Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Golden Spruce | 2005 | John Vaillant | Buy |
| 2 | The Tiger | 2010 | John Vaillant | Buy |
| 3 | Fire Weather | 2023 | John Vaillant | Buy |
John Vaillant’s three non-fiction books form a coherent body of work about humanity’s relationship with the natural world under conditions of ecological stress. The Golden Spruce (2005) opens in the temperate rainforest of Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, and investigates the felling of a rare golden Sitka spruce that was sacred to the Haida people. The book interweaves environmental history, Indigenous cultural loss, and the psychology of the man who cut the tree down.
The Tiger (2010) moves to the Russian Far East and reconstructs a 1997 incident in which an Amur tiger began hunting and killing humans in a remote village. The book combines a gripping case narrative with a broader examination of how Soviet-era poaching and habitat destruction pushed tigers and humans into increasingly dangerous proximity. It won multiple awards and has been compared to the work of Sebastian Junger and Jon Krakauer for its narrative drive.
Fire Weather (2023) turns to Alberta’s 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, one of the costliest natural disasters in Canadian history, and uses it as a lens for examining climate change, the fossil fuel industry, and the future of wildfire in an era of rising temperatures. The book is both a minute-by-minute account of the fire and a long-term argument about the forces that made it possible. It was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in General Non-Fiction.