Park City Library and Summit County Library present One Book One Community’s 2025 book Fire Weather by John Vaillant.
One Book One Community is supported by Friends of the Park City Library, Friends of the Summit County Library, and Dolly’s Bookstore.
Fire Weather is available as a physical book at each library, as an ebook and eaudiobook on Libby, and available for purchase at Dolly’s Bookstore.
Grips like a philosophical thriller, warns like a beacon, and shocks to the core.
Robert Macfarlane, bestselling author of Underland
One Book One Community Main Event
Main Event with Author
Park City Library, Santy Auditorium, Free
Tuesday, July 29, 7PM
Author of Fire Weather John Vaillant will speak to the community about his book. There will also be a book signing and books available for purchase supported by Dolly’s Bookstore and the Pendry.
One Book One Community Events
Illuminating the Future of Earth’s Forests Under Climate Change with Professor Anderegg
Park City Library, Community Room, Free
Wednesday, June 4, 2PM
As part of our One Book One Community program, Professor Anderegg will be giving a lecture on Illuminating the Future of Earth’s Forests Under Climate Change. We aim to answer the question: what is the future of Earth’s forests under climate change? Massive forest mortality events of many tree species in the last two decades prompt concerns that drought, insects, and wildfire may devastate forests in the coming decades. This talk will cover how drought, fire, and climate change affect forest ecosystems in the western US and around the world.
Fire-Resilient Landscaping for Safer Spaces
Park City Library, Community Room, Free
Tuesday, June 10, 5PM
Join Maddie Nelson, the Open Space Supervisor at Basin Rec, and Sara Jo Dickens from the Summit CWMA for an engaging and informative session on fire-resistant landscaping and fire mitigation projects in Park City. Discover how to reduce the spread of noxious weeds during fire mitigation efforts, and take home free seeds to plant your own fire-resistant plants. The event will conclude with a Q&A session, giving you the opportunity to get expert advice on creating safer, more resilient landscapes. Don’t miss this opportunity to enhance your landscaping while supporting fire safety in the community!
Safety Fair
Information Center Parking Lot, Free
Saturday, June 28, 10AM
Build relationships with Summit County’s public safety and health leaders. Activities include: Kids bike derby, free face painting, food trucks, prizes, crafts, big truck petting zoo (Park City Fire Truck and Summit County Bookmobile). Organizations include: Park City Fire District, Summit County Sheriff’s Office, Summit County Health, Peace House, Summit County Library, and more.
Learning to Live with Wildland Fire with Bradley Washa
Park City Library, Community Room, Free
Monday, June 30, 6PM
From the Los Angeles Basin and Lahaina to the Marshall Fire in Boulder, Colorado, the impact of devastating wildfires continues to increase across the United States. While Park City has not experienced recent damage from a wildfire event, local fires such as the Parleys Canyon Fire of 2021 and 2024’s Yellow Lake Fire bring home the idea that we all exist within a wildfire-dependent ecosystem. As such, each year we face increased effort to address these threats around Summit County and live with the associated personal impact. In his presentation, Brad will demonstrate the parallels and differences between our local wildfire events and those across the country and beyond, including that of the 2016 Fort McMurray Fire in Alberta, which is the fire of interest in this year’s One Book One Community selection, Fire Weather by John Vaillant.
Why Fire Weather?
The world we thought we knew is changing under our feet because we changed it…We are entering clima incognita, the unknown climate.
Fire Weather has won and been nominated for many awards. The novel is a 2024 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in General Nonfiction has won the British Baillie Gifford Prize, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize, and the John Wesley Dafoe Book Prize. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, and Canada’s Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize. It has been named one of the best books of 2023 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, TIME, NPR, Slate, and Smithsonian. It was also number four on MacLean’s Power List for Climate in 2024.
Synopsis of Fire Weather
In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.
Fire has been a partner in our evolution for hundreds of millennia, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways.
With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. John Vaillant’s urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.
About John Vaillant
John Vaillant is an author and freelance writer based in Vancouver, BC whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and The Guardian, among others. His journalism, fiction, and non-fiction explores collisions between human ambition and the natural world.