S1: Welcome in San Diego. It's Jade Hindman. On today's show , KPBS Metro reporter Andrew Bowen spoke with Jordan Thomas , an anthropologist who studied wildfires and indigenous fire practices extensively. He's also been on the front lines himself and is now out with a book When It All Burns Fighting Fire in a Transformed World. This is KPBS Midday Edition. Connecting our communities through conversation. Fire season is well underway in California. The Gifford fire , currently burning through California's Central Coast , recently reached mega fire status , becoming the largest fire in the state so far this year. It is part of a broader trend of worsening wildfires across the region , including here in San Diego. Earlier this week , KPBS Metro reporter Andrew Bowen spoke with Jordan Thomas. He's an anthropologist who studied wildfires and indigenous fire practices extensively. He's also been on the front lines himself , working with an elite team of wildfire firefighters known as the Los Padres Hotshots. He recounts one intense firefighting season with the Hotshots in his book , When It All Burns Fighting Fire in a Transformed World , where he also unravels the cultural history around fire. Here's that conversation.
S2: So we're seeing wildfires become bigger , more destructive , deadlier. And I imagine that means firefighting efforts have intensified in response.
S3: You never really know what you're going to get because like you said , these are some of the largest wildfires that anyone has ever encountered in California's recorded history. But science is having a really hard time keeping up with predicting what these fires are going to do , like how they're going to spread , how they're going to behave , what they're going to do overnight , what the overall ecological impacts are going to be. But wildland firefighters , their job is to know this stuff that science doesn't even know on a day to day basis , and their lives depend upon their ability to do that. So what is it like ? It's one of the most difficult , one of the most intense jobs on earth , because you're living on the cutting edge of the climate crisis and beyond the edge of what science knows about the climate crisis.
S2:
S3: If you're an elite wildland firefighter , that's an official job title. It's a hotshot , which is which is an attraction on its own. But what the hotshots are , they're they're like the special forces of wildland firefighters in the United States. There's around 100 crews across the US. There's 20 people in each crew. And what they do is they get deployed to the most intense , dangerous sections of some of the largest fires. And there they have such an elite status because of their fitness. They're essentially tactical athletes who mountaineer around the edges of these incredibly dangerous fires and some of the most rugged terrain in the United States. But they're also really , really intellectually and cognitively attuned to fire behavior , because while they're mountaineering on the edges of these massive wildfires and triple and triple digit heat , they're also having to pay attention to all of the shifting conditions that can change wildfires behavior. And not only that , but figure out how to either steer the fires away from towns and communities , or the parts of the landscape that want to protect or put them out and contain them. Sometimes they do this with chainsaws , and they're often commanding the Black Hawk helicopters and airplanes that you see. They're doing that from the ground with radios , but sometimes they also light fires around the edges of the wild ones to use fire to contain the wildfires as well. So there's an incredible amount of physical fitness and incredible amount of knowledge that goes into these communities of people.
S2: I can imagine it's really intense , grueling work , very physical labor.
S3: But the more common injuries and the more common dangers that you face are the chronic ones. The toll that the firefighting takes on your lungs , the toll that it takes on your joints , and just the toll that constant smoke exposures. Day after day , week after week , month after month , year after year. The toll that that takes on your body and the psychological toll that just facing this kind of stress. This is just background stress of danger takes over time. And part of that stress comes from the fact that wildland firefighters are often not very well taken care of in the long term. There's some compensation to help you if you get hurt on the job. But there's very little long term compensation for the chronic health effects of the work. And part of that reason is because the chronic health effects have gotten so much worse as climate change has gotten worse and the firefighting efforts have intensified.
S2: Tell me about the people you worked alongside with.
S3: But there's also no escaping that every day you get kicked awake before sunrise , you hike for hours out to the fire. You work on the edge of the fire until sunset. You hike back. You sleep on the ground and you do it again. So you really have to figure out a way to laugh and just have a sense of humor with your community when you're in these settings. So there's that. And within that it's a it's a typically sort of masculine culture. Most wildland firefighters are men. There's some fantastic books coming out this summer from perspectives from female hotshots as well , such as River cell. This book called Hotshot Life on Fire. And I recommend people read that for a perspective that's not from that masculine one as well. With wildland fires.
S2: Before you joined the Hotshots , you were already studying wildfires extensively.
S3: So hotshots have a perspective that really very few people on Earth have access to. And as an anthropologist researching the climate crisis and how people experience it and how people are adapting to it and trying to solve it , this was this automatically just fascinated me and interested me. It was sort of one of those happy coincidences where I also didn't have a job during that time too. So I was super interested in this stuff. Didn't really have any , uh , career prospects in California where I just moved to. And so I started talking to the Hotshots around the same time as I started talking to the anthropology program at the University of California in Santa Barbara. I started researching wildfires at the same time as I started finding them. So the two perspectives that I weaved throughout my book really stemmed from that.
S2: You've spoken about joining the Hotshots as blurring the boundaries between academia and practice.
S3: You can't really be doing any other kind of work because it's so all consuming. It takes in a lot of fires. It takes all of your concentration just to stay focused on the fire behavior and to stay conscious because the physical activity is so grueling. But then at the same time , in between fires , while we were traveling to them , I was always reading books , taking notes , trying to think about what was creating these , these contexts that we were fighting fires in. How had they gotten so big ? So with the older people in my crew , the leader of the Los Padres Hotshots is in his 50s when they started their work. You might they might have encountered one mega fire in their entire career. But the season when I was a hotshot , we fought four of them and there was 1 million acre fire as well , which I don't think had ever been recorded in California's history. So.
S2: Can you tell me more about the history of fire management in California and how it changed with colonization. Yeah.
S3: Yeah. So California is one of the most fire evolved regions on Earth. The vast majority of California's ecosystems depend upon certain kinds of fire to remain healthy. So we talk about whether fire is good or bad , like is a singular thing , which doesn't really make sense because you wouldn't talk about what the precipitation is , good or bad. Certain kinds of rain are good , but then floods are often bad , right ? And it's the same sort of thing with fire. The different types of ecosystems of California need different kinds of fire to stay healthy. And for over 10,000 years , California's indigenous people realized this , and they gave the landscapes the kinds of fire that they needed so often and so frequently that indigenous burning practices actually became the dominant forms of fire the landscapes encountered. So fire was an essential part of indigenous economies because it allowed them to shape the landscapes in ways that that they could use to facilitate certain kinds of plants to attract certain kinds of animals. So the very first thing that the very first governor of California did when Spain took over and the late 18th century was criminalize indigenous fire practices as a way to criminalize indigenous economies , as a way to conquer and subjugate indigenous people. That was also the very first thing that the American government did when we took over in the middle of the 19th century and it became an American state , we criminalized indigenous burn practices. And the first governor called for the genocide of California's indigenous people. And these two things went together. So by the time the United States Forest Service was founded in 1905 and started a policy of total fire suppression soon after , most fires had already been put out because most fires had been were lit by indigenous people and had been criminalized and taken away alongside the colonialism and genocide that really was the dominant force between colonial governments and California's indigenous people. So there's a real injustice embedded in these fires that we're seeing today. That really should be part of the conversation when we're thinking about the solutions. Mhm.
S2: Mhm. In the book you really focus on deconstructing this idea of fire as a natural disaster. Can you talk more about that and why you think that is important to to interrogate. Yeah.
S3: Yeah. Because so when we talk about fires and natural disaster , what really what we're doing is we're just hiding all of the ways in which the choices that we make as a society and in our politics shape the sorts of fires that we encounter. So fires the sorts of fires we're seeing today , these mega fires , these destructive fires , these new kinds of fire. They're they're fundamentally emerged from at the nexus of climate change and land mismanagement. Now , these are both political choices. Climate change is caused by the fossil fuel industry and the people who support it and our politics. That is a choice. And there is no form of land management that will work if we don't get a handle on climate change and stop using fossil fuels. That said , with land management. There's also an enormous amount of power that we have. To make our lands more resilient to climate change and to make our lands healthy again by returning the right kinds of fire to California's ecosystems. And what this does is it may not requires political will , and it requires funding , and it requires organizing , especially in California. This is not a small government or big government thing. It takes both because half of California's land is federal land. So if we want to get any handle on the sorts of fires we're seeing today , it will require massive investment from the federal government and the Forest Service. And that's investment not just in flashy technologies , but in people , people like the hotshots who understand fire and who understand how to put fire on the ground and how to make it behave in the ways that will benefit the ecosystems. And really , the opposite thing is happening with our current administration. While they talk about how we need to manage our land , they're actually cutting funding for the people who know how to manage the land , which is a public servant on our public lands who have the skills and expertise to do the sorts of forest management and prescribed burns that will prevent these sorts of fires from being so destructive.
S2:
S3: Two things are missing from the media coverage. The first one is this every time this wildfire seasons roll around , there's this false debate that emerges about whether this is climate change or forest mismanagement. And the fact is that it's always both. The impacts of climate change are always shaped by the context that they land in , and we need to stop talking about them apart from each other. We need to be smarter than that and think about solutions in lockstep. We need to cut fossil fuel use while also investing in the communities of people who know how to manage our landscapes the right way. The second one is what we're talking about when we say support our firefighters. You see this in banners hanging all around the state of California every time fire season rolls around. But that's just rhetoric at this point , because a lot of wildland firefighters in the off season don't have health care , they don't have support , they don't have psychological support for mental health or anything like this. And so when we talk about what it means to support firefighters , it's what it means to support a lot of other working people in this country , which is they need health care , they need social support network. They need they need funding , they need compensation. And that doesn't happen by banging pots and pans together. That happens by electing people in our politics who support public servants and want to actually pass legislation to increase their funding and to give them health care. So I think sort of cutting through that empty rhetoric and actually having the courage to talk about what does it mean politically to support our firefighters , and what does it mean politically to get a handle on these wildfires ? I think those are those are the two things that I , I wish were addressed more clearly every wildfire season.
S2: You've alluded to this a bit already , but what does it mean to get a handle on the crisis of wildfires in California.
S3: So I drove north up to Lake County , which from a visual perspective , it looked like some form of apocalypse. I think 98% of the national forests up there had burned and the previous couple of years. So you just enter this forest of matchsticks and then you go down to the lake and. But what I found at the edge of the lake was a group of people organizing a prescribed burn. And the groups , the group of people there was one of the most hopeful groups of people I've been around , working at the nexus of climate change and wildfires , because the project was being led by a by a group of Pomo peoples and other indigenous groups in the region , partnered with the US Forest Service. Partnered with Cal Fire , partnered with with the Air Quality Board in the area. Partnered with all sorts of different people from the region who are all coming together. To have conversations about what would it mean to bring the right kinds of fire back so that as this landscape heals , as the lands , as these new forms of plants and trees and forests re-emerge , how can they do so alongside fire ? And what that means is forming bridges between communities that have been fractured historically. But what that also means is having a real focus to localize the tension on your local ecosystem so you know how to burn and provide the right kinds of fire in the ways that provide the types of plants that you want. So it's a real , locally based and socially based movement that needs centralized funding to succeed at the scale that we're talking about in California , but is fundamentally a place of hope and action and possibility , and we're going to need a whole lot more of that all around the state of California in the years to come.
S1: That was Jordan Thomas , author of the book When It All Burns Fighting Fire in a Transformed World , speaking with KPBS Metro reporter Andrew Bowen. You can see Jordan talk more about When It All Burns at the Book Catapult in South Park on August 21st. He'll also be at the San Diego Book Festival on August 23rd at the University of San Diego campus. You can find more details on these events at KPBS. Org. That's our show for today. I'm your host , Jade Hindman. Thanks for tuning in to Midday Edition. Be sure to have a great day on purpose , everyone.
