‘When It All Burns’ Brings Us to the Fireline
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Scott Schaefer in for Mina Kim. Coming up on Forum, what is it like to fight fire with your own hands in a landscape burning hotter and faster than ever before? Anthropologist Jordan Thomas found out firsthand trading research for a chainsaw and joining the Los Padres Hot Shots, an elite wildland firefighting crew on the Central Coast.

His new book, When It All Burns, brings us inside that brutal high-stakes world. We'll talk with Thomas about life on the line, what these fires teach us about our changing climate, and where we go from here. That's next after this news.

This is Forum. I'm Scott Schaefer in for Mina Kim. In January, as we all remember, wildfires tore through the Santa Monica Mountains during what historically would have been California's rainy season. The Eaton and Palisades fires forced 200,000 people to evacuate, destroyed thousands of structures and killed 30 people while causing more than $250 billion in damage. Our guest today knows that world intimately.

In grad school, anthropologist Jordan Thomas studied indigenous fire practices, but he put academic stuff aside and joined the Los Padres Hot Shots, one of California's elite wildland firefighting crews. Thomas has spent months on the front lines of California's mega fires on the Central Coast, wielding chainsaws, digging fire breaks, and breathing thick, toxic air. In his new book,

When it all burns, firefighting in a transformed world, he brings us inside that brutal high-stakes world with 16-hour days, toxic smoke, and a fight not just about flames but against the forces fueling them. Jordan Thomas, welcome to Forum. Thanks for having me on. Well, you fought fires for some time as a Los Padres hotshot. What first drew you to that work, especially, you know, someone coming from academia?

Yeah, that's a really good question. I moved to California during what seemed to be an unprecedented fire season after unprecedented fire season hitting the state, which is a trend that's continued. And I joined a PhD program and started fighting fires there at around the same time. And I noticed this real gap.

where the scientists I was working with really had no idea what was happening with these fires. Really no way to predict them. They're spreading with more speed, they're growing with more intensity. But there's this community of people called the hotshots whose lives depend upon their ability to navigate these fires. So I got really fascinated by the hotshots. And it's surviving these fires and learning how to navigate them isn't abstract. The gap there is very material.

Yeah. What kind of people are the hotshots? What's the range of types of folks you worked with? Oh, there's all sorts of kinds of people. I mean, look around California and then transplant that into a hotshot crew. There's people from ranching families. There's surfing people. There's people from Mexico, people from Nicaragua, Central America, first-generation immigrants from Europe.

all sorts of people. And that's really one of the things that draws people to this job is it's just a really fun and fascinating experience to live in the woods for six months in such intense situations with such characters. You say it's fun, but I mean, to the average person, it may sound terrifying. What kind of research did you do before signing up? So I was researching wildfires in California.

academically as an anthropologist. But again, it really blurred the boundaries between academia and practice. Like for example, I was on my balcony in Santa Barbara outside UCSB grading undergraduate papers and I saw a fire start in the foothills. And then I started getting emails from my professors that they're evacuating and classes are getting canceled. And then I got a call from the fire chief

asking me if I could come help this fire. So I brought the papers with me that I was grading, went out into the mountains with a chainsaw, in the dark with a headlamp, and had to tunnel through brush with the crew.

And at night, we would go sleep in a horse corral, and I'd be grading papers by my headlamp. So it was a real mix of academic research, of trying to understand how people are making sense of these fires and where these fires came from. But in addition to doing research into the culture of these people by getting to know these people and what I'd have to do to survive, which really involves...

It's basically a professional form of athletic training in which you have to be able to navigate mountains with chainsaws in extreme heat for hours on end, for days on end, for weeks on end, for months on end.

So the hotshots are kind of the special forces of America's firefighters. They've been compared to the U.S. Navy SEALs in terms of training, difficulty of the mission, and so on. And I'm wondering, how did the other members take to a former anthropology grad student joining the crew? Were they a little skeptical? I think that...

Everybody is always skeptical in a hotshot crew of the new people on the crew. And the way you prove yourself on the crew is showing that you can keep up with the crew. So the interview, you sit down in the office and you get asked the normal questions like your hobbies and whatnot. But then the actual interview afterwards, you go put on a pack and the leader of the hotshots asks you if you want to go for a walk. And you race up the mountain with him as he's asking you questions. And you have to be able to continue answering questions with 50 pounds on your back

basically running up a mountain. And it's that sort of physical activity that people gauge when they're learning to take you seriously or not. So yeah, people were very skeptical of me, but they weren't necessarily skeptical of the fact I was an anthropologist. They were skeptical of the fact of whether I could keep up or not. And sometimes I did. Yeah, did you...

Did you have those doubts yourself? Yeah. Oh, of course. I was incredibly nervous. So I was on a chainsaw initially, and I thought I was a pretty good Sawyer. That's what a person with a chainsaw is called as a Sawyer. And the reason I should emphasize, I was so naive when I joined this that I thought I would get a hose because I thought you put fires out with water. But the hot shots, the reason why they're so revered in these communities is because there's not water on the mountains where they're working.

So what you do is you remove fuel from the edges of the fires with chainsaws. And fires love steep, intense terrain. So you're essentially mountaineering with chainsaws on the edge of fires to put them out, which is why there's so much emphasis put on physicality and fitness, because that's just getting to work, right? And you have to be able to be doing this extreme physical feats while staying really, really mentally astute.

Because you're on the edges of fires that, again, science doesn't even understand. But your life depends upon your crew's ability to predict what they're going to do. So you were primarily fighting fires in mountain ranges, in mountains. And how is that different in terms of how the fire behaves from flatter terrain in terms of the danger or the kind of equipment that you can use?

Yeah, yeah. You have a lot less access to the sorts of equipment you have in municipal areas, for example. And you have less access to people because it takes a lot of skill and training and knowledge to be in these steep terrains. Largely because fire, it's affected by the fuel type, so bushes or trees. It's affected by the weather.

And it's affected by the topography, so the steepness of the slope. So fire moves really fast upslope. So you have to, when you're working in these different terrains, you have to be keeping all of these different things in mind all the time. What fuel you're moving through, what the weather's doing, and what the topography is. And of course, it's becoming far more difficult to do this because the weather patterns are more altered because of climate change.

And then also the fuel types are becoming more altered because of the long-term effects of climate change. So this is really the cutting edge of climate work, really. In this kind of work, I'm sure you have to both have each other's backs, but also not do something that could endanger your fellow crew members. Talk about that a little bit. What are some of the mistakes that you're taught to avoid?

Yeah, so again, I mentioned that I was on a chainsaw starting off. And when you're on a chainsaw, you're at the front of the group of people, which is about 20 people, and you're trying to create a line of dirt around the fire. And so you're cutting and you're setting the pace for the crew, because if you slow down, then the crew can't move as fast. And you're really having to move quickly in order to stay ahead of the fire.

But if you lose focus and you hit a rock with the chainsaw, something that small can dull the chain. It can slow you down just a little bit. And if you're slowed down just a little bit, then say a weather front moving in that's predicted and that you have a lookout watching for, that wind could come, pick up, intensify the fire behavior, and you could all get seriously injured or worse.

So there's real attention paid to things like how are you using the chainsaw? And that's enforced through a lot of like really fine-tuned social things like a lot of machismo, which in general culture is not very, it's frowned upon. But here it really makes sense because you really do have to perform with a certain level of intensity or else people's lives are a very real risk.

Yeah, I was going to ask you about that because the very name Hotshots kind of oozes with testosterone. And I'm wondering, I seem to remember seeing some photos where there was one or two women. How many women are there in these Hotshot elite firefighting groups? There's, I don't want to give you an exact number, but I believe it's less than 10%. And, yeah.

It varies year by year, which is often considered a problem. There's been a push since the 1980s to bring more women into hotshot spaces because it's widely understood that a diversity of views and backgrounds and experiences can provide more eyes and more ideas into how to relate to fire and can actually be a major benefit. But the first woman hotshot was actually on the Los Padres hotshots back in, I think, the 1980s.

So it's been a push for a long time, but it hasn't really caught on. And women are still having a hard time joining the job or staying in the job when they join. And a lot of that is because people are very much evaluated based on these machismo ideals, which are really hard to legislate your way out of because they're so cultural. Yeah.

Yeah, well, I was going to say, you know, in the typical workplace, I mean, I think we all know what's right, what's wrong in terms of how you talk with people and address people and, you know, the pronouns you use and everything else, the kinds of questions you ask. Does all that go out the window? I know there are no windows, but does it, you know, does it get ignored, that sort of, I don't want to say political correctness, but, you know, the kinds of things we've learned over the past decades about the right way to, you know, build trust and talk with people? You know, it's...

I've been told that it's changed over the years on Hotshot crews as well. And I think a lot of it depends upon the people that you have. But so I showed up with the Hotshot crew kind of expecting to get like wrapped up in duct tape and stumped into a dumpster or some old fashioned hazing, things like that. And it's not like that anymore. People are pretty cordial and nice. And there's a lot of, well, you're just spending so much time with this group of 20 people that it really depends on the personalities on the crew. But there's a lot of banter, a lot of, uh,

A lot of joking around. When you're in these intense environments, and I've spoken to friends who served in the military, physicians who serve in the ICU. My sister was a nurse during COVID. A lot of the time people, I think, find ways to create a levity even in these really grave situations. And a lot of that levity, I think, you find in the banter and the way people are just talking to each other and relating to each other in these scenarios. And that's one of the real joys and difficulties of writing this book is how to find that balance.

Yeah. And then just quickly, because we're coming up on a break, how is a group like the Hotshots different from CAL FIRE in terms of reputation or image?

Yeah, well there's a real rivalry between the two. And I'm not going to take a side on that rivalry, but I think the rivalry comes from the different jurisdictions. So, CAL FIRE specializes in what's called the WUI, which is the Wild and Urban Interface. And this is a place where houses really start encroaching on forests. While HOTSHOTS, they are employed by the federal government, CAL FIRE's state, and they work out in the mountains with big trees where these huge fires are burning.

All right, we can come back and talk more about that after the break. We're talking with Jordan Thomas, anthropologist and former wildland firefighter. His new book is called When It All Burns, Fighting Fire in a Transformed World. Stay with us. We have lots to talk with him about, and we'd love to hear from you. Have you ever fought a wildfire or worked on a fire crew, or have you been affected by a wildfire? Give us a call, 866-733-6786. ♪

Support for Forum comes from the University of San Francisco School of Management. Celebrating 100 years of partnership with the Bay Area business community, the USF School of Management connects students to the city's vibrant culture, hands-on internships, and a wealth of career opportunities.

where AI and sustainability are integrated into every facet of business education, and where students bring innovation, ethics, and entrepreneurial leadership to a planet in need. The University of San Francisco School of Management. Change the world from here. Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Earthjustice. As a national legal nonprofit, Earthjustice has more than 200 full-time lawyers who fight for a healthy environment.

They wield the power of the law to protect people's health, preserve magnificent places and wildlife, and advance clean energy to combat climate change. Earthjustice fights in court because the Earth needs a good lawyer. Learn more about how you can get involved and become a supporter at earthjustice.org.

And welcome back to Forum. I'm Scott Schaefer in this hour for Meena Kim talking with Jordan Thomas. He's an anthropologist and former wildland firefighter, and he's author of the new book, When It All Burns, Fighting Fire in a Transformed World.

We'd love to hear from you. You can email your comments and questions to forum at kqed.org, or you can find us on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. We're at KQED Forum, or you can give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. Again, 866-733-6786.

Jordan, you mentioned in the book that there's an old adage that you learned from the hotshots and I'm quoting here. It's you learn to let go of hope or you get crushed. Say more about that. What does that mean? Yeah. So I was told that when we were fighting a fire in Sequoia National Forest during the windy fire during a year in which 20% of the Sequoia trees burned. So a fifth of the world's Sequoia population died that year.

And this was really profound to experience because sequoias are among the most fire-evolved species on Earth. Their bark grows several feet thick to insulate them from heat.

Their canopy rises over 100 feet off the forest floor, which protects them from basically all but the highest flames. And they can recover if 90% of their canopy torches. And they actually need fire to open their cones so that their seeds germinate. So the fact that these trees were being driven towards extinction by the same ecological force they once depended upon their survival...

For me, it opened all these other questions about what does that mean for the rest of the balance weaving together the life on Earth and climate change? And what does that mean for our society and for us? And the hotshots are really living on the edge of this. And for some people, it meant letting go of hope, putting down your shoulders and just trudging through and doing the work and not thinking about hope or wondering where you're going. And this is one of the things I weave through throughout the book is going from this point

of hopelessness towards the end where I'm interviewing people and exploring what does hope mean in a changed climate and these spaces of massive fires.

I can imagine, and this would be true, I guess, of any first responder kind of job that after a rough day on the job, you might need a little kindness, a little empathy. And I'm wondering, does that exist at all when you are, you know, out in the middle of the mountains and the forest fighting these fires in this kind of a macho organization?

That's a really good question, Scott. I think it depends on what kindness and empathy is. I think it's expressed in different ways here. So the way it looks, you wake up before dawn, getting kicked awake by your supervisor. You're sleeping on the ground on a sleeping pad and a sleeping bag, no tent, nothing, under the stars. You're trying to pack things up and get to the vehicle as quickly as possible, and

And then you get ready to go. You get briefed on the fire behavior, then you hike several hours out into the mountains, and that's the commute to work. And then you work for around 14 to 16 hours on the edges of these flames in the mountains, and then you go back and you eat some bad food and you lay on the ground and you go to sleep. And...

There's kindness and there's empathy, but I think it's in just how close this collective experience is and the pain that you're going through, but also how you're all dealing with that pain, which is, again, a lot of joking about it, not a lot of talking about it, because it's not going to go away. You're going to get kicked awake tomorrow and you're going to do it again because there's a real focus on duty. And that's the duty that these people have taken on.

What about for you personally, when you either, you know, took a break from the firefighting or when you were done, did you have a kind of, I don't know, a version of PTSD or did you need to get some therapy or something to sort of help you make sense of what you saw and what you did?

Yeah, so for me personally, I spent a lot of time with the hot shots in the off season, doing things like winter mountaineering and other things to really just try to find that social space that we had all bonded with over the crew, which was really jarring to move away from afterwards. But in terms of my relationship to the landscapes and the fire, that was really shaken during that period because it is so violent.

And the histories that have made these fires so big are also so violent. So for me, after I stopped fighting fires, I used the skills and the certifications I had gained over the course of being a hotshot to try to learn about prescribed fire and to try to learn about what people are doing to bring good fire back to California's landscapes. Because California needs certain kinds of fire. Its landscapes do and its plants do. And really the ability of its people to thrive relies on certain kinds of fire. And there's a real movement in California to bring these kinds of fire back.

If you're just joining us, you're listening to Forum. I'm Scott Schaefer. In this hour for me and Kim talking with Jordan Thomas, his new book is called When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World. And we'd love to have you join our conversations. Have you ever fought a wildfire or worked on a fire crew or been affected by a wildfire, had to evacuate, that kind of thing? What questions do you have about what it's like to be a wildland firefighter?

Or do you have questions about how we fight and manage wildfires today? You can email your comments and questions to [email protected] or find us on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. We're @kqedforum or give us a call if you'd like 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.

Jordan, you made a reference a moment ago to some of the physical pain and discomfort that one has to kind of go through and get through when you're part of this hotshot crew. Describe, you know, what is it like for your feet, your back, your, you know, your head, anything? Yeah, yeah, that's a really good question.

And it leads me to this point that I kept coming back to and that reframed sensations of like heat for me and heat waves, which was just the violence of climate change right now, not in some abstract sense, but right now and how direct that is. And so there were fires that we fought, for example, in Big Sur in the spring where it should normally be very cool, but the temperature was around 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

and you're trying to stop this huge fire from going to this town. So you're working in this heat, and it's so hot that your water, you can hardly drink your water because it's hotter than a jacuzzi water, and that's what you have to cool off and dump on yourself. Meanwhile, your feet are chapped and oozing within your elk leather boots, and you're just tunneling through brush, getting really just cut by it and dented.

and trying to stay conscious in this heat while working like this when your sweat is sizzling off of the bar of the chainsaw

And just trying to stay conscious, let alone focused enough to not say cut your foot with a chainsaw is a real, real task. And a former hotshot told me that's when you know you're doing the work, when you think about cutting off a toe just to escape the pain of the job. And that is becoming far, far worse as we continue pumping more carbon emissions and as the fossil fuel industry delays action on climate change.

I want to give out the phone number again, then we're going to bring in our listeners. If you'd like to ask Jordan Thomas a question or make a comment, you can email your comments and questions at a forum at kqed.org or give us a call at 866-733-6786. Let's go to the phones now. And Chris is calling from, it looks like Clarksburg. Is that right? Where are you, Chris? That's correct. Clarksburg. We're on the Sacramento River Delta.

a small town in california um yeah i i heard your call out to uh people who had been on fire crews in the past and when i was 18 right out of high school i got lucky enough to get a job on a u.s forest service hot shot crew out of uh angeles national forest it was called little tahunga hot shots and uh they're still in operation i saw one of their crews their crew a couple years ago on the field and i chatted with them it was pretty

entertaining, but it was very exciting for a kid. When it's a young man's game, I mean, it was so physically intense. I heard the previous speaker talking about Big Sur and 120 degrees. I was on a fire in Big Sur before and super steep.

And, uh, that thing about water is you only get, we would only carry four quarts of water and you wouldn't even know when you're going to, you don't know if you're going to be out all night, um, carry some web gear, a butt pack with a little bit of food in it. And, uh, you had to really ration your water. And if your buddy ran out of water, it's kind of tough, but we had a lot of adventures and we'd fly interstate. We did a lot of helicopter work, a lot of backcountry helicopter drops, um, which was all extremely exciting, uh,

Uh, for the whole crew. And one of the, that I remember was, uh, we went to Idaho and we're flying out of, we were just out of the San Fernando Valley and little Tahunga Canyon. And, uh, we went to a fire in Idaho and, uh, um, took a raft across the Salmon River to get to the wilderness boundary and then hiked up the hill for half a day. And the weather was kind of turning and it was starting to get cold. And the fire was really, um, uh,

really dropping in severity. There wasn't that much to do firefighting, but we got lost because it was foggy. And one of the crew got hypothermia because we were getting wet, getting rained on. And he was still walking, but he wasn't really conscious. Wow. And so we took him and we put him in a, we did have some sleeping bags because the chopper, we got to the campsite.

with him and Chopper came in and dropped the net with our gear and we had packs in there and a bunch of water and food and we also had sleeping bags. We'd never see those packs, but we did that time. So we put him in a sleeping bag with another guy who had a small stature, but for a warmth transfer, we decided they should probably take their clothes off. So they only had their underwear on, but it worked really well. And the one was just devoted to his friend and the other one was unconscious. And when he woke up,

He was flabbergasted, he was in a sleeping bag with another man. Oh, wow. Chris, thanks for sharing that. Those are really amazing stories. And obviously that was, especially when you're, since you were so young, really an exciting time in your life. Jordan, Thomas, what do you make of what Chris is describing? Does that sound pretty familiar to you?

Yeah, it does. And thanks so much for calling in, Chris, because we tied in with Little Donga Hotshots a few times. One of the people who trained me early on started off on that crew. And yeah, there's not very many hotshot crews left.

And so you really appreciate the ones that you find. And there's a real camaraderie there. There's a rivalry, but also camaraderie. And I mean, that's a really good point, which is not just heat, but you're dealing with all these swings in weather throughout the year. And so people, you know, you have to look out for hypothermia as well as heat stroke. And that can be in as little as one of your two-week assignments because it's such a

because you're moving around so much and because the weather changes so much in the mountains. So you really do have to be specialized. Chris, thanks so much for calling in with those stories. Really appreciate it and stay safe out there. I want to go to Novato next and Lisa is calling in. Lisa, welcome to Forum. Oh, hi. Thank you so much. Jordan, first of all, you're an animal. Yeah.

I have so much respect for Hotshot, basically. And I'm getting this blue stone because when I was 19, I was in Santa Barbara going to school. And I had a roommate who was a Hotshot guy. And we started talking and I was like, do you think I could ever do that?

And he said, yeah, you have to work out a lot more and blah, blah, blah. And I ended up actually, because of the timing, I ended up being a Santa Barbara City firefighter for 29 years. Wow. And one of the, I mean, it's just so simplistic. I'm listening to the radio and here you're on.

And one of the guys that I became good friends with within the first year had been a hotshot. And his roommate, buddy, was Stan Stewart Jordan. Do you know his name? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell us who that is. Stan Stewart was...

Yeah, Lisa, go ahead. Lisa, sorry. Oh, no, no, you go ahead, Jordan. I want to hear what you have to say, because in my opinion, he was the most knowledgeable about fire behavior besides one other man who I believe is still alive in Santa Barbara County. But go ahead. I was just going to say that he helped train Aoki, who's one of the main characters in the book and who was leading the Los Padres hot shots while I was on the crew. So I've heard a lot about Stuart.

Yeah. So Lisa, you obviously knew hotshots. Were you, and you were a firefighter, were you ever a hotshot firefighter or did you, did you think about doing that? No, no, I used to say to Stan, you know, you guys are really crazy. I mean, who runs into a forest with, you know, trees burning and sweeping in the dirt 18 days in a row sometimes. How do you do that? He goes, I'm crazy. Yeah.

You run into a burning building. And I said, well, wait a minute. We used to like eat each other because I really, I just think hot shots are, they have my just utmost respect. And there was a woman on the hot shot tree. She, Deanna, do you know that name, Jordan? I believe I've heard the name. I don't know her personally, though. Yeah. They might not have been there at the same time.

Oh, no, no, no. This is like, you probably weren't even born. Sorry. This was back in 19, late 70s. Oh.

Oh, wow. Well, Lisa, thanks very much for sharing all of that with us. And thanks for being a firefighter. We need them out there. So appreciate all of that. Thanks for calling in. We've got a lot of listener comments. Let me read a few of those. One writes, how badly does poison oak affect wildland firefighters? Do critters cause problems or injuries? Jordan?

Yeah, the poison oak is a point of constant pain when you're fighting wildfires because you're cutting through brush and you don't really go around things. You're staying on the edge of the fire. So yeah, I've cut through the strands of poison oak about 30 feet high with the oil so intense that it burns your skin on contact and your whole body's covered in that and you're not showering. You're sleeping on the ground.

So by the end of the week, you look like a total swollen sausage. It's extremely uncomfortable, and you learn to live with that discomfort. And yeah, there's all sorts of things you have to worry about. Bears are not, they're the least of people's worries, really. You're often more worried. They're too smart to be hanging out in a firebox.

Yeah, what about your lungs though? You know between the you know the smoke generally But you know when when the poison oak burns and you inhale some of that does that cause any problems in your lungs? Yeah, I'm glad you asked about the smoke I haven't noticed anything in particular with smoke from poison oak But I know smoke in general and the chronic health conditions associated with that are a major major problem with wildland firefighting people focus on the danger of burning alive and

And when it happens, that's terrible. But the far greater danger is the chronic health effects associated with the work. And federal firefighters, like hot shots, they actually do not have very good long-term health coverage. And a lot of the time it's seasonal contract labor. So outside of the season, you accrue all these health problems during the season. But when the fires aren't burning and you're not on the job, you're actually not taken care of medically. So you see banners like support our firefighters or we heart our firefighters.

firefighters. But that really seems ironic from the perspective of hotshots who aren't actually getting the support from our institutions that they need in order to keep doing this and stay healthy doing it. And there's a lot of people leaving the job. It's hard to keep these job staff now because they're really not compensated well because of things like smoke exposure.

And that would require what? Something from Congress in order to improve things in terms of resources, pay and health care? Yeah, yeah. So you're asking earlier about the difference between Cal Fire and Hot Shots. And one of the major differences, Cal Fire is state and Hot Shots are federal. So it requires federal action to get Hot Shots better taken care of, to raise their pay, to provide them year round health care benefits.

things like this that will keep them in the job. So if we want hot shots out there, and hot shots are some of the greatest fire experts we have in our society, it'll take actual federal congressional action to provide them the conditions that will keep people in the work and will attract people to the work. And that's a real task that we need to take care of because it's very hard to staff hot shot crews now.

Yeah, a lot of politics in that. A lot of politics, yeah. Yeah, and the climate change, which of course you write about as well, that, you know, has made everything hotter and everything drier and the winds worse. So you're fighting a lot of things that are, you know, beyond your control. Exactly. But it is in our political control. And I think that that is something that should give us hope.

Yeah. All right. We are going to take another break and we'll come back and talk more with Jordan Thomas about his new book. It's called When It All Burns, Fighting Fire in a Transformed World. And we'd love to hear from you. Do you have a question about how we fight and manage wildfires today? Is there a place in California you love that has been changed or threatened by fire?

Give us a call at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786, or we're on all the social media platforms, Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, or email us. We're forum at kqed.org. Scott Schaefer here this hour for Mena Kim.

Support for Forum comes from the University of San Francisco School of Management. Celebrating 100 years of partnership with the Bay Area business community, the USF School of Management connects students to the city's vibrant culture, hands-on internships, and a wealth of career opportunities. Where AI and sustainability are integrated into every facet of business education.

and where students bring innovation, ethics, and entrepreneurial leadership to a planet in need.

The University of San Francisco School of Management. Change the world from here. Support for KQED podcasts comes from Earthjustice. As a national legal nonprofit, Earthjustice has more than 200 full-time lawyers who fight for a healthy environment. They wield the power of the law to protect people's health, preserve magnificent places and wildlife, and advance clean energy to combat climate change. Earthjustice fights in court because the Earth needs a good lawyer.

Learn more about how you can get involved and become a supporter at earthjustice.org. And welcome back to Forum. Scott Schaefer here this hour with Jordan Thomas. His book is called When It All Burns.

And we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call if you would like to join us, 866-733-6786. Jordan, before the break, we have been talking about politics and climate, and one listener writes, climate change remains a politicized issue. Have you ever encountered hotshots who are conservative, right-leaning, or Republican, but break with their party on the subject of climate change because of what they've seen in the field?

Yeah, that's a good question. I'm guessing you're not. It is interesting, but I'm guessing that, you know, I don't know, out there when you're doing this, there's not a lot of talk about federal policy, but who knows?

There's a lot more talk about when you're fighting wildfires about the small things that are keeping you alive out there. Chainsaw maintenance, your boots, your blisters, keeping off water, things like that. When you do start talking about climate change, there actually are not very many people that I've encountered on these hotshot crews who deny climate change. There's different levels of trust in terms of our institutions and their abilities to deal with climate change.

And I think that's largely because hot shots are such a, really, it's such a disadvantaged job. The institutions that we have are failing hot shots by not providing them enough health care and not paying them very much. So there's a lot of institutional distrust, ironically. And I think one of the things the fossil fuel industry has done very effectively is harness that distrust and exploit it to continue preventing climate action.

I want to come back to the phones in a minute, but I know that both in your research as a student and in the book, of course, you write a lot about indigenous fire usage. And you write that the fire knowledge that indigenous people have can help protect the state from mega fires. What are you thinking there when you say that? How so? Yeah, so...

Climate change could be viewed as a spark that's lit these fires, but the kindling was laid by several centuries of forest management that was based on colonial practices of excluding fires from the landscapes. And in California, that's really important because for the last 10,000 years or so, indigenous people were lighting most of the fires in California.

intentional ways to tend the landscapes in certain ways that increased biological diversity and produce the sorts of ecosystems that indigenous people thrived with. So, California is one of the most fire evolved landscapes on earth, but it depends on certain kinds of fire.

And people, indigenous people, have been lighting those fires long enough to where California's landscapes have actually, it's one of the few places on earth where they're more adapted to human burn patterns than natural burn patterns like lightning. So there's, as soon as the Spanish colonized California, they criminalized fire.

As soon as the United States took over California from Mexico, they criminalized fire in the rest of the state by indigenous people. And this was an intentional way to subjugate indigenous people because they relied on fire to produce the sorts of plants that they used for their economies. And so this really disrupted the ecosystems and made the ecosystem sick in ways that climate change is now basically exploding every single year.

And you write in the book, I think, about sort of alliances between some of the indigenous groups and other firefighting organizations like CAL FIRE. Is that correct? Yeah. Yeah. So if we can accept the indigenous people lit most of the fires in California and that taking those fires away is part of what laid the groundwork for these massive fires we're seeing today, then bringing these fires back in ways that are intentional and adapted to the particular ecosystems, it

It's one of the ways we can create resilience against the effects of climate change. They won't be effective if we keep using fossil fuels, but they can help maintain and restore ecosystems in the meantime. And in the process, the people involved with this work, indigenous people, firefighters, conservationists, ranchers, all sorts of people have an interest in ecosystem health in California. In particular, the right kinds of fire are central for ecosystem health.

So bringing these people together in these spaces to decide what kinds of fires to light and how to do it, and then the actual practice of doing it, that's a real method of really, I think, increasing the health of our social relations as well and bridging a lot of these divides that have formed historically. All right, let's go back to the phones again. The number is 866-733-6786. And let's go to San Jose and Mary. Welcome to Forum Year, Han with Jordan Thomas.

Hi, thanks. I was on something called the Davis crew in 1980. I was a student at UC Davis and the crew there, not hot shots by a long shot, was about half female.

And we went on one fire. Well, we went on many fires. I went on one in the Sierras for about a week and came home with poison oak all over the side of my body and blowing out black boogers for over a week. It was really hard, really hard work. My brother...

became a hotshot in the Angeles Crest Forest. And here's my question. He was a hotshot, like the whole helicopter thing and everything for a couple of years when he was in his 20s. And then about four years ago, when he was 60 years old, he got this really rare disease

thyroid cancer die like almost instantly. It's such a rare form of thyroid cancer. And I have wondered if it was somehow related to what they're using or whatever it is.

what they're inhaling, because we hear stuff about firefighters, you know, in the city and how many of the stuff gives them health issues. And so that's my question. Thanks so much for that, Mary. And Jordan, you know, of course, we remember after 9-11, a lot of those first responders also had a lot of health problems. And, you know, there was a lot of difficulty getting the federal government to pay for that. But what are your thoughts about Mary's question?

Yeah, Mary, I'm so sorry to hear about your brother. And thanks for the work that you did fighting fires as well. I mean, I can't speak to any particular case. And I think that's what makes it so difficult with these. It's really hard to track every time you're exposed to something because you're constantly exposed to different things.

And it's really hard to pinpoint a particular ailment to the chronic exposures. And wildland firefighters are a really good example of this. But this is really something that's unfolding across frontline communities and essential workers across the entire country, whether it's farm laborers or workers.

what have you, especially as climate change gathers momentum. And I think this is just a really good example of why things like universal health care can be increasingly important as climate change gets worse, because it's often hard to pinpoint the exact cause. But we do know that the conditions are getting more dangerous for more people who we rely upon in our society. And so I think that's, it's, I'm sorry, I'm very sorry to hear about your brother, though. And I thank you for sharing that, Mary.

Mary, thanks very much for that call. We have a number of comments here. Zizza, I think it is, or Ziza writes, can you speak to why people feel called to this incredibly challenging and painful work? I'm so curious about the motivations different individuals bring to becoming a hotshot. And, you know, Jordan, you talked a little bit about what drew you to it, but I imagine it's a little different for everyone.

Yeah, there's a lot of different motivations. It's often assumed that it's some sort of genetic predilection to adrenaline and wanting to chase adrenaline. That's often not actually the case. So you want to be working with people who are risk averse and who can really rationally judge the situation because that keeps people safe.

Some sociologists have attributed it to inequality. Some people's lives and property are protected, and then other people's lives are considered worth being the ones doing the protecting. And it's generally lower-income people drawn to this work for various reasons. But on a case-by-case basis, it's just so variable. There's people who join the crew because of broken hearts, because of the excitement of the work,

And I think I would not minimize the amount of the sense of wonder and awe that you get being this close to such a visceral and enormous phenomenon of the planet. These fires are being close to them as an experience that you really cannot replicate anywhere else in society. And there's a real draw to it.

Let's go back to the phones now. And Mayor Ormeyer in San Jose, you're next. Welcome. Hi, thank you very much. In 2019, I was an EMT and we spent a lot of time evacuating patients from these fires. And so I'm well aware of the mutual aid efforts that go into them.

In addition, I've seen that there's a lot of local aid firefighters that will go out and be sent out. But those firefighters are paid relatively well, at least in the Bay Area, and have full health care benefits. And so I'm just sort of wondering why there's this gap between the hotshot getting paid so little and the mutual aid firefighters that are getting paid their regular rates during this time. Jordan?

Yeah, so we can get into the weeds in this a little bit, but a lot of it has to do with jurisdiction. So municipal firefighters in California, they're the ones with the fire engines and the hoses. They're pretty well compensated. State firefighters- And they're union members by and large, right? Union members, yeah. Cal fires, they work under the state of California, so they're still a little bit closer bureaucratically. They're also paid a bit better and have better healthcare benefits.

Federally, it's just been incredibly difficult through the years to keep...

compensation commensurate with the speed with which climate change is growing fires. So, hot shots are still paid about what they were in the 80s. But back in the 80s, it's essentially a different planet they were fighting fires on. They'd be doing trail work for maybe 90% of the time and fighting fires for about 10% of the time. And that equation is totally flipped now. So, just a couple decades ago, a 200,000 acre fire season across the whole American West was considered bad.

While I was fighting fires, there was a million acre fire in California and several different hundred thousand acre fires burning across the state simultaneously.

So the conditions of the planet has shifted far faster than compensation has kept up. And part of that is due to politics and the difficulty of convincing right-wing people in our Congress to pass things like wage improvements and healthcare improvements for federal workers because there's been a real tension in funding public sector things in society in recent decades, as we can see with this current administration especially.

Yeah. It's still kind of counterintuitive in a way because it seems like everyone can rally around treating first responders, firefighters, police officers, and so on with respect and paying them commensurate with the work they're doing. It is a little surprising to me. It's extremely surprising, and that's one of the reasons I think it's important to draw attention to because I don't think many people in society would want to not be paying hot shots well. I think it gets lost in this just...

empty rhetoric about, for example, government waste in the public sector. And then that gets used as an excuse to cut funds, which, you know, then cuts, allows you to cut taxes and whatnot. So the implications of what it would mean in a material way to pay hotshots what they should be paid, and really everyone else what they should be paid. I mean, what that comes down to is taxing the wealthiest strata in our society more.

And so essentially the health effects of hot shots is a sort of a tax subsidy for, um, the richest people in society. You're listening to forum. I'm Scott Schaefer in for me and Kim. We've been talking with Jordan Thomas, anthropologist and former Los Padres hotshot, the elite firefighting force in the U S his new book is called when it all burns, fighting fire in a transformed world. You know, uh,

Jordan, like your writing is just so terrific in this book and your descriptive language and the characters that you bring out. And I'm just wondering, this seems to me like perfect for a movie, you know, and I'm wondering if you've been approached by any screenwriters or studios or Netflix or anything like that about turning this book into a film. I've not been approached by anybody, no. But if somebody approaches me, I think it would be a great idea.

Well, maybe somebody listening will do that. I mean, there've been similar stories or films, I guess, about like local fire departments. I think there was one called Chicago Fire. I don't not necessarily, you know, wouldn't necessarily go to a film like that, but a lot of people do like them.

When you look at the future of California's fire landscape, Jordan, you know, what gives you hope and what worries you the most? Obviously, climate change and the lack of action, in fact, going backwards with policies, you know, worries you, no doubt. Is there anything that gives you optimism? Yeah.

Yeah, I'll start as quickly with what worries me. And it's that we know what we need to be doing. And that's we need to stop burning fossil fuels as quickly as possible. And we need to start lighting more of the types of fires landscapes need as quickly as possible. And our current administration has backtracked on both of those things. So as we know what we need to do, we're actually going in the wrong direction in terms of pumping more fossil fuels and propping up the fossil fuel industry with the Trump administration, while also cutting funding for the public sector that's needed to do forest management work on federal lands.

And that is half of California's lands is federal lands. Half of California's lands are federal responsibility and are impacted by the sorts of cuts the Trump administration has implemented. So there is no forest management strategy in California that will work without sufficient federal funding. That's what worries me. What gives me hope is...

Really what people have in my work for this book told me gave them hope. And that's in places like north of San Francisco where whole forests have been torched in recent years by mega fires.

People are coming together to rehabilitate and bring back forests alongside fire, to regrow forests that will be adapted to fire from the beginning. And this brings together all sorts of people. As we were going through earlier, there's indigenous people really at the helm of this.

And they're allied with Forest Service officials who historically there's not been, there's a lot of conflict there and CAL FIRE officials and all these different people really forming these sorts of alliances to bring these landscapes back in ways that will be resilient and will be healthy. And that's the process of healing that isn't going to solve climate change that prevent the sort of widespread destruction, but really does build a relationship to place and to people that is very, very special.

Getting to the end of the hour, but let me see if I can sneak in one more caller. Judy in Novato, you're next. And just be mindful, if you would, that we're coming up on the end of the hour. Yeah, I'll make it fast. My nephew worked for the National Forest Service for 30 years. He was the superintendent of a hotshot crew in Los Padres National Forest. And although, you know, we didn't talk a lot about the fires he fought there,

Maybe like people who go to war, they don't always talk about the battles. But one thing he always said is that he wanted all his guys to get back safe. And I remember that comment more than anything else about his work as a superintendent of a hotshot. Yeah, yeah. Jordan, that's really the most important thing, right, is in addition to putting the fires out or containing them, is doing it safely. Yeah.

Yeah, thank you for sharing. Doing it safely. Doing it safely. Jordan, you know, before I let you go, I asked you earlier a moment ago what gives you hope, and I'm wondering, you know, how do you feel about technology and the prospect for things like drones or infrared cameras, early detection, undergrounding of wires, tree trimming, those sorts of things? Yeah, I'm glad that you asked that, Scott, because it's...

Innovation does help, and I'm not going to pretend that it doesn't. But one of the things I try to do in this book is trace the growth of these fires and the way our society have created them through the political choices we've made through time. And these megafires we're seeing now are really products of these political choices we've made. And it's hard to innovate your way out of systemic issues. I really think it will take a systems change and alterations in how we

run our society politically in order to get a hold on these fires. And the main parts of that are stop burning fossil fuels and provide the funding needed to do the right forms of forest management and put more fire on the ground. And that sounds simple, but that's a pretty would require a pretty profound shift in our, how our democracy runs in terms of not being having an administration full of billionaires, for example, but having people elected who understand forest management or understand what working people are dealing with on the ground.

Definitely seems like we're going in the other direction. Well, Jordan Thomas, thank you so much for joining us again. The book is called When It All Burns, Fighting Fire in a Transformed World. Really important topic and really a great read as well. And maybe a movie one day, huh, Jordan? I'm sure that wouldn't be too upsetting if that happened. Thanks very much for joining us. Thanks so much, Scott. You've been listening to Forum. I'm Scott Schaefer here this hour for Mina Kim. I'll be back tomorrow. Thanks so much for listening.

Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Support for Forum comes from the University of San Francisco School of Management. Celebrating 100 years of partnership with the Bay Area business community, the USF School of Management connects students to the city's vibrant culture, hands-on internships, and a wealth of career opportunities. Where AI and sustainability are integrated into every facet of business education.

and where students bring innovation, ethics, and entrepreneurial leadership to a planet in need.

The University of San Francisco School of Management. Change the world from here. Support for KQED podcasts comes from Earthjustice. As a national legal nonprofit, Earthjustice has more than 200 full-time lawyers who fight for a healthy environment. They wield the power of the law to protect people's health, preserve magnificent places and wildlife, and advance clean energy to combat climate change. Earthjustice fights in court because the Earth needs a good lawyer.

Learn more about how you can get involved and become a supporter at earthjustice.org. Hey, it's Glenn Washington, the host of the Snap Judgment podcast. At Snap, we tell cinematic stories that let you feel what it's like inside someone else's skin. Stories that let you walk in someone else's footsteps. Storytelling like you've never heard before.

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