All tagged Canada

Fire Weather: The Petrocene & The Making Of A Beast / John Vaillant

Acclaimed author John Vaillant joins me to discuss Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast, a masterfully written chronicle of the destructive power of fire in the twenty-first century.

Humanity’s kinship with fire extends across the millennia. The conditions that allow fire to exist, let alone flourish, are the same that allow Homo sapiens to survive and thrive on this planet. Our relationship with this element has been mutually beneficial. Our ancestors use of fire propelled the rapid evolution of human anatomy and cognition. In turn, fire was able to spread, shaping the environments that allow us to co-exist, survive and thrive, forever binding the fates of human and more-than-human life with it.

Since the Industrial Revolution, and especially since the beginning of what Vaillant calls the Petrocene, the co-adaptive, co-evolutionary path we have carved out with this life-giving/life-destroying element has become discordant and unbalanced. Industrial humans, harnessing the incredible power of ancient fossil fuels over the past few centuries—a mere blink of an eye in Earth’s geological timescale—claimed mastery over this lively entity, and has, in turn, altered the global climate system so dramatically as to trigger a mass extinction event. A relatively small subset of the peculiar species we belong to have, with careless abandon, produced the conditions for fire to claim a larger and destructive role on the planet. Is it really that we are masters of fire, or instead, is it the other way around? 

Fire Weather is an astounding chronicle of the boreal fire that swept through Fort McCurray, Alberta in May 2016. Over the course of 24 hours, the nearly 90,000 residents of this modern-day bitumen subarctic boom town evacuated, escaping the out of control fire as it eviscerated everything in its path. Vaillant zooms in close, guiding us through the decisions made that day as the fire raced into the city, made by residents and authorities alike as catastrophe unfolded. He expands the story to situate Fort Mac as a nexus point in the larger settler colonial history of Canada and its inextricable relationship with the fossil fuel industry and extractive capitalism, all situated within our present paradigm of ecological crisis, climate change, and 21st century fire.

Demonic Metals: Cobalt & The Birth Of A Mining Superpower / Charlie Angus

Charlie Angus, MP for the riding of Timmins-James Bay in Ontario, Canada, joins me to discuss his new book Cobalt: Cradle of the Demon Metals, Birth of a Mining Superpower, published through House of Anansi Press. He shines a light on how the fascinating, and disturbing, history of a small mining town in Ontario, aptly named Cobalt, is tied up in the genocidal, and ecocidal, history of the nation-state of Canada, and its outsized role in the global mining industry today.

What does a small town in northern Ontario have to with Canada's rise to becoming the world's reigning mining superpower? How is cobalt, this "demonic" metal, tied to some of the most horrific crimes of settler-colonialism and financial, extractive capitalism in the modern era?