In When It All Burns, the anthropologist discusses what he learned from his time as a California wildlands firefighter.
When did you decide to turn your firefighting experience into a book?
When I got home from fighting my first megafire in 2020, I felt shell-shocked. The intensity of the experience was beyond words, physically and psychologically—the violence, pain, stress, and exhaustion, but also the love I felt for the people I had been risking my life with. I started writing to try to regain my bearings, and I kept writing in the years that followed, whether at home or in my sleeping bag on the fire line. My intuition was that this sense of feeling unmoored was a concentrated version of what many people are experiencing with climate change. I knew I wanted to write a book, but it felt like wanting to fly to the moon. I decided, definitively, to turn this into a book when I first sat down in New York City with Alice Whitwham, my agent, the winter after my time as a firefighter ended. Our visions clicked, and I felt I needed to write the book.
You discuss how the “fire-industrial complex” profits from disastrous wildfires. How does that work?
Austerity measures have led to an underfunded, understaffed, and underperforming workforce on public lands, justifying the delegation of an increasing amount of fire suppression work to private corporations. This includes everything from private fire suppression crews to the airplanes that dump retardant to the retardant itself, resulting in the creation of an entire economic sector dependent on megafires. As fires grow, so does revenue, and with it, political power. The CEO of America’s largest private firefighting company recently had private meetings with Donald Trump’s secretary of the interior. Lockheed Martin has become one of the most prominent fire policy lobbyists. Does this mean there is a conspiracy to make fires bigger? No. But it means there is a disproportionate incentive to put ever more resources into fire suppression strategies that further enrich billionaires. It’s difficult to generate proportionate interest in prescribed burns because they’re not profitable activities.
What’s the most important lesson you learned from your time on the front lines?
I was continuously awestruck by the skills and knowledge that allowed my hotshot colleagues to survive on the edges of such intense wildfires. The best available science can’t make sense of this new era of combustion, but this isn’t just what the hotshots’ jobs demand—their lives depend on it. They have access to ground truths about climate change that are inaccessible to scientists, the public, and policymakers. The lesson I took from this is that these dirty, stinky, rough men are among our society’s most finely tuned technological assets for adapting to a planet that burns like never before, and we should be investing in them as such.
