One of the best books about the increase in wildfires is John Vaillant's 'Fire Weather'. Every writer should read it for the craft alone.
John Vaillant's excellent Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World is one of the best-written books I've read in the last few years. The story is riveting and relevant (as I'm writing this, the skies of North Carolina are smoky from raging wildfires in Canada). Part of what makes so hard to put down solid is Vaillant's vocab — and I don't even mean technical and scientific terms. Here are some of the words that caught my eye (all definitions from Merriam-Webster, except as noted) and brought the story to life:
- discontinuity: a situation wherein expertise and past experience cease to be useful guides to future problem-solving (Vaillant)
- gnomon: an object that by the position or length of its shadow serves as an indicator especially of the hour of the day: such as a sundial
- ignescent: volatile
- infandous: unspeakable, too odious to be spoken (the OED considers this term obsolete, but here's JV using it in 2023!)
- Lucretius Problem: the difficulty humans have imagining and assimilating things outside their own personal experience (Vaillant)
- plangent: having a loud reverberating sound or an expressive and especially plaintive quality
- predatory delay: the deliberate slowing of change to prolong a profitable but unsustainable status quo whose costs will be paid by others (Vaillant)
- revirescent: growing fresh or young again, reviving
- viriditas: greenness (Wikipedia)
Infandous is my favorite and a friend of mine and I have committed to bringing it back. And I'm definitely using revirescent and viridtas in my nature writing.
PRO TIP: I keep a reading journal —a notebook where I jot cool words like these, copy down passages that speak to me or process my thoughts about the text (quality and concept). It's a great way to enhance the experience of a book — especially if it's on loan from the library or a friend. Mine wouldn't be of much use to anyone but me because my handwriting is terrible, but I love going back through and revisiting what I've read.
