I studied Biology in university, and I loved learning something new about the world every single day. I wanted a career where I could keep on doing that and also have the chance to fill people in on all the amazing things I’ve discovered. I love the fact that any time a question pops into my head, I can just pick up the phone, call an expert, and get an answer — most of the time.

I’ve been a reporter for more than a decade, and I’ve never experienced anything like the 2017 wildfire season. It was a crisis that felt like it didn’t have an end, and every day seemed to bring a new emergency. The stories I heard were heartbreaking and the environmental implications were dire. I wanted to explore how we got to this point, what it meant for people’s lives, and where we go from here.

I knew I had a huge obligation to get this right, so before I started, I read everything I could find about the fires and then just kept on reading throughout the whole process. I carved out plenty of time for each and every person I spoke to, because each story was as much about a series of events as it was about the impact of those events. I can only hope I’ve succeeded in capturing the scale and significance of what happened.

There were so many stories to tell and only so many pages to fill. I conducted hours and hours of interviews, and I probably could have written an entire book on each person’s experiences during the wildfires. Cramming them all into a single manuscript was tough.

I hope people see that as terrible as the 2017 wildfire season was, it wasn’t an anomaly. It’s not a question of if, but when we’ll experience another summer like this in B.C. And every aspect of our lives will be affected — our homes and families, the air we breathe, the wildlife we love, and our economy.