IGNITION

A confrontation of modern-day views on fire suppression and “the myth of wilderness.”

As apocalyptic megafires blaze uncontrollably throughout North America, journalist O’Connor, author of Resurrection Science and Wayfinding, takes readers on an all-encompassing journey through a variety of perspectives regarding our relationship to fire. The author interweaves her wildland fire experience with the complex, often fraught history of fire and how we have slowly erased the culture of prescribed fire, or “good fire,” in the nation’s ecosystems. For thousands of years, Indigenous people maintained a symbiotic relationship with the land, and their system involved prescribed fire interventions. These routine fires helped to clear debris and competing vegetation that covered the forest floor. Eventually, arriving colonizers made these fires illegal, and fire suppression gained favor over the following centuries. O’Connor shines a light on the individuals and groups working to reintroduce good fire back into our culture and policy. “Suppression has created a fire deficit and a need to reduce the fuels that cause high-severity wildfires,” she writes. “In California alone, an estimated twenty million acres—an area the size of Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey combined—would need to burn to eliminate the so-called fire deficit created by a century of suppression. Federal agencies acknowledge the problem, but bureaucratic risk aversion and budget constraints, among other things, have stalled the adoption of new approaches, leaving America both burning and fire starved.” Along with diverse crews of wildland firefighters, Indigenous leaders, prescribed fire experts, scientists, and ecologists, O’Connor engagingly chronicles her adventures in the nation’s lush forest landscapes. She explores not only the unexplained nature of the megafires, but the mental and physical toll these often record-breaking fires have on the firefighters trying to contain them.

An intricate examination of the relationship humans once shared with fire in the past and what it can become in the future.