TO ORDER, PLEASE USE THE LINK AT THE END OF THIS BOOKNOTES.

There is an excellent new book about spirituality coming soon that I want to tell you about next time — linking it to two other great ones. Stay tuned for that. I actually wanted to do this BookNotes later in the summer, but after a creepy seven-hour long drive back from Ohio through smoky smog and days of dangerous AQI readings from the tragic wildfires, I have to tell you about these riveting books now. Thanks to those valiant CCO friends who helped us load the book boxes back into the van through that serious heat and haze. We hope you got home safely.

Here in the mid-Atlantic (and beyond) the smoke from wildfires to our North descended upon us hard, making it difficult to breathe well outdoors. Even inside, the smoke came through the cracks in doorways and windows. For those of us with illnesses (just for instance, Beth’s breast cancer, and my less serious but still cancerous diagnosis) and anyone with asthma or other health issues, this is more than an inconvenience. It has been scary.

We are fortunate not to face the immediacy of horrific flames as those around our continent have, time and again, and our prayers go out, again and again and once again. The whole creation groans (Romans 8:22) and we along with it. Heaven help us.

Yet, thoughts and prayers (as our friends who have lost loved ones in mass shootings have reminded us) are not enough. We must understand the problem and do something. We must study up. As good neighbors and faithful citizens we must advocate for policies that might serve the common good, this time regarding the pressing problems from pollution. My dear friend Steve Garber’s book, Hints of Hope: Essays on Making Peace with the Proximate (Paraclete Press; $24.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99) reminds us that in this fallen world we cannot do it all, we cannot change the world in anything close to ultimate ways, but we can do something, providing some healing — maybe a bit shy of what Schaeffer suggested in True Spirituality as “substantial healing” — but real, offering tangible hope. I thought a lot about that book this week.

One of the joys and obligations of my vocation is to find books that are not only informative and helpful but that are inspiring, maybe even fun to read. We listed novels in our last BookNotes (and there are plenty more where that list came from) but we tend to specialize here in nonfiction. Sometimes authors we suggest are writing directly from a Christian perspective, other times not. In any case, we recommend books that we think you ought to read, that are helpful and important. Here, with a smoky smell I can’t yet wash away, are three that feel existentially vital. And, believe me, they are rip-roaring, amazing reads.

Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World John Vaillant (Vintage) $20.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00

Perhaps if you’ve seen me on any of our every-other-week podcasts you’ve noticed some books stacked up — I’ll admit, somewhat staged — on the desk, over my shoulder. One of the books there has been nominated for a prestigious Pulitzer Prize and also nominated for the almost always impeccable American Book Award. I put that hardback copy of John Vaillant’s Fire Weather there in honor of customers of ours who have lost much in tragic fires. I’ve been wanting to describe it here at BookNotes and I am sorry I am only now, with Canadian smoke in my nose, even through a mask when outdoors, telling you about it. It is now in paperback and it has been for me one of the most interesting and compelling books of the year.

Mr. Vaillant’s meticulous style is clear and detailed, the book arranged in three major sections. It is not quite as personal as the two that follow (they feature real-time glimpses of life in communities effected with first-hand journalistic verve and humane storytelling.) Fire Weather is a tad more scholarly, telling of an event that happened a decade ago, but even at its most detailed, it isn’t dense or plodding. I found it a page-turner, full of interesting facts and brilliant descriptions and touching episodes. One reviewer said it is “astonishing on every page.” Agreed.

The opening intro is breathtaking in its brief retelling of one of the worst disasters, and the costliest, in Canadian history, the 2016 wildfire in Fort McMurray in the far northwestern part of Alberta, Canada, not that far from the rugged Saskatchewan border. It is, as you may surmise, a book about forest fires and how climate change —  aggravated by our polluting the atmosphere so terribly — has made such fires more common and more severe. And that riveting introduction to the horror of the inferno in the boreal forest and the oil refinery town in the middle of the tar sands region in the otherwise very rural region heading towards the Arctic circle, sets the stage; wow!

As the good writer he is (he has previously published significant fiction and nonfiction) Vaillant has to do the background, setting the historical context of what in the world is going on in the near arctic regions of northern Alberta. The first three chapters, surprisingly, are worth the price of the book. In vivid prose he writes about how isolated and rural and expansive the geography of Alberta is. He describes the (rare) weathered buildings, the long, long roads, the Boreal forest, the animals — deer giving way to moose, crows giving way to ravens, coyotes to wolves, with the wild bison and 100 pound trout in huge lakes and big sky landscapes. Almost every page I noted something to quote for you, and after pages of post-it notes and so much stimulating writing, I realized I couldn’t retype paragraph after paragraph, pages of quotable writing. It’s fascinating, all of it.

He has to look at the history of this region — it hangs together as the dots slowly are connected — including telling the gruesome history of the Hudson Bay Company. A Scotsman named MacKenzie was the first European to traverse to the West Coast of Canada (years before Lewis & Clark did so in the US) and the Hudson Bay Company became more rapacious and profitable and extractive than their counterpart in the south, The East India Company, about which Edmund Burke said it was “a merchant masquerading as a State.” Vaillant studies the discovery of what we now call the Tar Sands region and a bit about the history of the oil and gas industry (including the discoveries in Titusville, Pennsylvania.) There’s even an old photo of derricks in Venango County, which many Pennsylvanians will recognize as south of Erie. That whole chapter is very important, as you will see.

(By the way, those who follow BookNotes who knew the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto and the Canadian Citizen’s for Justice & Liberty (CJL) in the late 1970s will recall John Olthius and Gerald Vandezande then leading faith-based activism against the MacKenzie Valley oil Pipelines that would only add to our dangerous oil addictions and commitments to the false gods of economic growth and hurt the indigenous First Native peoples, who declared “Our Land Is Not for Sale.” Yes, it is that MacKenzie whose name is seared into my memory from those heroic Christian lawsuits against big oil and in solidarity with the Dene so many years ago. By the way, earlier this year, the University of Toronto Press published a major work by Olthius telling of his life’s calling to bring legal action around Native people’s claims. It is called Dismantling Settler Colonialism: An Insider’s Perspective on Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples (University of Toronto Press; $35.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $28.00.)

Vaillant’s bit about J. Howard Pew (founder Sun Oil / Sunoco and funder of Grove City College and Christianity Today and other groups that blended his freedom-loving entrepreneurial spirit with capitalism and Christianity) is not just illuminating but vital to understand. Even in his old age in 1967, Pew threw a huge celebration about “man developing the Earth” in the seemingly forsaken region of Alberta, as they invested millions into the development of the tar sands industrial sites. Vaillant notes how many clergy were among the invited dignitaries commemorating this new stage of development at Fort Mac. How faith in progress, nominally driven by evangelical religion, justified all manner of polluting inventions — he talks about some of the largest machines in the world, some of the tallest industrial structures for thousands of miles around — is haunting.

I am a bit embarrassed about how I have not much considered the ways in which industrialization was linked to the early oil and gas industry, starting in part in Western Pennsylvania and eventually spread throughout the Americas. The amount of stuff under the ground in Alberta is truly vast, but not usable as the crude in, say, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Oklahoma, or Texas. A whole, expensive lot has to be done to the oily gunk in the Alberta tar sands — using Canada’s natural gas and creating lakes of stored industrial wastewater and huge piles of tailings like sulphur — to make it sellable.

Some of you may recall those of us who protested just a few years ago the pipelines criss-crossing the US to sell this gross and inefficient bitumen; religious nuns here in our area (in Lancaster, PA) went to jail rather than concede land and lend complicity to this unstewardly project. Anyway, this Fire Weather book has these great chapters about the origin stories (as he calls them) of the famously notorious project at Fort McMurray that is something like gigantic strip mining and mountainous, sloppy refineries, in a place that frankly sounds like working on the harsh landscape of the moon.

Vaillant has a chapter in Fire Nation about the processing of turning the gunky sand tar into something that is almost sellable in the global oil market, and, believe me, I was so intrigued I read much of it out loud to Beth, who also leaned in. (I was interrupting her reading a Madeline L’Engle novel, but this bit kept us both wondering how Vaillant learned so much about this secretive process and place.) In a region that otherwise seems like the Russian steppes of Siberia, 90,000 people live in Fort McMurray, many who describe it like Tolkien’s Mordor. Working dangerously for long, long hours in brutal temperatures ruins a man — they are mostly men — and the stories of workers there are worthy of a whole book. From the strip clubs to the church planters to the drug pushers to the truck dealers to the civil servants and industrial leaders, the info on this oddest place in North America is really fascinating. Even the complex chemistry of transforming this sludge was fascinating. He likened the process to something akin to putting molasses in a giant sandbox and trying to make rum out of it.

Some of the big Caterpillar vehicles used at the Suncor and Suncrude plants there have tires that sell for more than $8000 each and can explode like a bomb when the friction from the hundred-ton loads causes sparks. Things freeze up, too — the huge bulldozers are made for below freezing, but at below -40F even human eyeballs freeze. You can imagine the complexity of the working conditions for machines and people. The writing about all this is spectacular as he describes this center of the worst air pollution in North America and its unfathomable global impact.

I so agreed with a blurb by a writer from Slate who says that “Vaillant writes so vividly that he can make subjects like the mining of bituminous sand fascinating.”

And, slowly, we learn about the horrible scarring of this huge patch of Earth processing bitumen — one of the few things, like the Great Wall of China, that can be seen from outer space — and why it matters to the heat rise of the planet, and, yes, the increase in and severity of out of control wild fires. I do not recall Vaillant using the word ironic, but it is even now ringing in my ears that the place that contributed to global warming ends up being the very sport of one of the modern era’s worst fires.

Vaillant writes that,

The dramatic transformation of Fort McMurray from trading post to petroleum hub has been as rapid and radical as any on the continent, and it has followed the manic-depressive pattern of all petroleum boomtowns before it. Boomtown stories are part and parcel of American lore, but Canada has its share, and some of the most exuberant examples come from Alberta.

Vaillant cites an amazingly breathy report from 1914 of folks clamoring to buy shares of the oilmen’s profits, from a single day of trading where investors drove up the share price of the Calgary Petroleum Products Company by more than 1,600 percent.

He continues that first part of the “origin stories” before the heart of the book about the nature of forest fires, with this reflection on that financial boom.

Explosive growth of this kind mimics that of fire, and humans seem particularly prone to it. Fire is known to physicists as an exothermic reaction — that is, a reaction that unleashes more energy than was required to initiate it. Just as a single match of cigarette can burn down a house or ignite a landscape, a handful of men with novel trade goods, a drilling rig, or an IPO can set off a commercial explosion of buying and selling. Each of these events has the power to change the fortunes of a region and its inhabitants overnight.

The first 70 pages are surprising and captivating and important. Knowing the historical backstory is critical, believe me. And you’ve only just begun. Part Two (before the final, shorter third portion called “Reckoning”) is the hot heart of Fire Weather. Chapter Six starts with a haunting Seamus Heaney poem, “Mycenae Lookout.”

Buckle up, gentle readers, buckle up.

The story of how the historic fire at Fort McMurray developed and how the leaders there — the highest paid firefighters on the continent, trained, oddly not for boreal fires coming at you like a tsunami, but as typical urban firefighters — mishandled some of the early days of the terrifying battle, is, again riveting. I don’t usually read books that are thrillers or laden with action, and this learned and thoughtful study isn’t a cheap ride. But, man, you are on the edge of your seat, wondering, page by page, what they experienced and how it might resolve. More than one reviewer praised the visceral storytelling. There are a dozen more chapters, including a brief study of the explosive 2001 Chisholm fire that was first discovered by US atmospheric experts (some say NORAD) when they saw the exceptional high and energy-laden smoke plume, thinking it had to be an unannounced nuclear test, which it obviously was not. The hottest fire on record, these sorts of fires don’t just destroy, they vaporize nearly everything; the Chisholm burned as ferociously as if exploding multiple nuclear blasts per minute.

The famously huge McMurray fire is tragic — one spoiler I’ll share is that they evacuated almost 88,000 people, using the only road out of the city in the middle of nowhere with its complex of pipelines from the refinery stations — but we learn quickly part of the moral of the story. With climate change the air is hotter, even in the North, and dryer, in even supposedly rainy seasons. Fires are increasingly worse than ever. We simply must (I would say) elect bi-partisan public officials who take climate change very seriously. Ten years ago, when the McMurray inferno happened and this center of this exceptionally well-researched book is set, it was a relatively naive time in climate-change-informed firefighting. It was then an unprecedented episode and much has been learned about the strategies and skills of this kind of extreme firefighting in huge forest areas.

What is the larger lesson?  Fire Weather isn’t preachy or overly didactic, but the lessons are clear. The book could be called Fire/Weather as it explores the relationship between fire and weather. But when weather conditions are ripe — the heat and humidity in rural Alberta Canada mimicking Death Valley Arizona temps and humidity index — the word “fire” becomes an adjective to describe the weather. Either way, fire weather or fire weather you will hear again the pairing of these words, so expertly explored here by Mr. Vaillant. This is a wake-up call.

The original hardback (which we still have with its deckled edges and full color photos) of Fire Weather had the subtitle A True Story from a Hotter World (Knopf; $32.50 // OUR SALE PRICE = $26.00.) The paperback edition (the price we actually listed above) has the subtitle On the Front Lines of a Burning World. Either way, it is a fantastic read, a report that moves carefully with important historical context and which builds with thrilling narrative momentum, and ends with lots of mature reflection about recovery, science, policy, and citizenship. Highly recommended.

Before It’s Gone: Stories from the From Lines of Climate Change in Small-Town America Jonathan Vigliotti (One Signal Publishers / Atria) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

I waited for this to come out in paperback before pushing it as I thought with the somewhat lower price more folks might take me up on my invitation to read it. It is a sprawling, vivid report, a book I couldn’t put down. One learns a bit about the realities of climate science but it is mostly a narrative of a TV reporter who specializes in heading to danger zones to report on floods and fires and the like. I mean it: it’s an incredible read. As Publishers Weekly put it, “The prose is transportive, and stirring portraits ground the climate science.” They note that it is thoroughly reported and “disquieting” which is a nice way of saying it is troubling as hell.

Vigliotti is an Emmy and Edward R. Murrow Award-winning CBS News national correspondent; his work has taken him to over forty countries and territories across six continents. He’s been on CBS Sunday Morning, Face the Nation, 48 Hours, etc. I hope his acclaim in the industry (and the way he has put his life on the line to bring us up-to-the-minute live reporting) earns him respect. You really should read this, his only book!

Before I realized his award-winning reputation I picked up this book because of the “small-town America” line in the sub-title. I read another book (see below) about how climate change is effecting real Americans from Alaska to Florida, from Annapolis to California, and this, too, seemed to be the sort of book of immersive journalism that takes us into the locales of ordinary America. And this is done wonderfully well. He flies in — often being awoken in the middle of the night when he fetches his packed “go bag” to catch a plane somewhere — where perhaps after the first immediate report of a tornado or flood, heads to the local diner or main street cafe or grange hall or wherever else he can talk to real locals.

As Jeff Goodell (author of the best-seller, The Heat Will Kill You First) says, it is,

An account of a TV journalist on the climate beat that reads like it was written by Indiana Jones on Red Bull.

Exactly.

Vigliotti may be fearless and wired with Red Bull but he is gracious and kind, wanting to understand the pathos and human drama around the episodes of tragedy. He meets people, using his journalistic charisma and delightful personality, to (usually) get them to open up, even in moments of hardship. Some of it is heartbreaking, some of it infuriating, all of it beautifully told and candid and captivating. (Need to revigorate your prayer life? I dare you to read this book and not bow your head to pray for these real-life folks, and for him, that he could keep going in this valiant work.) Jonathan Vigliotti documents the people, families, communities, fields and landmarks impacted by climate changes of various sorts. For two decades or more he has criss-crossed the land, bringing us first-hand reports, making this book with a bit of his backstory almost feel like his own work-world memoir. Of course the spotlight isn’t really on him, but is about the devastation (and signs of hope and change) in real-world America. The prologue is called “A World Away Hits Close to Home.”

As it says on the back cover:

From massive forest fires in California to hurricanes in Louisiana, receding coastlines in Massachusetts and devastated fisheries in Alaska, we learn that warnings of a future impacted by climate change are no more; the catastrophe is already here.

Before It’s Gone: Stories from the From Lines of Climate Change in Small-Town America is arranged around four sections: Fire, Water, Air, and Earth. I can’t tell you how interesting all of this is, with little known backgrounder detours into historical matters that are utterly fascinating. (Payments made for white folks to move to Alaska to do permafrost farming; dust-bowl issues among farmers in the midwest and a chapter cleverly called “The Father of Soil” about an early agronomist.) The batch of chapters under the section “Air” is about the rise of both the amount and severity of tornadoes and his time with a twister chaser is breathtaking.  Don’t miss the chapter there called “Coffee, Grits, and Motorcycle Greats.”  Each time, I wondered what could be worse than the infernos or the floods. But that tornado secant — whoa! The land section — as complex as any of them — interviews Wendell Berry, too, as he studies the impact of the bad stewardship of big agribusiness.

As tragic and scary as the flooding chapters are and as tragic as the hurricanes and tornado parts are, it’s the fire section that starts the book that will have you glued to you seat, turning page after page of high-octane prose. The Pulitzer Prize winning Elizabeth Colbert (author of Under a White Sky) says it is “at once vivid and terrifying.”  Indeed it is, but it is the humanizing style of his conversations with fellow citizens, our own neighbors and relatives, even, that makes this such a moving portrait. There is urgency and drama and this personal touch. It is different than Fire Weather in style and, of course, covers more than the wildfires.

I hate it when I hear of people mocking the mainstream media or those who roll their eyes at secular journalists, as if they are all hucksters behind some desk, with some elitist ulterior motives. Jonathan Vigliotti has gulped his Red Bull and found himself in danger zones, just to show us and tell us what is happening in America, here, there, and in places some of us call home. It isn’t a screed about carbon emissions, although there are some side-roads into climate science. But it is mostly about the ways small town Americans are resilient. And need to be.

Again, it is not a screed, but he does make clear what happens when the icebergs start melting and the slight change in the temperature of the ocean effects the wind and weather patterns (starting in Africa, actually. Actually!) What a read.

Friends, this is not going to get better soon, and we simply must know more about what to expect in years to come. Before It’s Gone is a must read to help us understand, plan and prepare, and — please, Lord — work to remove the current administration from Washington who is doing so much to harm those fighting climate change. From cutting the budgets of life-saving climate research to cutting the caring work of FEMA, from rolling back EPA regulations to unleashing fossil fuels, Trump has put us all in danger. There is no debate about the facts of his policies. This good book isn’t about that, but it might inspire you to care and vote for candidates that realize the times and know at least some of what we must do. Whether you care about this topic much or not, this is an amazing book, full of energy and story. Thank you, Mr. Viigliotti.

At Home On An Unruly Planet: Finding Refuge on a Changed Earth Madeline Ostrander (Holt) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

Even before I started Vigliotti’s Before It’s Gone: Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Change in Small-Town America I thought of this, a book I had read a few years ago and which I’ve raved about often.. At Home on an Unruly Planet has been one of my go-to recommendations for anyone wanting a glimpse into the hard reality of what’s going on in recent years with encroaching changes in climate. It a powerful read and you’ll learn so much, and learn to care about so much.

You know we’ve got theological and Biblical studies on ecology — see, just for instance, anything by Steve Bouma-Predigar, like his delightful Creation Care Discipleship: Why Earthkeeping is an Essential Christian Practice (Baker Academic; $25.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $20.79) or, say, the fabulous collection of short pieces called Beyond Stewardship: New Approaches to Creation Care edited by David Warners and Matthew Kuperus Heun (Calvin College Press; $17.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39) — and we have more scientific books documenting carbon output and melting icebergs and changes in weather patterns.

But this one, At Home on an Unruly Plantet, like Vigliotti’s, brings it all home in very readable, even enjoyable, writing. Like Vigliotti, Madeline Ostrander is a brave reporter and a great writer with a good heart and keen insights. Like Vigliotti, she blends historical and scientific data with captivating, on-the-ground, first person accounts of the amazing resilience folks need to display in the aftermath of climate-related tragedies. This is very much about how we can protect our homes and our communities, knowing what is happening, and what will continue to happen, in the months and years ahead. It is a rich, serious book.

I raved about it in a previous BookNotes, and I’ll quote just a bit of what I said then; it explains it’s basic structure well, I think.

The four locations and contexts about which Ostrander writes in luminous detail include the wooded rural areas north of Seattle in the Pacific Northwest (and the crisis of forest fires, seen mostly through the eyes of a forest biologist and smoke jumping firefighter), the East coast of Florida and extraordinary drama of life-changing hurricanes (seen, fascinatingly, through the eyes of a woman who works in historic preservation in the oldest European-settled town in America, St. Augustine), a northern California urban landscape plagued by fossil-fuel disasters, including a toxic explosion (seen mostly through the eyes of a black, urban farmer) and, finally, the sea-rise in Alaska forcing the a village of Yupik people to start a decades long effort of moving to a new location as their land warms and erodes beneath them.

As the At Home on An Unruly Planet book cover says, rightly, “Ostrander pairs deep reported stories of hard-won optimism with lyrical essays on the strengths we need in an era of crisis.” Some may appreciate the essays in between the reporting of these four unfolding dramas, although those major four stories had me up late at night, sweating it out.

Like Vigliotti, Ostrander takes us on a firsthand tour of places, but while his book was places he was sent to because of immediate tragedies on which he was reporting, and goes from there, she traces, with in-depth and longer-term visits, her insights about four key places that have experienced hardship from climate change. As I noted in my above paragraph, she looks at rising water levels in historic Saint Augustine, Florida (and Annapolis, Maryland), she looks at forrest fires in some of the most riveting prose I’ve encountered, in the rural pacific NorthWest, she explains what is happening in an Alaskan village as they must head for higher ground as the permafrost melts under the village. (These Yupic peoples are perhaps the first real climate refugees among our American citizens and it is an amazing tale.) Whether it’s the firefighter who has to rebuild her own town after wildfires or an urban gardener and community activist rebuilding a harshly hit minority neighborhood in the Bay Area of San Francisco after a fossil fuel disaster (that many of us haven’t even heard of) At Home on an Unruly Planet is not only richly reported but includes “lyrical essays on the power of communities to find solutions and resilience.”

There is what one reviewer called “uncommon empathy” in At Home… and there is no doubt we will need more of this in coming seasons. The US citizens complaining this week about Canadian wildfires need some of that empathy, of course, as we all do. We need hints of hope that can encourage us to act responsibly, fully realizing we are in this together. Madeline Ostrander has reflected well on this crisis that is truly global in scope, but she focuses on our fellow citizens and neighbors here in the US. Bill McKibben is right, this book is “marvelous.” And urgent, troubling, and, yet, oddly enriching. It’s a good read, one you will never forget.

Which brings me back to Garber’s serious and profound Hints of Hope. Now would be a good time to get that one if you have not yet.  You know how much in means to many of us. Let us know if we can send one of those, too. We recommend it, now more than ever.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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