Alarm Bells

You could say that John Vaillant benefited from a lucky coincidence when the release this spring of his book on climate change, fire, and the near destruction of Fort McMurray, Alberta, in 2016 coincided with smoke blanketing the media capitals of Canada and the United States. But that wouldn’t just be cynical; it would be wrong. No coincidence, lucky or otherwise, was necessary, because over the past decade, major forest fires have become a feature of virtually every summer and spring.

Vaillant’s previous non-fiction books focused on high-drama conflicts that illustrated aspects of humanity’s impact on the natural world. In The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed, from 2005, he used the bizarre protest-killing of a mutant spruce tree in Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, to tell a larger story about destruction of West Coast forests. In The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, from 2010, he focused on a showdown between a...