This change is palpable in fire-dependent ecosystems like the Boreal in the Northern Hemisphere, which goes all the way through Russia, Northern Europe, and North America and burns naturally, often in spectacular fashion, every 75 or 150 years. They are now coming back in 30 or even 10 years. These forests need maturation time to establish themselves, but because small gradients of elevated heat impact the forest floor, things dry out quickly, and we have a heat dome effect.

Heat domes are a high-pressure system that parks over a landscape, and when the sun blazes on it, you achieve record temperatures, drying things out in unnatural ways. If a fire’s lit, it will burn explosively in unnatural and unfightable ways. Extreme examples are seen in places like Valparaiso, Chile, which burned grievously in March last year. Texas, famous for big fires, had the biggest fire in history. We’re now seeing fatalities the Northern Hemisphere hasn’t seen in a century.

This changing nature of wildfire indicates the changing fire regime, which will remake Earth’s forest and grassland map over the next century. Wildfires will burn more easily in hot, dry, windy weather, which is technically called fire weather. This is why I chose to name the book.

There have been massive fires in human history, such as the Chinchaga fire of 1950, the single largest recorded fire in North American history or the one you write about, the Fort McMurray fire in Canada, which forced 88,0000 people to evacuate. Yet, why do we forget and deny the catastrophes nature can unleash on us?

We have developed psychological coping strategies since we started out as a species in southern Africa, where there were many dangerous wild animals, environmental uncertainty, and high mortality rates among our babies. We have learned to survive and persist under those conditions. One strategy is to compartmentalize.

The other reason we don’t focus on this enough is that political parties or industries like the petroleum industry are investing in us and are not focusing on the real causes of this issue. They spout rhetoric: “Look what China’s doing.” China is leading the entire world in renewable energy development on a scale that no one has matched. They’re building the future while the US is burning coal and gas, making it less and less controllable.

Again, I think the Western political system, built on a four- or six- or two-year term, is horribly calibrated to deal with generational problems.

In your book, Fire Weather, you state that the first climate science experiment was conducted in 1856, just three years before the first oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania. This was also the year when the first commercially viable internal combustion engine prototype was built in 1859. How do the trajectories of climate science and a fossil fuel economy overlap?

A citizen scientist, a woman named Eunice Foote from upstate New York, did a home experiment in which she took isolated CO2 in one cylinder and regular air that we breathe in another, and she put them out in the sun with thermometers.

She watched the CO2 cylinder heat up faster and hotter than the regular air. It also took a lot longer to cool down. By the 1890s, not the 1990s, it was understood that CO2 emissions from what was then coal-fired industrial projects had the potential to change the climate. They knew it then. They didn’t have the proof because the planet wasn’t warming in a measurable way yet. By the 1930s, it was warming substantially.

When did the petroleum industry understand the impact of their actions?

By the 1950s, petroleum companies knew. By the 1970s, the petroleum industry, Exxon, the leader, was publishing privately, internally sharing its own science and predictions for where CO2 would be if they continued expanding the petroleum industry through the 1980s, ’90s and 2000s. They predicted where we are now. They predicted the CO2 concentration and the heat and knew it would have extremely adverse effects on climate change and human habitability.

The petroleum industry is a fire industry, which means a CO2 industry. It manufactures CO2. That means it’s a climate-changing industry. They are perpetrating the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated in the history of Homo Sapiens. This is a fact. When you count the number of people who will be affected, who this will kill.

When Trump was re-elected as the President, he declared that the US was facing a national energy emergency. What impact do you see on America’s climate policies?

It is an unmitigated disaster, and it’s astounding to me. Yeah, no, it’s a lie. Only 50% of people in the United States voted, or even less so, a relatively small percentage of the population voted for Donald Trump. He won by 1%, which is not a landslide, it’s not a mandate, it’s not any of the things he or his party say it is, but he won, he assumed the elections were fair. This administration has a malevolent intent regarding social services, science, and the integrity of federal protection systems. His is an administration hostile to that.

And the harm to Americans is going to be enormous. I was born and raised in the United States. My family’s been there since 1620. They were early Pilgrims. My ancestors fought in the Revolution and all the wars. And this is the Civil War again. And this time, the South has won. And the slave states that favoured business over democracy favoured racism and white superiority over equality. It’s as if Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy of the South, is now the President of the United States. And we will find out what it would be like if the South had won.

It wants to dismantle that and empower, enable, and reward oligarchs. What we’re almost seeing is not identical to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the raid by the oligarchs on national industries. But there are similarities. Over the next four years, we will see colossal, irreparable damage to the nation, which may never recover.

In the book’s epilogue, you put your faith in Earth’s regenerating capacity. What is the way forward?

I don’t see people stopping voluntarily. Without a policy, without a mandate, kind of like a lockdown, I don’t see it stopping. And so, nature will stop. Nature will burn it or flood it to make us stop.

Earth, in its default mode, grows and regenerates. In my book Tiger, I wrote that when you stop shooting tigers, trapping and poisoning them, they breed literally like cats. There’s suddenly a whole lot of them. They come back. If there’s a prey base, they will fill the void as quickly as biologically possible. So that is what comforts me.

There are these oases of groups of people who are working towards climate change mitigation. 30 years ago, the survival rate due to typhoons in Bangladesh was dismal. You now lose people in the hundreds instead of the tens of thousands, and that is humanity at its best dealing with reality bravely, which we are good at doing and acting on behalf in a way that values human life.

These people don’t value corporate profits or a politician’s survivability but individual lives. Indigenous knowledge, too, will save our lives and probably our species. And we have to guard it and reverse the forgetting of it. This moment is an invitation from nature to understand that nature is communicating with us. And we used to be good at that. That used to be what we did. India mastered it way before many other regions of the world. It’s part of our heritage, being in tune with nature and worshiping nature; it is our God. It really is.

Kanika Sharma is an independent journalist.