[Applause] five 15 thank you so much Rosie and Jack uh and everybody really really good to be with you uh today um it's still morning for me so you're way ahead of me and I I hope you're all having a good day because um you know you're in the future uh uh so uh firew weather uh intruded uh into my life on May 3rd uh 2016 and I I made the mistake of of looking at Twitter when I was actually in a really beautiful Italian uh writer Retreat working on a novel and uh and so Twitter shouldn't be allowed in such places and yet there I I looked at it and this uh City Fort McMurray in Northern Alberta was completely shrouded in black smoke and uh Fort McMurray isn't really known to people outside of Canada or North America and it's it is the largest source of foreign petroleum Imports into the United States uh they just broke 4 million barrels a day of production uh it's about 600 miles north of the US border and 600 miles south of the Arctic Circle it's uh deep in the Boreal forest very isolated Place sitting on top of a gigantic bitchman deposit bitchman is not oil it is tar and in order to rent it into something that an American petroleum company will want to buy you have to burn billions of cubic feet of natural gas every day to process this stuff into something uh usable um it caught on fire the the the petroleum plant didn't but the city of roughly 100,000 people where all the workers live was overrun uh by a wildfire on the afternoon of May 3rd initiating the largest most rapid evacuation due to fire in Modern Times And this is what came across my Twitter feed on May 3rd and I'm looking at this and uh because Fort McMurray occupies such an outsized uh role in in the Canadian Consciousness because so much money is generated there and the wages are so massive it really touches the whole country kind of the way Silicon Valley touches uh the whole United States so um it was frightening to see the city disappear to see these ant-like Trails of cars uh crawling down this the the single Highway out of the city uh everything was going at this glacially slow pace because everybody was evacuating at once there was no understanding of who is left uh what is saved what has been burned who has died nobody knew for days and again I'm in Italy I'm thinking I should be in western Canada where I live this is the biggest story in a generation and uh so I was you know feeling ruthful about that and and Afraid for the people and thought no I'm here to write a novel and tried vainly to go back into it and then um really just couldn't uh Take My Eyes Off it in part because the fire didn't pass the fire burnt in Fort McMurray not for one or two or three days but for an entire week and the the Great Fire of London lasted for about 5 days and houses and entire work camps were burning to the ground in Fort McMurray two weeks later 2,300 square miles of forest burned in the process uh and again you know 90,000 people were evacuated um so um I'm looking at this and realizing this is obviously a national story but I I really try to write inter International stories I'm I'm interested in kind of universal themes and the closer I looked at this when I started looking at the the behavior of the fire and the conditions under which it occurred I realized that these are conditions that can be replicated almost anywhere in the world and again this was back in 2016 which seems like an almost quaint historic time when we consider the incredibly destructive fires that have burned since then across Greece uh even in the UK uh you've had I think you had the busiest fire day since World War II and I think it was in 2021 or 2022 during that terrible drought uh but you know Val parizo and Chile just literally last week uh just an apocalypse for them um so this is back in 2016 I'm looking at the conditions and it's you know this is the subarctic of Canada it's a cold place it's a wet place and yet it was um 30 3 Celsius that day and really more significant and something that we don't think about uh was the relative humidity and it it was 11% and that really doesn't have a lot of meaning uh for most of us and um it didn't have a lot of meaning for me until I started looking for places where uh 11% was normal and 11% relative humidity is normal in Death Valley in July and that's how dry it was in Fort McMurray in May there was Ice still on the local lakes there were car-sized blocks of ice on the Athabasca river which is the main water body that flows through that City uh so basically Southern California fire conditions were recreated in the Boreal forest um and that's a terrifying Prospect and that changes fundamentally how fire behaved and so I coined a term uh which is 21st century fire and it's a different animal it behaves differently we've got the same Planet we've got the same Sun we've got the same trees but when you tweak the Heat and you tweak the humidity that changes the dynamic and creates a space for fire an opportunity for explosive behavior that simply didn't exist in a lot of places prior so on May 3d this fire that started quite innocently in the forest um was unsuppress by human means they had water bombers on it they had Hot Shot crews albertans are very good firefighters and they could not put this fire out um the temperature and the humidity did not change it stayed very hot at night which is one of the characteristics of 21st century fire and really 21st century climate change the temperatures are not dropping at at night the way they used to so it stays warm and the warmer it is the easier it is for fire to to expand uh so we have this um hot explosive situation that on May 3 with very little provocation became 100 meter Flames across a wall um about 10 kilometers wide and so it's really you have to think something more like a tsunami of flame that sweat Ste in to the city of Fort McMurray which has a lot of suburban settlements on hilltops the river flowing through it uh kind of urbanized downtown and the um you know these are all things that I really had no idea about when I was going into this story but but radiant heat which is the heat that tells you not to touch the candle flame is energy that moves at the speed of light and the radiant heat coming out of the forest Forest into the neighborhoods of Fort McMurray was 500 celsus that day that's hotter than the planet Venus and what the heat does what heat does for fire is it dries out the fuel and then it also causes whatever available hydrocarbons they are it might be in the trees it might be in the leaves it might be in the rubber tires it might be in the vinyl siding on the side of the houses or the tar shingle roofs or the plastic uh swing it causes the hydrocarbons in those fuels to vaporize so we're feeling the heat we're seeing the smoke we're trying to get out what the fire is seeing is this it's almost like an aura it's this cloud of billowing fuel emanating not just from the forest but now from the city itself and Vapor is what fire engages with think of a gas can exploding the houses in Fort McMurray these are twostory half million doll state-of-the-art brand new homes burnt from the roof to the basement in five minutes because they were super heated in their entirety to 500 Celsius vaporizing like crazy and so everything engaged at once and firefighters cannot fight that human beings have no means at their disposal to uh uh combat that so this is a petroleum town and what I took me seven years to understand seven years to write this book that the petroleum industry is a wholly owned subsidiary of fire it's kind of a crazy idea it's feels a little bit backwards but the petroleum industry and all of us too are servants now of fire and our servitude to liquefied fuel over the past 150 years has changed the nature of our atmosphere to the point that fire is now able to burn more broadly more intensely on planet Earth than at any other time in human history so the question now is is fire serving us enabling us to live these spectacular po lives where we have unparalleled mobility and many of us are able to generate much more wealth because of it even Ordinary People or are we serving fire and enabling it to PL uh prosper and flourish in in Fire's terms across the globe more intensely than it ever has and I think the historical record the geologic record will indicate that that fire got the better end of this deal uh and that's U you know that's in our future somewhere right now what the what the future what the planet is telling us um is to pay attention and and what what the petroleum industry has allowed us to do is to think that we don't need nature to think that we can manipulate it that we can amp it up or damp it down as we need to uh we can drive in vehicles that insulate it from its uh us from its effects live in homes that insulate us from its uh various changes and and fluctuations and what it is now you know what I the message I get from this Heating and from these fires is kind of being grabbed by the collar and saying I'm out here I'm impacting uh I'm being impacted by you and your impacts are now um causing me to uh impact you in return in ways that that are not tenable so um you know the message that the kind of the obvious message for me is you know to decarbonize as as rapidly as possible but I was also um you know really resonating to what what Jackie was saying is you know it major obstacles stand in our way and yet a friend of mine here uh from Alberta uh in fact said when when he became a father he understood that he was morally obligated to be an optimist and and I think going through the world now in an in an energetic way in a in a proactive way in a positive way is a practice it's not sort of a matter of well I'm having a good day today so I guess I'll do something positive it's really uh it's a conscious effort and um we also have to remember uh that that Nature's default mode is reveres it's it's to flourish it's to rebound and it's to regrow that's what it wants to do when you stop killing anything um it generally rebounds I learned that when I was writing the tiger when you stop shooting Tigers they breed like cats and that's what uh the Living World wants to do is reproduce itself and so that's uh very hopeful to me and I want to be a part of that and that's um you know as I've been traveling around with this book and people are wondering how do we face this how do we confront this um there is there are uh along with these really Grim uh indicators from our climate there are also these incredible gains being made around renewable energy and around the way people are renegotiating their relationships with nature uh through a Agriculture and Forestry and just as a way of being more uh living more lightly on the world and those people are in abundance among us and it behooves us to Ally ourselves with them rather than get tangled up with the people who appear to be still wedded to the an Ever bigger truck or um expanding uh petroleum operations and so there's you know there's sort of different there different Pathways we can choose and it's very easy to get distracted by the negative and overwhelmed by the negative I love that comment uh pessimism is for lightweights uh very challenging and uh but I'm exhilarated by it and uh I'm here for it so thanks so much for your attention and really good to be with you all