Forests and Trees and Climate
Three books to come to terms with our burning world and what is required
July is festival month for me. I always, for 25 years running, end the month going to the Calgary Folk Festival. A month of live music is incredibly enervating and renewing, and the Winnipeg Folk Festival & Calgary Folk Festival always give me a boost. Since moving to Winnipeg 5 years ago, I make a point of driving to Calgary on the Wednesday before Folk Fest, so I will be there for all 40 hours of music over the four days.
This year, that drive was on July 24th. Driving across the Prairies that day was a hot and smoky day. There was a forest fire haze in the air due to our forests, once again, spending the summer on fire. This time it was primarily from a fire near Jasper, Alberta, over 1,000 km away.
Into the Maelstrom
On July 24th, after about 10 hours of driving, just west of Medicine Hat the sky turned considerably darker. The western horizon was no longer hazy it was black with smoke. A distinct plume hung ahead, as we drove west the black smoke completely blotted out the sun. In Calgary, ash was falling from the sky and even from a couple of kilometres away the downtown skyline was completely invisible.
At the same time, as we drove into what felt like an apocalyptic scene, the Jasper fire reached town limits. The Town of Jasper had been evacuated the day before, and now, as I entered Calgary the fire entered Jasper.
Over the next couple of days, Jasper became the third Alberta town to burn, joining Slave Lake in 2011 and Fort McMurray in 2016.
Our skies and air regularly fill with smoke, it now seems like an annual occurrence. Weather reports contain smoke conditions and warnings. Fire “season” is now pretty much year round. New terms have entered our lexicon like “zombie fires” that never go out and “fire tornados”. Sadly, possibly because it is now a yearly thing, it is something we have become inured to.
The response, from political leaders and others, is to look at what immediate action to take to make it better. Whether it’s more funding for forest fire fighters, better forest management, “more logging”, better evacuation responses and warning systems, it is all woefully inadequate. We are literally missing the forest for the trees. That forest is the climate crisis.
Climate Crisis
We broadly understand we need to address climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is understood that manmade GHG’s are warming the planet and action is required. We have seen some steps taken to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. We are producing more renewable energy than ever, the sale of electric vehicles is booming, and climate denialism is waning. But for all that, we are not making real progress.
The challenge of climate crisis is huge. It is bigger than the individual actions we are taking, either as citizens or as governments. It is challenging our political and economic systems and even our abilities to think about how to go about dealing with it. At best, we are taking small steps in the right direction, at our worst we fall back into “what aboutism”.
To make real progress, we need to better understand not just climate change itself, but the challenge of our very human approaches to problem-solving.
Human Limitations
So finally, and the point of this post!, three books to help us wrap our heads around the challenge we are facing and the futility of our thinking and approach to date. This list is also intended to be read in the order presented, rather than in publication order.
The Ingenuity Gap
First is Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Ingenuity Gap, published in 2000. This book is not about climate change. It is fundamentally about the limits of “human ingenuity” in addressing the increased complexity of our world. Homer-Dixon posits that as systems becomes more complex, be it in international trade, technology, or indeed the environment, these systems no longer respond in a linear manner. Part complexity theory, part chaos theory, The Ingenuity Gap shows how complex systems, and for our purposes that would be the climate, don’t specifically react to an action as intended or believed.
Human ingenuity is one of incrementalism, building on previous actions, either positively or negatively. It is how we have developed as a species, grown our civilisation and our economies. It is an approach that has served us well, growing into a world spanning and world altering species.
The “ingenuity gap” is the gap between our linear systems thinking and the non-linear systems we are increasingly surrounded by. Our historical linear approach to systems: “if we take action A, then B will result” is failing us in our complex interconnected world. This book lays out the limits of our problem solving abilities in today’s world.
Fire Weather
Next on the list is Fire Weather by John Vaillant. One of The New York Times Top Ten Books of 2023 and currently nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. It is nominally the story of The Beast, the Fort McMurray fire of 2016, the conflagration that led to 88,000 people being evacuated on a few hours notice and resulted in the destruction of much of the city. It is really about how our world has changed and we haven’t come to grips with that yet.
With each smoke filled day, forest fire is the most present indicator of that changed world. We can no longer say that climate change is something that will happen, it is here. In tracing “The Beast”, burning through the heart of the Alberta oil sands, Vaillant shows how our hotter world is challenging how we think about our forests, cities and how we live in this new environment.
The burning of Jasper, Ft McMurray, and Slave Lake, to name a few Canadian cities, is no accident. “Fire Weather” shows how the conflagrations we are seeing are completely man made. From anthropomorphic climate change, to the urban forest interface where we build, to how our homes are literal fire bombs, our hotter world is exploding around us.
Filled with interviews and commentary from those who lived through the Ft McMurray fire, several of whom I know, the common response from those involved is one of disbelief. Residents and first responders alike never thought this could happen.
Vaillant’s book is a clarion call to believe it. The climate crisis is here. The hotter world we were warned about is here, now.
The Ministry for the Future
The final book to read in this series is The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Robinson is a science fiction writer, and Ministry for the Future is a book of fiction. But, as the blurb on the cover states, it is “the best science fiction nonfiction novel”. The book essentially starts today with a cataclysmic heat dome over India that kills millions of people. It is a grim and shocking opening scene, but one that unfortunately is not far fetched. This year we saw over 1,300 pilgrims die during Haj and thousands more ddie during the July India heat wave.
The Guardian: Heat Inequality Causing Thousands of Unreported Deaths
The Ministry for the Future lays out the action needed to actually address climate change and reverse the self-destructive path we are on. It shows the extent of a system wide approach required to react to climate change already happening, to adapting to the future change already baked into our global climate, and to what is required to turn the corner and get us to the target of 350 ppm CO2 established as the safe level for humans on this planet.
*I was born at 319.48 ppm, reading on August 14, 2024 was 422.66 ppm
Kim Stanley Robinson shows that our response, to be able to return to the safe level of 350 ppm, requires an all-hands-on-deck approach. That approach needs to be system wide and concerted. Our response to the climate crisis, and yes it is a crisis, needs to include economic and trade systems, transportation networks, social structures, political systems, and how we work with the environment rather than opposed to it.
We Have Met the Enemy
The Earth is on fire. Dying coral reefs, burning forests, killer heat waves, glacial outbursts, and so many other cataclysmic events show us we are fully and completely in a climate crisis. So far, the climate modelling done has been proven right or understating the effects of our hotter world.
There is no magic bullet solution. As much as we might want a simple solution, there isn’t one. A carbon tax isn’t going to do it, particularly not at the same time as we build more pipelines and complain about the cost of gasoline. Buying an electric car is not a solution as long as we continue to build ever expanding cities.
Addressing the climate crisis will need us to not only overcome our addiction to fossil fuels, we need to overcome our very human nature. That might be the biggest challenge of all.
So far, we are failing.
Brian
