He Went to Fight Megafires, and Ended Up Respecting Them

New York Times

2 days ago

WHEN IT ALL BURNS: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World, by Jordan Thomas
As viewed in shaky social media posts, the new megafires that plague the Western United States are monstrous in their magnitude: Walls of orange flame melt homes and turn dense green woods into spent matchsticks beneath explosive black mushroom clouds.
But in 'When It All Burns,' Jordan Thomas's account of a season fighting fires with the so-called 'Los Padres Hotshots' — a U.S. Forest Service firefighting unit that he describes as one of 'the special forces of wildland firefighters' — conflagration is terrifyingly intimate.
In the first pages, his crew scrambles down rocks to face a football-field-sized, ember-spitting fire in oxygen-burning surround sound. 'I realized that the silence was becoming a roar, and the roar came from the megafire,' he writes. 'It was close. The dark understory of the forest began to glow, a vibration emanating from its depths, rising to the sound of a jet engine.'
That was in the fall of 2021, in Sequoia National Forest, in an about-to-burn grove of gargantuan trees that, for millenniums, had thrived amid fires, albeit a less vicious kind. And that feels like a lifetime before the Los Angeles fires of 2025, in which the combination of Santa Ana winds and heat served to reset California's understanding of where cities end and wild lands begin.
'When It All Burns' is a report on the state of firefighting, crossed with a tale of what might be called exploratory adventure: Thomas, raised in the Midwest, signed on to his firefighting team while in the midst of an anthropology degree at the University of California, 'skeptical,' he wrote, 'of the idea that humans are inherently destructive to our environments.' What follows is part memoir, part exegesis on man's relationship to fire — and inspired by a trip to a Maya community in southern Mexico that gave Thomas insight into the ways forests have traditionally been managed with fire. 'Nearly every terrestrial area, I learned, has evolved with different kinds of fire — flames catered to each ecological niche and shaped by the people who inhabit the land,' he writes.
Interspersed between accounts of his training exercises and deployment, Thomas gives us crisp histories of national and global fire policies, beginning with Spanish settlements in North America, where Indigenous Californians were enslaved and tortured, their traditional fires scorned, since they ruined grazing fields colonizers wanted for Spanish horses — 'burnt off by the heathens,' wrote a disciple of Junípero Serra, an 18th-century priest (now canonized) whose missionary system was notorious for its treatment of Indigenous populations.
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