As flames rise, true progress beckons

Editor’s note: This column continues a recent exploration of the natural world in an industrial landscape. 

In the late early 1900s, Minnesota Republicans, Democrats, and Farmer-Laborites all claimed the word “progressive.” At the time, the word meant building society and everything that comes with it. This included scooping horse manure off the streets, mowing the park grass, and installing expensive infrastructure with money taxed from the mines.

“Progressive” also meant cutting into virgin forests and destroying much of the natural world. This policy enjoyed broad agreement. There was little debate. But for those who wish to return to this approach, a word of caution.

In financial terms, none of this was sustainable. For instance, when Iron Range towns laid paved streets in 1904, some leaders actually believed that they would cost less to maintain than dirt roads. Builders of the state highway system in 1921 believed something similar. 

Today, paper trillions roll through public budgets each year for more tar: never enough … not nearly enough. Elections turn on whether gas costs $3 or $4 per gallon, even though U.S. taxpayers spend about $20 billion per year subsidizing the oil industry.

Meantime, clear cutting forests in the name of progress also carried a steep price. Here in Minnesota, slash piles and mountains of enormous stumps fueled the wildfires of 1918. Whole towns burned. Hundreds died. 

The horrific events of 1918 taught us better forestry and fire fighting strategies, but the threat of disaster still smolders. We are free to doubt the consequences of climate change, but they’re already happening. By the time our skeptical society accepts reality, we’ll have sacrificed far more than was ever necessary.

One deeply researched example may be found in “Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World” by John Vaillant. Vaillant’s book mostly describes the 2016 wildfire that destroyed a large portion of Fort McMurray, Alberta, a bitumen oil extraction town on the edge of Canada’s expansive boreal forest.

On the surface, the book stands as a thrilling tale of horror and heroism as firefighters evacuated the city of 88,000 in the face of a supercharged wildfire. Despite the destruction of more than 2,400 homes, there were no fatalities. 

But the real strength of “Fire Weather” is the textured analysis of history. Technically, the fire started in 2016. And yet, the first sparks flew decades earlier, when human thirst for petroleum products became insatiable. Vaillant sets this scene without ignoring the ways people have benefited from the extraction of oil.

“Behind the wheel of a Chevy Silverado, a one-hundred-pound woman can generate more than 600 horsepower as she draws a six-ton trailer at 60 miles an hour while talking on the phone and drinking coffee, in gym clothes on a frigid winter day,” writes Vaillant. “Prior to the Petrocene Age, only a king or pharaoh could have summoned such power, and its equivalent would have required hundreds of enslaved people and draft animals. Today, with cheap and plentiful oil at our disposal, everybody’s an emperor.”

Vaillant presses one crucial metaphor throughout the book: People and fire are more alike than we’d like to admit. 

“Fire may not be alive or conscious in the sense that we are, and yet its behavior manifests a vitality, flexibility, and ambition often associated with intelligent animals,” writes Vaillant. “Likewise, we may not appear as flickering sprites composed of light and smoke, and yet, distilled to our essence, we are fire’s kin — gas-driven, fuel-burning, heat-generating appetites who will burn as bright and hot as we can, stopping at nothing until we’re fully extinguished.”

Fundamentally, people and fire both desperately seek to satiate our cravings.

“There’s a saying in the business world that applies equally to wildfire: ‘If you’re not growing you’re dying,’” reminds Vaillant. “That’s the oxygen talking.

“Petroleum — fire on demand — has allowed and encouraged more people to burn bigger, brighter, and faster than anything else in history,” continues Vaillant. 

Later, he considers our development, what we must do to overcome the climate challenges we’ve created.

“We may be a force of Nature, but we are not a mature one,” he writes. “Like adolescents through all of time, petroleum burners want the power, but none of the responsibility. In this way we (the species) are not so different from a fire.”

Fort McMurray survived its great fire, but was evacuated again just this year in the face of another. That’s precisely Vaillant’s point. There will be more such fires, extending ever closer to populated centers, causing problems that can’t be ignored.

“Not so different from a boreal fire, [Fort McMurray] only knows how to do one thing,” writes Vaillant. “Narrow specialization and over-dependence on a rigid status quo are lethal to species, industries, and civilizations alike.”

Though the Iron Range and its surrounding forests do not produce oil, we are a hub of the industrial supply chain that feeds the industrial conquest we were all raised to celebrate. We may embrace “green steel” and other methods of reducing our carbon emissions, but we must also consume less and conserve more for those strategies to work. 

Tough sell? You bet. That is, in essence, the next step in our progress as a species. Do we have it in us to try?

Thus, the word “progressive” may one day mean not expanding the use of fire to advance humankind, but rather finding ways to reduce its dangerous grip on our public imagination.

“That there will be life at the end of the Petrocene Age is a certainty,” concludes Vaillant in “Fire Weather,” “but whose, how much, and where is less clear.”

May it be ours, here, and as many other places as possible. We will have to make progress, however, for this wish to come true.