John Vaillant & Rob Macfarlane

John Vaillant & Rob Macfarlane | Fire Weather

Recorded: Mon 27 May 2024

Duration: 1 hr

John Vaillant & Rob Macfarlane | Fire Weather

One Off Event - May 2024

Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Winner 2023, John Vaillant

For hundreds of millennia, fire has been a partner in our evolution, shaping culture and civilization. Yet in our age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in ways never before witnessed by human beings.

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, Alberta, the hub of Canada’s oil industry, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster turned entire neighbourhoods into firebombs and drove 90,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the story of this apocalyptic conflagration, John Vaillant explores the past and the future of our ever-hotter, more flammable world.

Award-winning writer John Vaillant and nature writer Robert Macfarlane tell the remarkable story of Fort McMurray, a brutal urban wildfire, and explore our rapidly changing relationship with fire within the urgent midst of climate crisis.

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