"One edge of the climate crisis"
A Q&A with Jordan Thomas on firefighting, forestry, and ecological disaster
California’s 2020 fire season, during which nearly ten thousand fires incinerated more than four million acres of land, shattered pre-existing burn rate records. In October of that year, anthropologist and then-firefighter Jordan Thomas reflected, in the pages of The Drift, on the past and future of fire, arguing that fire suppression practices have historically served to accelerate Indigenous dispossession, destroy ecological diversity, and construct the idea of a “wild” American west. “Forest managers are beginning to backtrack against the Euro-American legacy of fire suppression,” Thomas wrote in his essay, “A Note from the Fireline.” But with climate change rapidly advancing, he warned, “they may be running out of time.”
In a year that began with the Eaton, Palisades, and other fires devastating the Los Angeles area while global temperatures reached new sustained highs, Thomas’s warning bears even more weight. Since retiring from firefighting, he has been working to implement ecologically healthy fire management practices in California. He’s also expanded his Drift essay into a book, out next Tuesday from Riverhead, called When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World. In it, Thomas traces his experience as one of the Los Padres hotshots, the group of elite firefighters who are dispatched by the federal government to fight megafires — the explosive, landscape-destroying infernos that have emerged in recent years. He also examines the historical relationship of fire to American state-building, industrial capitalism, and land management.
Drift editorial assistant Shreya Chattopadhyay talked to Thomas about the shifting role of the U.S. Forest Service, the impact of controlled burns, false binaries in popular climate analyses, and more. To hear more about When It All Burns, join The Drift on May 27 at Community Bookstore in Brooklyn for a conversation between Thomas and climate journalist Kate Aronoff. RSVP here for free.
When describing your decision to join the Los Padres hotshots, you write: “I wanted to get close to the flames to understand how people navigate new scales of destruction — emotionally, physically, and tactically.” How did you hone in on fire as a particularly useful vector for thinking about these questions, and what were you weighing when deciding to actually join a crew? What was the difference for you between studying the subject and practicing it?
I came to focus on wildfires — and the existential questions attached to them — mostly by accident. When I moved to California in 2018, I needed rent money during a year between graduate research positions. I didn’t want a desk job, so fighting wildfires seemed like the logical move. When I got to the fireline, I realized I’d found one edge of the climate crisis — a place where environmental changes are accelerating faster than we can understand them. Climate change is happening everywhere, of course. But on a fire, it feels concentrated. I felt I had a vantage point from which I could sort through the crisis’s historical, political, and personal layers.
When I was first starting my PhD, I was grading papers on my balcony when I saw some smoke rising from the mountains over Santa Barbara. Soon, professors emailed me that they were evacuating. Then, a firefighter called and asked me to help out. I went and helped fight that fire with a chainsaw in the dark, then kept grading papers by the light of my headlamp in my sleeping bag in the horse corral where we were sleeping. This project felt like it jumped the categories of my identity as much as wildfires were jumping the firelines we built.
All of which is to say, those roles weren’t discrete; they were just me at that time of my life. I didn’t feel like I was switching roles so much as occupying them all at once. I think that being a hotshot made me a better anthropologist, and being a friend made me a better writer. And, frankly, the different roles unsettled me, as I think they should. They forced me to stay close to the community, to remain in conversation, and to constantly ask: why am I writing this? What responsibility do I carry for how these words may impact the people I’m writing about? Stories may be the most reliable bridge we have toward empathy, and empathy towards action. But those who appear in this book are not just characters or vehicles for a story — they’re people. And in many cases, they’re friends. That’s a tension I sit with. And it’s one I don’t plan to resolve. I think it’s a tension any narrative nonfiction writer should be willing to continuously return to and inhabit.
When It All Burns was written before this year’s fires in Los Angeles. What did public discourse and mainstream coverage of those disasters miss or misunderstand? How do you hope your book will change the conversation about megafires?
The first thing I want readers to understand is that megafires are not “natural disasters.” Fires take the shape of the conditions under which they ignite. We’ve profoundly altered those conditions, from the carbon in the atmosphere to the vegetation patterns in our forests. We know how to prevent megafires: stop burning fossil fuels, and reintroduce the kinds of fires that California’s landscapes evolved to thrive with. The fact that we’ve done neither, despite knowing how, means that megafires are not inevitable. They are political choices.
But in mainstream coverage, these two dimensions — climate change and land management — are often pitted against each other. Every time a record-breaking fire season arrives (which is now nearly every year), the same debate reemerges: is this climate change, or is it mismanagement? What I hope my book helps clarify is that this is a false binary. The climate is being destabilized by the fossil fuel industry and its political enablers. That destabilization is real, and the people causing it should be held to account. At the same time, the effects of climate change are channeled by policies that prime some people and places to bear a disproportionate brunt of climate impacts. This violent convergence is not an aberration but a defining feature of our climate-changed era.
Why is it important even for those of us who don’t live in especially fire-afflicted areas to better understand the California fires and their history?
Because megafires serve as a concentrated illustration of how climate change operates across ecological, historical, and emotional registers. Climate change is notoriously difficult to locate. By being everywhere, it starts to seem like it’s nowhere. But megafires make visible a few broadly applicable dimensions of the climate crisis. First, there are the shifts — rising temperatures, deeper droughts — that dry out landscapes and prime them for combustion. Second, there are punctuated extremes, such as record-breaking heatwaves that act like gasoline poured onto a tinderbox. At 125°F, there’s no firefighting strategy that could hold up.
Then, there are the historical structures that determine how impacts take shape. Megafires move through landscapes shaped by settler colonialism, genocide, corporate forestry, and political collusion. A major argument in When It All Burns is that we need to relocate the starting point of “fire mismanagement.” Mainstream narratives often begin with the founding of the U.S. Forest Service in the early twentieth century. But fire exclusion actually began over a century before that, when colonial governments used fire policy as a tool to dispossess Indigenous peoples and criminalize their livelihoods as a means of capturing their land and labor for exploitation. Exploitation isn't an error in the fire management system. It's at the system’s foundation. That’s why some places burn more violently, and some communities are more exposed to harm.
And finally, there are the social constraints. Climate change is outpacing our capacity to adapt. Prescribed burns are one of the most effective tools we have available to prevent megafires, yet they’re becoming harder to implement due to more volatile weather windows and disinvestment in public infrastructure. These dynamics aren’t specific to California. They’re global. Whether it’s floods, famines, or megafires, climate violence is always filtered through history and politics. Understanding fire can give us the tools we need to better understand the anatomy of the crisis.
Throughout the book, you take great care to push back against the idea of “the American wilderness,” which you describe as being “invented gradually.” Even among conservationists, ideas about what constitutes a “wild” or “natural” landscape often lead to disagreements about policy. Why do you think the idea of wilderness has such a persistent hold in the American mind, and how might we orient ourselves toward the land without that concept?
I think the persistence of the idea of wilderness, historically and today, is a matter of both power and convenience. Historically, the myth of wilderness served colonial expansion by allowing colonizers to imagine the land as “untouched,” and therefore available. This framing justified the theft of territory from Indigenous peoples who had, for many thousands of years, actively shaped and tended those landscapes. To call a place wild was a political act of Indigenous erasure.
Today, for many, the myth of wilderness remains convenient because it allows people to experience these landscapes without reckoning with the histories that shaped them. Confronting those histories is uncomfortable — not just emotionally, but ethically. It implies responsibility to the land, and to Indigenous peoples. It’s far easier to simply call a place “wild.”
After I left the hotshots, I began working to help reintroduce ecologically appropriate fire — what many call “good fire” — to California’s landscapes. The training for that work begins with a shift in perspective. You learn to read landscapes and to see how history is written into the forests. Not just the recent colonial history, which is the focus of much of my writing, but also the longer history of beneficial interactions. This reorientation is towards a concept of landscapes as cultural artifacts which have been shaped by people through time. Our responsibilities to the land are also responsibilities to each other, and vice versa.
I was really interested in the way you narrate the U.S. Forest Service’s changing relationships to land, industry, people, and fire at different points in its history. What have been the effects of these shifts? How do you anticipate the Forest Service may transform under the current presidential administration and federal government?
While my book highlights some of the Forest Service’s most damaging historical policies — like fire suppression and clearcutting — there are also signs that the agency can become a force for community-based ecological restoration across California and the broader West. The U.S. Forest Service manages roughly half of California’s land. That means there is no meaningful solution to the wildfire crisis that doesn’t involve the agency. In recent decades, we’ve seen encouraging signs — like funding for collaborative restoration efforts that direct resources into local communities, where people can implement projects rooted in diverse ecological needs and cultural values. From a ground-level perspective, Forest Service officials are, for the most part, highly knowledgeable, highly skilled, and chronically under-resourced people who care immensely for the landscapes in their charge
There’s a tendency, especially among RFK Jr.–types, to treat the agency’s regular failures as intrinsic, pointing, for example, to corporate capture as evidence that public institutions should be dismantled. I think that misses the point. The deeper issue is the erosion of democratic guardrails that are supposed to insulate public institutions from special interests. When those guardrails are stripped away, of course industry moves in.
The actions of the Forest Service are shaped by federal priorities and funding streams. Under administrations like Trump’s, the agency has been caught in what I think of as a doom cycle of divestment: the right defunds public agencies to make them less effective, and then uses the ensuing dysfunction to justify further cuts. The short-term goal is to outsource and privatize land management. The longer-term goal is to privatize public lands themselves, which has been a goal of the American right since the founding of the National Forests.
It took the Koch brothers less than 24 years to destroy a bipartisan climate consensus; it took white settlers in the newly christened state of California forty years to kill ninety percent of the region’s Indigenous people. Then there are the hotshots, who as federally contracted seasonal employees have to work for two weeks to get three guaranteed days off. How has writing this book made you think differently about time — whether that be in the context of climate anxiety, wage labor, or political change — and what can a healthier relationship with fire teach us about it?
Doing this research while firefighting had the effect of flattening time. The histories that gave rise to these fires were present here and now. On the fireline, these forces intersect in your body. Your body is where you encounter the world, and therefore the most intimate point where history and politics inscribe themselves. That’s why I felt it was essential to make this book so sensory. No one is separate from the histories that shape the worlds we inhabit. The ability to pretend you are is a privilege.
Megafires make that collapse of time visible, but so do the beneficial fires that communities are working to bring back to the land. In the prescribed burn community, it’s common to refer to these fires as medicine. They heal the land — nourishing soil, supporting pyrophilic plants — but they also begin to mend social fractures that have accumulated over time. Because prescribed burns often require diverse collaboration — from firefighters to activists, from tribal leaders to government officials — they create space for new relationships and alliances. And they can be healing in a more intimate sense too. For people whose experience with fire has been shaped entirely by trauma, participating in good fire can reframe that relationship. It offers something beyond fear and destruction. It gives back a sense of agency, and opens space for a small reorientation toward a future which often otherwise looks quite grim.
You can buy When It All Burns here. Read Thomas’s 2020 Drift essay here.
The Drift’s first poetry reading is this evening! Join us at 6:30 p.m. at Karma gallery in the East Village. Poets Sasha Debevec-McKenney, Grace Nissan, and Benjamin Krusling will read, then have a conversation moderated by our poetry editor, Zoë Hitzig. The event is free and open to the public.
