When It All Burns
Fighting Fire in a Transformed World
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
“Exceptional. . . . When It All Burns is one of those books that immerses the reader in the nuances of a world most of us know only through the lens of tragedy and destruction. Thomas’ visceral, crystalline prose only adds fuel to the fire.” —Los Angeles Times
A hotshot firefighter’s gripping firsthand account of a record-setting fire season
Eighteen of California’s largest wildfires on record have burned in the past two decades. Scientists recently invented the term “megafire” to describe wildfires that behave in ways that would have been nearly impossible just a generation ago, burning through winter, exploding in the night, and devastating landscapes historically impervious to incendiary destruction.
In When It All Burns, wildland firefighter and anthropologist Jordan Thomas recounts a single, brutal six-month fire season with the Los Padres Hotshots—the special forces of America’s firefighters. Being a hotshot is among the most difficult jobs on earth. Thomas viscerally renders his crew’s attempts to battle flames that are often too destructive to contain. He uncovers the hidden cultural history of megafires, revealing how humanity’s symbiotic relationship with wildfire became a war—and what can be done to change it back.
Thomas weaves ecology and the history of Indigenous peoples' oppression, federal forestry, and the growth of the fire industrial complex into a riveting narrative about a new phase in the climate crisis. It's an immersive story of community in the most perilous of circumstances, told with humor, humility, and affection.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Anthropologist Jordan Thomas gets his hands (and everything else) dirty for this engrossing look at the changing landscape of wildfires. Thomas spends a chaotic California fire season working with a “hotshot” crew: skilled firefighters deployed to battle megafires. So he certainly comes to this work with some serious respect for the destructive power of fires and what goes into combating them. But in Thomas’ research, he finds that not everyone sees fire the same way—he repeatedly runs into frustrating obstacles, like governmental refusal to acknowledge effective Indigenous methods of working with fire season to season, rather than against it when conditions become impossible to control. And then there are the chemical companies that profit from manufacturing fire retardants that are questionably effective at best. When It All Burns doesn’t sugarcoat the climate mess we find ourselves in, but it does offer hope that there might be a path through the fire—if we’re willing to follow it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Anthropologist Thomas debuts with an essential meditation on fire's role on a warming planet. The central narrative recounts his six-month tenure as a member of the Los Padres Hotshots, an elite federal fire-fighting crew, in 2021, discussing how even as the group engaged in lighthearted prank wars with other crews, they struggled with the stress of working under perilous conditions. Providing visceral accounts of his most harrowing deployments, Thomas describes, for instance, falling off a small cliff after passing out while battling a Big Sur megafire in 123 °F heat, only to haul himself back up to the top and continue clearing brush. Supplementing his recollections, Thomas provides captivating background on how colonial-era bans on Indigenous controlled burns set the stage for today's inadequate fire suppression practices; how climate change has made fires more severe and frequent; and how private firefighters, retardant manufacturers, and lumber companies take advantage of fire disasters by selling to the government often faulty services that prioritize profit over effectiveness. Writing with exceptional verve, Thomas captures the furious intensity of working on the fire line ("The sawyers circled one another like swordsmen in a duel, cutting every last branch they could find until none were left and they faced each other with heaving chests and sweat pouring through the grime"). Narrative nonfiction doesn't get better than this.
