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.
A global wave of fire suppression saw Pennsylvania ban open fires as a means of controlled burning in 1749, the New England colonies around the same time. Ditto French industrialists colonizing Southeast Asia and the English in Ireland. Dutch trading corporations executed South Africans for using controlled burns. “Everywhere European colonizers laid their claims,” writes Thomas, “they extinguished fire.”
In 1905, the U.S. Forest Service was born, a branch of the Department of Agriculture that, implicitly, now classified trees as a crop, and where Gifford Pinchot, the first Forest Service chief, quickly became a teller for the nation’s bank of timber, fire profit’s enemy.
Pinchot’s successor described controlled burns as “an insidious doctrine,” and many of the nation’s new national forests were in fact Indigenous lands nationalized by President Theodore Roosevelt, whose love for the outdoors was equaled by his disdain for Native Americans.
Targeting fires meant ending myriad traditional burning practices that managed plants and animals, or controlled snowpack for flood mitigation and even plant transpiration that influenced river levels. For many people, for many generations, fire wasn’t a nuclear weapon but rather a regenerative tool, more efficient than the sedentary agriculture of white settlers. But by 1890, the regular fires that coursed through California forests had been quenched.
Only two months into the 2021 fire season, Thomas’s Hotshot crew had fought a desert fire in Nevada, an Arizona lightning burn and flaming redwoods in Big Sur. Occasionally, “When It All Burns” reads like posts from a testosterone-soaked reality show, but mostly it feels like dispatches from a long, unwinnable war. Victories are short-term and generally for corporations: “In 2021, the U.S. Forest Service purchased fifty million gallons of Phos-Chek at around $2.50 per gallon,” Thomas writes of a Monsanto-developed flame retardant. And Sierra Pacific Industries is known for the controversial practice of salvage logging — collecting fire-damaged timber from an area and then selling it to Home Depot, Lowe’s and Menards.
Thomas recalls an incident in which the owner of a multimillion-dollar mansion tried to pass out $100 bills to him and his fellow firefighters as tips. One asked him instead to keep paying his taxes, or maybe more taxes: Hotshot crews often rely on GoFundMe campaigns to pay for major medical bills.
Today, the U.S. Forest Service (or what’s left of it) is full of research ecologists, working to listen to, for instance, Indigenous land managers. Fire is being understood for the way it might restore California black oak; for how it increases carbon capture in soil.
Fire isn’t bad; bad fires are bad.
This is counterintuitive, occasionally even for Thomas, who, near the book’s end, encounters a fire that teaches a lesson in patience. In a Santa Barbara oak wood, he watches flames dance through the grass. When worry kicks in, he reaches for a shovel, only to be counseled by a Nlaka’pamux Nation firefighter, visiting from British Columbia. “You know, Jordan, why don’t you sit down and let it burn?” he tells the younger man. “Let it burn just a little longer.”
WHEN IT ALL BURNS: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World | By Jordan Thomas | Riverhead | 350 pp. | $30
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