What it’s like to fight a megafire

In 2017, Timothy Ingalsbee, the executive director of the organization Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, published an article in the International Journal of Wildland Fire in which he argued that firefighters know that large fires will defy suppression until weather conditions change or fuels run out. Steve Pyne, a historian and a former wildland firefighter, asked me, “Why are firefighters there at all? That’s the fundamental question.” Putting out too many fires contributes to the creation of even bigger blazes: fire ecologists call this the “fire paradox.” Today’s wildland firefighters are trapped within it.