“Unless we are willing to escape into sentimentality or fantasy, often the best we can do with catastrophes, even our own, is to find out exactly what happened and restore some of the missing parts.” — Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire
The great burning of Jasper, a place of national solace, speaks to an unfolding tragedy whose many parts we dare not name, let alone discuss.
There are several great fires contained within this single tragedy, and yet as Canadians we continue to deny them the same way glib politicians pretend that we can build back better once yet another conflagration has consumed another town or city.
Yes, we can restore houses, often with lesser-quality materials, but not without a loss of heart. Grief is not something we can command away like a dog. It sticks to us, leaves a mark and then departs only after it has reordered our being. “Who doesn’t know this doesn’t know much,” said the poet Mary Oliver. Contrary to popular belief, resilience is not a chewing gum that politicians can purchase at a dollar store.
Our primitive brains, of course, can sort of imagine the enormous 100-metre wall of flame, fuelled by heat and wind, that engulfed Jasper National Park and its townsite as a monstrous beast that generated its own lightning.
What our brains cannot appear to grasp is how the scale of human industry now shapes these monsters and multiplies their daunting numbers. Some call it overshoot, and others call it the metacrisis. This awkward and inadequate term includes everything from diabolical technological complexity to the exhaustion of soils and oceans. So, too, the quiet death of birds and fish by plastic.
But the real story is more pointed than that. One species found a remarkable energy source: fossil fuels. Then one billion humans gorged on the resource to become eight billion people served by 500 billion mechanical energy slaves — the devices, from cars to cranes to cookers, that serve us.
The pollution from these slaves has now melted ice, acidified oceans, dried forests, roasted the climate and contaminated the world with forever chemicals. Yet the magnitude of our destruction escapes us. The Titanic powers on, ignoring all peril, because its metabolism demands more fuel and growth. While one half of the crew calls for livelier music, the other half proposes to electrify the engine with even rarer materials. Meanwhile no one wants to discuss the scale of the tragedy unfolding on deck.
One of the forces driving the wall of flame that consumed Jasper is almost beyond imagination and belongs to no political party. Scientists can now measure the amount of energy absorbed on Earth from the sun and the amount going out. The amount of incoming energy must equal that flowing out to space in order to maintain a Goldilocks climate. Carbon dioxide emissions act as an enormous blanket that skews the balance.
As a consequence the Earth energy imbalance is changing, and rapidly. About 10 years ago the amount of energy being trapped by CO2 emissions equalled the force of 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs per day, every day. Now it equals the force of 800,000 Hiroshima bombs every day.
This explains why our oceans experience “heat anomalies” and why our burning forests are expelling more CO2 than the existing trees are capturing. It explains the growing ferocity of the floods, the hurricanes and the heat waves rolling over civilization like plagues of old.
To understand the calamity of Jasper and more Jaspers to come, it is important to close your eyes and imagine the explosion of five atomic bombs per second. The climate scientist James Hansen recently noted that as long as more energy is coming in than going out, as long as the Earth energy imbalance is positive, the planet will continue to get hotter.
Inertia is another fire smoking our vision and fogging our brains. Our leaders continue to promise some magical energy transition, yet fossil fuel consumption keeps rising.
We don’t dare admit that maybe the metabolism of a high-energy-use civilization simply can’t change, short of a heart attack.
Nor do we want to consider that it may also unravel as quickly as a mature lodgepole forest beset by bark beetles.
In the face of these realities we stand mute, unable to marshal a response. How did the great historian Barbara Tuchman put it? “Inertia in the scales of history weighs more heavily than change.”
One of the most disturbing things about the Jasper fire was the public’s polarized response. The left blamed Premier Danielle Smith’s aversion to accepting the reality of climate change, and the right blamed Justin Trudeau and bark beetles. The right claimed the federal government had mismanaged the forest, while the left hollered that the Alberta government had underfunded firefighting and failed to prepare for the non-linear impacts of climate change.
Yet there is much blame to go around. As a species we have moved into the forest and then suppressed fire, an agent of renewal, for far too long, and we have burned fossil fuels to terraform these landscapes with abandon. Now, with so much human detritus crowding the landscape, from pipelines to power lines, we fear prescribed burns as much as lightning strikes and runaway campfires.
Here again the Jasper fire speaks of a greater truth. A conflagration has no political stripe. It will evaporate any ideologue in an instant. It will reduce the bone of human hubris to ash. A runaway freight train, which resembles the roar of a wildfire, does not care if the idiots playing on the track are deeply polarized about train accidents.
My friend Ed Struzik, the author of Dark Days at Noon (a magnificent history of fire in Canada), has helped to set the record straight here. More has been done in Jasper National Park to reduce fire risk than in almost any other Alberta jurisdiction. So if wildfire, fuelled by a warming climate, unlimited energy spending and a growing human population, can’t be stopped there, it means that just about every foothills and northern community can expect tragedy to arrive at its doorstep sooner or later.
A pattern keeps on repeating itself. One week we watch 10,000 British tourists evacuating the island of Rhodes; the next we learn that 100 people burned to death in Lahaina, Hawaii. The towns of Lytton, B.C., and then Enterprise, Northwest Territories, disappear in a flash. Flames blister the paint off fleeing cars. And then Yellowknife is evacuated. West Kelowna burns. And now Jasper.
The facts don’t seem to bother us much. Or even change our reductionist thinking. We remain an emotional and self-righteous animal easily overwhelmed by too much information. Anyone who thought the internet was a good idea didn’t read about the Tower of Babel.
Last year, Canadian wildfires turned nearly 7.8 million hectares of forest into charcoal. That represented more than a quarter of all tree cover loss globally in the year. As a consequence, the emissions from Canada’s burning forests exceeded the emissions from oilsands projects by five times. Hell, they exceeded national industrial emissions by three times. The great burning of 2023 released nearly four times the carbon emissions of the global aviation sector in 2022.
As it gets hotter, and that is the damned forecast, you can see where this tragedy is going. Jasper will be remembered as a small paragraph in a new book of revelations — our collective book of losses.
Arrogance is another fire burning brightly. Humans have built a high-energy technosphere dependent on fossil fuels, but this technosphere remains tethered to and dependent on a badly damaged biosphere.
Nature understands the importance of volatility and variation. As animals we are subject to these laws regardless of our class or TikTok accounts. We have already tried, but we can no more cancel history than we can remove tragedy from our lives.
I once thought that the Slave Lake fire and the Fort McMurray fire might bring us to our senses and invite some clarity.
But they did not. Humility is a rare human trait, and denial remains a comfortable couch.
Whatever you have been told, climate change is not a technical problem with a defined solution but a manifestation of a much more profound predicament — too many people consuming too many fossil fuels and resources on a finite and flammable planet.
Our growing polarization tells us how grave this predicament has become. Civilizations fail when their elites can no longer agree on what the threats are, let alone how to respond to them. In bemoaning the ruin of fire, as they must, our leaders unwittingly declare their impotence if not their incompetence.
Every forested community in Canada now looks more and more like an unwary Pompeii at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. I know, because I live in one in the Porcupine Hills. I am surrounded by drying fir trees and flammable fescue. The powers that be have suppressed fire here for 150 years, and I fear the consequences will be epic.
The writer Norman Maclean grew up in the West and understood its dryness and its hubris. He didn’t write much, but everything he penned is a gift from God. Before he died, he retold the tale of the 1949 Mann Gulch fire in Young Men and Fire.
That monstrous event consumed the lives of 13 young men on a hot afternoon in Montana. Temperatures of 36 C had parched the forest that day. But the trees probably were not as stressed and dry as those now cooking in the foothills and boreal forests.
All of these vibrant young men, elite members of the Smokejumpers, thought they were beyond the grip of tragedy. Like us, they saw the fire coming, but they couldn’t outrun it.
“There’s a lot of tragedy in the universe that has missing parts and comes to no conclusion,” Maclean wrote. “Including probably the tragedy that awaits you and me.”
