Welcome to Zero. I am Akshadrati. This week, the cult of fire.

On May 3, 2016, a wildfire in the boreal forests of Sub-Arctic Canada, some 600 miles north of the U.S. border.

Forest fires are not uncommon here, but this one was different.

The day it broke out, the temperature was several degrees hotter than the previous record,

and thus the fire spread rapidly.

Soon it had engulfed the city of Fort McMurray in the province of Alberta.

The fire stood out for its size and its speed,

but it interested writer John Valiant for another reason, its location.

Fort McMurray is a company town. At its heart is the oil industry. You might not have heard of

tar sands oil or bitumen before, but it's a sticky, viscous substance that requires extremely

energy-intensive steps to turn into usable crude oil.

Canada sells millions of barrels of this stuff every day.

The story of how fossil fuel extraction made Fort McMurray and how a fire, supercharged by the effects of global warming nearly destroyed it is the

subject of John's latest book. Fire Weather is a bestseller and Pulitzer finalist. It's a deeply

reported work of nonfiction that taps into some of the contradictions of the way we live today.

I got to talk to John about it a few weeks ago at the Charleston Festival near Lewis in the

English countryside. As we'll hear on this episode, the fire at the heart of the story is a

thing of awe and terror. But it's also a distinctly man-made disaster.

When I read fire weather, I was struck by the sheer force it takes to extract bitumen.

Massive machinery, huge shovels, an enormous amount of energy and human willpower,

all of which in this story set the stage for a great deal of destruction.

When I spoke with John, I asked him to begin our conversation by reading a passage from his book that describes just how bitumen is extracted from the Canadian Earth.

...