The following description comes from the event organizer.

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil 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 — author of The Tiger and The Golden Spruce — 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. Vaillant’s urgent work, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World (Knopf), is a book for — and from — our new century of fire, which has only just begun. Vaillant will be joined in conversation by Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction.