His Fire Weather gives us a hard-hitting portrayal of the events and aftermath of the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire in Alberta, Canada, which caused billions of dollars worth of damage, destroyed around 2400 homes and forced the evacuation of over 80,000 people. The American Canadian journalist and author is here at the recent Jaipur Literary Festival, and we are talking about his reading and writing, and about why he feels female leadership can help save the world. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation:

John, you've written on such different themes: Fire Weather on fire and climate change, a novel about undocumented Mexican migrants, and also a book about a man-eating tiger in the forests of the Russian Far East. What draws you to these themes?

As a writer, you can tell when a story is good. My aunt would call it 'a pricking in my thumbs.' With the tiger story, for example, I saw a documentary film about it, and 15 minutes in, I knew it would make an amazing book. A one-hour documentary script is about 50 pages long, and there's only so much depth you can capture. So I wrote to the director, Sasha Snow, and asked if anyone had approached him about writing a book. Luckily, he said no. It's the story of a lifetime. I can't believe I got to write it. You're from a tiger culture; there's a lot of anthropology, animal biology and tiger behaviour in the book I'm sure you will recognise.

Did you travel to Russia to do the tiger story?

Going to the Far East is very difficult. It's a hostile place. Russia is a mean, broken country, and it was in 2006 and it is even worse now. There's no support there. Very poor, very, very corrupt. I had the good fortune to go with a guy from Vancouver, where I live, a 25-year-old who is kind of a linguistic genius, and he spoke fluent Russian. He had done his undergraduate thesis in Khabarovsk, which is only 140 miles from where the tiger was. Nobody goes there. It's hell. And he went there to do his research, so he knew the region, and he had friends there. And he said, 'You know, I'll translate for you if you give me time to visit my friends.' So we went for a month, and then we went for another month the next year. It was really a collaboration—the story of a lifetime.

You grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. I read that your father is a psychiatrist and social scientist, and your grandfather was an archaeologist. How did that shape you?

I had an incredibly rich childhood; I was well-educated and lived in a beautiful home. But that's not what I mean by rich. I mean all over the house was original art, historic art, antique furniture. Because my grandfather worked in Mexico, and his father-in-law also worked in Mexico, all the family houses were filled with Mexican things. Some of that is, you know, colonial acquisition by rich white people, which happened, but my grandfather also knew Diego Rivera and my grandmother went to Frida Kahlo's first solo show in 1953. As a white kid in New Hampshire, this was unique—no other houses had this stuff.

The real gift of everything I just described was that it gave me access and kind of permission to explore this much wider world, to be interested in the lives of others who were very different from yourself.

What was your childhood reading like?

I was surrounded by books and was read to. My childhood books are still favourites; they helped shape the way I structure stories. There were books by Holling Clancy Holling—he wrote a number of picture books about American historical themes. And so a child could just look at the pictures, the diagrams of how a covered wagon is made, and the marginalia. And then there's a story going through that carries you along. That's how I write. I have the bright, vivid pictures, word pictures, you know, the fire, the tiger. And then around the edges, there's all this technical stuff and historical stuff, and you hope that the reader will be kind of carried through by the bright, shiny pictures, but they'll pick up this other stuff.

In Fire Weather, you come down hard on the oil corporations and the Government for enabling climate change. Have you had any pushback on this?

I sometimes wonder if my phone is tapped or something, but no, not yet. These people are so powerful, and they have such a sense of their own power. Anyway, I'm not going to stop. What's going on there is the crime of the millennium, being perpetrated by banks, the fossil fuel industry, and the governments that enable them. The petroleum industry is run by very smart people who have access to the best science. They know exactly what's going on. They've made financial decisions, and moral decisions, to maintain the status quo rather than bravely change. The consequences are almost incalculable and unimaginable, and they have sealed our fate.

What can we as the ordinary citizen do to fight climate change?

The sooner we decarbonise, the better chance we have. We live in a petroleum culture—everywhere we go, we're burning. We need to change our consciousness. Whether you drive an E-rickshaw or a car may not make a huge difference globally, but it makes a difference culturally. We need to vote for representatives who understand and prioritize climate action.

And are there politicians who will help fight climate change?

Few and far between. They're mostly women. Seems like women are the ones who have the courage. I feel like men benefit from the current status quo and power structure; there's less incentive for them to let go of it. Whereas women, who have really had to struggle just to be part of the conversation, understand—I think they can empathize more easily with the state of the world and the need for brave change. I really feel a future with more female leadership would be much healthier.

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For more books on Fire Weather by Jon Vaillant and climate change, here is Why I Changed My Mind About Reading on Climate Change. What about you dear Reader? What are your thoughts on climate change and are there any books you could recommend on the subject?

Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or suggestions, write to her at sonyasbookbox@gmail.com

The views expressed are personal