The Chinchaga Firestorm

The Chinchaga Firestorm PDF Author: Cordy Tymstra
Publisher: University of Alberta
ISBN: 1772120030
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
How the biggest forest fire in North American history affected and changed forest fire management.

The Chinchaga Firestorm

The Chinchaga Firestorm PDF Author: Cordy Tymstra
Publisher: University of Alberta
ISBN: 1772120030
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
How the biggest forest fire in North American history affected and changed forest fire management.

Firestorm

Firestorm PDF Author: Edward Struzik
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1610918185
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
"Frightening...Firestorm comes alive when Struzik discusses the work of offbeat scientists." —New York Times Book Review "Comprehensive and compelling." —Booklist "A powerful message." —Kirkus "Should be required reading." —Library Journal For two months in the spring of 2016, the world watched as wildfire ravaged the Canadian town of Fort McMurray. Firefighters named the fire “the Beast.” It acted like a mythical animal, alive with destructive energy, and they hoped never to see anything like it again. Yet it’s not a stretch to imagine we will all soon live in a world in which fires like the Beast are commonplace. A glance at international headlines shows a remarkable increase in higher temperatures, stronger winds, and drier lands– a trifecta for igniting wildfires like we’ve rarely seen before. This change is particularly noticeable in the northern forests of the United States and Canada. These forests require fire to maintain healthy ecosystems, but as the human population grows, and as changes in climate, animal and insect species, and disease cause further destabilization, wildfires have turned into a potentially uncontrollable threat to human lives and livelihoods. Our understanding of the role fire plays in healthy forests has come a long way in the past century. Despite this, we are not prepared to deal with an escalation of fire during periods of intense drought and shorter winters, earlier springs, potentially more lightning strikes and hotter summers. There is too much fuel on the ground, too many people and assets to protect, and no plan in place to deal with these challenges. In Firestorm, journalist Edward Struzik visits scorched earth from Alaska to Maine, and introduces the scientists, firefighters, and resource managers making the case for a radically different approach to managing wildfire in the 21st century. Wildfires can no longer be treated as avoidable events because the risk and dangers are becoming too great and costly. Struzik weaves a heart-pumping narrative of science, economics, politics, and human determination and points to the ways that we, and the wilder inhabitants of the forests around our cities and towns, might yet flourish in an age of growing megafires.

Lookout

Lookout PDF Author: Trina Moyles
Publisher: Random House Canada
ISBN: 0735279926
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
A page-turning memoir about a young woman's grueling, revelatory summers working alone in a remote lookout tower and her eyewitness account of the increasingly unpredictable nature of wildfire in the Canadian north. While growing up in Peace River, Alberta, Trina Moyles heard many stories of Lookout Observers--strange, eccentric types who spent five-month summers alone, climbing 100-foot high towers and watching for signs of fire in the surrounding boreal forest. How could you isolate yourself for that long? she wondered. "I could never do it," she told herself. Craving a deeper sense of purpose, she left northern Alberta to pursue a decade-long career in global humanitarian work. After three years in East Africa, and newly engaged, Trina returned to Peace River with a plan to sponsor her fiance, Akello's, immigration to Canada. Despite her fear of being alone in the woods, she applied for a seasonal lookout position and got the job. Thus begins Trina's first summer as one of a handful of lookouts scattered throughout Alberta, with only a farm dog, Holly--labeled "a domesticated wolf" by her former owners--to keep her company. While searching for smoke, Trina unravels under the pressure of a long-distance relationship--and a dawning awareness of the environmental crisis that climate change is producing in the boreal. Through megafires, lightning storms, and stunning encounters with wildlife, she learns to survive at the fire tower by forging deep connections with nature and with an extraordinary community of people dedicated to wildfire detection and combat. In isolation, she discovers a kind of self-awareness--and freedom--that only solitude can deliver. Lookout is a riveting story of loss, transformation, and belonging to oneself, layered with an eyewitness account of the destructive and regenerative power of wildfire in our northern forests.

What You Take with You

What You Take with You PDF Author: Therese Greenwood
Publisher: University of Alberta
ISBN: 1772124699
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
A memoir of disaster, survival, and “how our treasured objects can be the priceless vessels that carry the stories of both our past and our future” (Diane Schoemperlen, author of This Is Not My Life). Four years after Therese Greenwood and her husband moved to Fort McMurray, Alberta, their new community was shattered by one of the worst wildfires in Canadian history. As the flames approached, they had only minutes to pack, narrowly escaping a fire that would rage for weeks, burn more than 85,000 hectares and force 80,000 people to flee. In this book, she tells her dramatic story, and contemplates mourning, memory, and rebuilding. “By considering the things that she lost in the blaze and the things that were saved, Greenwood takes the reader with her through her own evacuation, the road to safety, the grief that she experienced on losing her home, and the steps to her recovery . . . a beautiful book, sharply observed [and] gripping.” —Miranda Hill, author of Sleeping Funny

Fire Weather

Fire Weather PDF Author: John Vaillant
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0735273170
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the award-winning, bestselling author of The Golden Spruce and The Tiger comes a stunning account of a colossal wildfire, and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind. 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. For hundreds of millennia, fire has been a partner in our evolution, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways. With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America's oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. John Vaillant's urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.

Dark Days at Noon

Dark Days at Noon PDF Author: Edward Struzik
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228013488
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The catastrophic runaway wildfires advancing through North America and other parts of the world are not unprecedented. Fires loomed large once human activity began to warm the climate in the 1820s, leading to an aggressive firefighting strategy that has left many of the continent’s forests too old and vulnerable to the fires that many tree species need to regenerate. Dark Days at Noon provides a broad history of wildfire in North America, from before European contact to the present, in the hopes that we may learn from how we managed fire in the past, and apply those lessons in the future. As people continue to move into forested landscapes to work, play, live, and ignite fires – intentionally or unintentionally – fire has begun to take its toll, burning entire towns, knocking out utilities, closing roads, and forcing the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people. Fire management in North America requires attention and cooperation from both sides of the border, and many of the most significant fires have taken place at the boundary line. Despite a clear lack of urgency among political leaders, Edward Struzik argues that wildfire science needs to guide the future of fire management, and that those same leaders need to shape public perception accordingly. By explaining how society’s misguided response to fire has led to our current situation, Dark Days at Noon warns of what may happen in the future if we do not learn to live with fire as the continent’s Indigenous Peoples once did.

A Journey Through History with the Davenports

A Journey Through History with the Davenports PDF Author: Roger Davenport
Publisher: Balboa Press
ISBN: 1982296054
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
The main focus of this book is to answer the questions that my close relatives would have wished they had asked me before I started “pushing up daisies” . When I was at school the subject that I detested was history. Now, many decades later writing the family’s history from a different perspective. Throughout my book I highlight stories about the world that was, yet some of the outcomes have resulted in many benefits for today’s society. When I reflect on the past, many of these events would have been regarded as irrelevant and little attention would have been paid to them. No doubt the dates of the births and deaths of Kings and Queens are important but so are many things one can learn from the quirky events and changes that happened as society progressed. Some of these were good and some were not. That is for you, the reader, to judge and hopefully, learn from them. Throughout my book in which the stories are told, they are presented with a sense of humor and interjections.

An Accidental History of Canada

An Accidental History of Canada PDF Author: Megan J. Davies
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228021715
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
Although Canadian history has no shortage of stories about disasters and accidents, the phenomena of risk, upset, and misfortune have been largely overlooked by historians. Disasters get their due, but not so the smaller-scale accident where fate is more intimate. Yet such events often have a vivid afterlife in the communities where they happen, and the way in which they are explained and remembered has significant social, cultural, and political meaning. An Accidental History of Canada brings together original studies of an intriguing range of accidents stretching from the 1630s to the 1970s. These include workplace, domestic, childhood, and leisure accidents in colonial, Indigenous, rural, and urban settings. Whether arising from colonial power relations, urban dangers, perils in resource extraction, or hazardous recreations, most accidents occur within circumstances of vulnerability, and reveal precarity and inequities not otherwise apparent. Contributors to this volume are alert to the intersections of the settler agenda and the elevation of risk that it brings. Indigenous and settler ways of understanding accidents are juxtaposed, with chapters exploring the links between accidents and the rise of the modern state. An Accidental History of Canada makes plain that whether they are interpreted as an intervention by providence, a miscalculation, an inevitability, or the result of observable risk, accidents – and our responses to them – reveal shared values.

Star Territory

Star Territory PDF Author: Gordon Fraser
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812252926
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
In Star Territory Gordon Fraser charts how the project of rationalizing the cosmos enabled the nineteenth-century expansion of U.S. territory and explores the alternative and resistant cosmologies of free and enslaved Blacks and indigenous peoples.

The Miramichi Fire

The Miramichi Fire PDF Author: Alan MacEachern
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228002842
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
On 7 October 1825, a massive forest fire swept through northeastern New Brunswick, devastating entire communities. When the smoke cleared, it was estimated that the fire had burned across six thousand square miles, one-fifth of the colony. The Miramichi Fire was the largest wildfire ever to occur within the British Empire, one of the largest in North American history, and the largest along the eastern seaboard. Yet despite the international attention and relief efforts it generated, and the ruin it left behind, the fire all but disappeared from public memory by the twentieth century. A masterwork in historical imagination, The Miramichi Fire vividly reconstructs nineteenth-century Canada's greatest natural disaster, meditating on how it was lost to history. First and foremost an environmental history, the book examines the fire in the context of the changing relationships between humans and nature in colonial British North America and New England, while also exploring social memory and the question of how history becomes established, warped, and forgotten. Alan MacEachern explains how the imprecise and conflicting early reports of the fire's range, along with the quick rebound of the forests and economy of New Brunswick, led commentators to believe by the early 1900s that the fire's destruction had been greatly exaggerated. As an exercise in digital history, this book takes advantage of the proliferation of online tools and sources in the twenty-first century to posit an entirely new reading of the past. Resurrecting one of Canada's most famous and yet unexamined natural disasters, The Miramichi Fire traverses a wide range of historical and scientific literatures to bring a more complete story into the light.