle social institutions. So we are going to need to fight for the things that we care about in ways that we haven’t before. And we may have to take the gloves off. And I don’t know what that means, because I’ve never been here before either, but this is again the Lucretius problem.

Other nations have been through this. Other nations have had coups, have had their governmental systems dismantled, have had social structures dismantled intentionally and willfully. We cannot think of ourselves as, “Well that happens in Venezuela, but that would never happen to us.” You know, that’s what they said in Fort McMurray. “Those fires, you know, happened to little communities. There’s no way a fire is going to get into Fort McMurray. We are so robust, and it’s never happened before.” Well, we need, I’m sorry to say, we need to entertain that possibility and brace ourselves for it, and think about how we are going to build a bulwark against it. And I’m really deadly serious about that, and I didn’t realize that Fire Weather was an allegory for the current political climate, but it is, and so in Fire Weather, we can see the mistakes people make and the successes and the really hard-earned wisdom that people have won from that experience.

Manjula Selvarajah: On that note, John, we could go on for another 30 minutes, but thank you. Thank you for joining us here and congratulations on the book.

(applause)

 
Solve for X is brought to you by MaRS. This episode was produced by me, Ellen Payne Smith. Lara Torvi and Sana Maqbool are the associate producers. Mack Swain composed the theme song and all the music in this episode. Gab Harpelle is our mix engineer. Kathryn Hayward is our executive producer. Watch your feed for new episodes coming soon.

 
Photo illustration by Workhouse and Kelvin Li