Video, Past Event, Environmental Justice, Urban Issues
John Vaillant: Fire Weather
Join SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement for a talk with author John Vaillant about his latest book, Fire Weather. In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s petroleum industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon.
Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world. John Vaillant’s urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.
The event featured a discussion and Q&A moderated by Am Johal.
About John Vaillant
John Vaillant is an author and freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and the Guardian, among others. His first book, The Golden Spruce (Knopf, 2005), was a bestseller and won several awards, including the Governor General’s and Writers’ Trust awards for non-fiction. His second nonfiction book, The Tiger (Knopf, 2010), won the B.C. Achievement Award for Non-Fiction, was a bestseller selected for Canada Reads, and has been published in 16 languages. In 2014 Vaillant won the Windham-Campbell Prize, a global award for non-fiction. In 2015, he published his first work of fiction, The Jaguar’s Children (Knopf, 2015), which was long-listed for the Dublin IMPAC and Kirkus Fiction Prizes, and was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His latest book, Fire Weather (Knopf, 2023), is a #1 national bestseller, and a finalist for the National Book Award (US), the Baillie Gifford Prize (UK), and the Writers‘ Trust Nonfiction Prize.
Presented by
SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement and The Jim Green Foundation
