Five times 15.
Hi, good evening and a big welcome here to Five by 15 tonight.
And I couldn't be more thrilled to be introducing our two speakers.
We're here tonight primarily to talk about this astonishing new book called the Burning Earth,
written by Sunal Amrith.
And it is an incredible story of the environmental history of the world and the Earth and the planet that we live on.
And any idea that you might have had
that what we're going through now is the first time that man has really trashed the planet.
Well, forget it,
because what you're going to learn in the next hour is that things have been not so great for a very long time.
And I'm really thrilled that Sunil's going to be in conversation with John Vaillant,
who wrote the Magnificent Fire Weather,
which was the book that won the Bailey Gifford last year, won all sorts of American awards.
And it's about the extraordinary fire that happened in the Athabasca tar sands in the town of Fort McMurray and blazed and blazed and blazed completely out of control and what it told us about climate change in our world and the oil and all the various things like that.
So if anyone's not read that, that's now out in paperback.
The details of both the books are in the chat and I'm going to hand over now to John and please enjoy and please put questions in the chat
because there's going to be time for them at the end.
In the meantime, here we go, introduce you both.
Thank you very much for being there.
Bye bye.