Review of "Ignition: Lighting Fires in a Burning World" by M.R. O'Connor
book reviewed by Mike Beasley
I must say I loved this new book by nature and science writer M.R. O’Connor. “Ignition” has O’Connor spending significant time away from her partner and home in New York as she enters the world of fire practitioners plying their trade as nomadic pyrotechnicians, burn bosses and controlled fire specialists. These are wildland firefighters, many of whom maintain the same credentials as local, State and Federal wildland firefighters. Known as the National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG), this body sets training and experience requirements for the many specialized roles that wildland firefighters fill on both wildland and prescribed fires.
The fire practitioner movement is distinctly different from the government-sponsored firefighter crews whose main goal is fire suppression. These controlled burns are often on Tribal lands, private land, and lands managed by non-profit organizations like the Nature Conservancy (TNC) and other NGOs, as well as local government (e.g. regional park lands). The groups organizing the fires are often led by Indigenous cultural fire practitioners, prescribed burn associations (PBAs) and are comprised of a far more diverse and inclusive workforce than the more traditional wildland firefighter rank and file. It is to these far more ethnically, gender and age diverse gatherings, wherever the land calls out for fire, that O’Connor travelled, car camping and commiserating with fellow nomex-wearing comrades leaning on pulaskis and shovels and telling stories when there’s down time.
Her book was a page-turner for me as it mostly took place on familiar landscapes with familiar characters from my own time as a worker in the fire trade. Starting in Nebraska, we meet Dan Kellerher. Far from his home base in California, I burned with Dan for years at Yosemite and at TNC Prescribed Fire Training Exchanges (TREX) in Northern California. We also visit Yosemite, where O’Connor meets with the fire historian, Stephen Pyne and probably my most influential mentor: Yosemite Fire Management Officer, Dan Buckley. We hear about the father of prescribed burning in the West, Harry Biswell, and his graduate student, Jan van Wagtendonk. Jan, a paratrooper in Vietnam turned smokejumper, would later be a fixture as Yosemite’s resident Fire Ecologist. Jan passed away recently and will be remembered at the upcoming Association for Fire Ecology's Fire Congress in Monterey. Sitting in Jan’s office or in the field, I cherished the moments I could listen and learn from him. Fittingly, O’Connor also interviewed Kent Van Wagtendonk, Jan’s son, who worked with his father on many related topics.
Toward the end of the book O’Connor makes her way to the Klamath Mountains, specifically to the confluence of the Trinity and Klamath Rivers, where the Karuk, Yurok, and Hoopa Tribes burn for food security, wildlife, basketmaking materials, and to appropriately manage their ancestral lands. There we meet Margo Robbins and Liz Azuzz, the well-known eco-cultural fire practitioners, basket makers, and Yurok storytellers of the highest order. Moving upstream to Orleans, O’Connor also introduces us to folks like Will Harling, Frank Lake, and Bill Tripp, all of whom have made their lives’ work focused on the return of fire to ancestral Karuk land.
My first visit to Orleans was in the mid-1990’s at the first fire ecology symposium organized in that most unlikely and beautiful of places for a big conference. At the time I was a module leader for one of the National Park Service’s fire use modules. Later I would return as an employee of the Six Rivers National Forest. I was firmly decolonized by the experience when, in an epiphany, I understood why the Tribes had no long-lost love for Smokey Bear. The criminalization of cultural burning was devastating to Indigenous families, and is part of their intergenerational trauma. O’Connor covers this well in her book.
Where I give the author most credit is in the middle of the book where she signs up for a two-week run with a contract fire suppression crew. She is obviously warmly welcomed by this crew, and she makes lasting friendships with her coworkers. If this crew is one fielded by Dan Kellerher’s employer, the owner is known for giving crew members who have had scrapes with the law a second chance. Often disdained by agency hand crews like the elite hotshots, these so-called “dirtbag” crews are made up of very different personnel, some of whom have criminal backgrounds and a lower level of education than many of the high-minded folks in the fire practitioner movement.
I have always appreciated the world of fire where there is a role for everyone from the hard-working inmate crews to a PhD fire ecologist and everyone in between. I have worked often with inmate crews from California to Idaho and respect their work. I am happy that Gavin Newson recently signed state legislation making it easier to hire ex-inmates into regular State fire jobs. They deserve that for their hard work and sacrifice. If anything, I am more critical of the snobbery which sometimes is exhibited amongst fire practitioners, most of whom all subscribe to a deeply held land use ethic. Whether learned from elders or learned in college, this embrace of the stewardship role is vital for those who use fire. That said, I heard it from employees of the local contract crew I burn with here in the Willamette Valley that the class divide is off-putting. I think O’Conner does a great job underscoring the often Indigenous and women-led nature of this movement to return fire to the land, but I would have liked to hear more about the class issue.
Even though TNC is a signatory to NWCG, many TREX attendees and other non-governmental fire workers can be almost militantly anti-NWCG at times. Many states are now offering burn manager certification programs that allow folks to burn on non-NWCG signatory lands with only a week or so of training and a mentorship, while becoming an NWCG Burn Boss can be a process that takes many years working your way up through the certification hierarchy. There is a case to be made that this bar is too high for entry, especially for Tribal members engaged in cultural burning, but there is also a strong case to be made that unlike pre-settlement times, the ability and knowledge to control fire before lighting one is essential to avert a disaster that can set a program back by years. Over 99% of all controlled burns go off without a hitch, but it is that small percentage of failures that attract the most public attention.
This book should be read by all who are entering the world of fire via TREX events and other non-governmental programs. There are many other locales O’Connor visits from the Black Hills of South Dakota to the New Jersey Pine Barrens, interacting with other fire luminaries like TREX uber-organizer Jeremy Bailey. She was handed a drip torch, and it changed her life, as it has done for so many others. Her willingness to go out on the Dixie Fire with a suppression crew is admirable, but she still doesn’t tell us much about life on a government crew, where often a lot of straight-edge white guys are more than happy to have nothing more than a job to protect other peoples’ stuff – no sophisticated land use ethic required. She does interview and become friends with many from this world, like Thom Taylor, survivor of the Thirtymile Fire, and Kelly Martin, my boss for a time at Yosemite.
I really appreciated O’Conner’s discussion of the growing levels of depression, PTSD, and suicide amongst today’s wildland firefighters. The joy I felt early in my career, applying prescribed fire and managing lightning fires in areas with few values at risk, was replaced later by dread and depression as I witnessed and worked on today’s climate-charged urban conflagrations like the Dixie Fire. I was bitter that all the sophisticated risk assessment and fire behavior tools I learned and used to facilitate beneficial fire use in the backcountry were now required to help manage huge wildfires in California that consumed entire towns. I even went back and looked at some of my fire behavior modeling products and the urgent discussions we had with the attendant fire team about the arrival time of the Dixie Fire to the floor of Genesee Valley, where O’Connor has one of her more exciting experiences. I recognized the place names. Even with the growing dread, I kept coming back to fire suppression after retirement, because I craved the pride and camaraderie of being on an incident management team.
Many in today’s fire practitioner movement left government service for the lack of diversity in gender and ethnicity, as well as thought and practice. This is why, in the most important agencies, the Federal land management agencies that have the biggest land base and are most in need of good land stewards, there is widespread risk aversion and reluctance to burn on the scale required. Keeping your head down, suppressing fires (which rarely attracts criticism) and making it to that 20-year retirement, affordable health care for life and a pension overrides the perceived professional risk of using fire to attain both protection and ecological imperatives.
Only outside the West, especially in the land of prescribed fire milk and honey, Johnny Stowe’s stomping grounds in the Southeast, do all the players seem to come together and play well. We must iron out these cultural and agency turf battles in the West to burn enough to make a real difference in reducing the impacts of the fires to come. O’Connor’s book is a great way to begin to bridge the divides that remain, as all wildland firefighters are brothers and sisters in tapping into and appreciating the primal essence of fire. As it has been for millennia wildland fire remains a tight knit culture where rank is less important than demonstrated competence. Humans were meant to wield fire. It’s how we evolved. It’s what we do. Cooking food around the hearth allowed our jaws to shrink and brains expand, as well as giving us the light and leisure time to develop language and art.
Like O’Connor, now that she is among the initiates, when I look at a natural landscape, I visualize how it would burn.