The American history of wildfire suppression has contributed to today’s most destructive blazes.
This fall, on a hike in Washington’s Olympic National Park, I found wildfire—or it found me. As I labored up a switchback trail, the air hung acrid with smoke from the half dozen fires that smoldered around the park. My windpipe burned and my head ached. The sun was a feeble orange disk; the mountains disappeared behind pale haze.
That the damp Olympic Peninsula—a region blanketed by temperate rainforest—was ablaze seemed telling. As the world has become hotter and drier, it has also become more flammable. This year Canada ignited, smothering the eastern seaboard in smoke; in 2019, Australia’s “Black Summer” released more carbon than many countries’ annual emissions; in 2018, California’s Camp Fire killed 85 people in the town of Paradise. “Fifteen years ago, a 100,000-acre fire would be the largest fire of your career,” one California firefighter told The New York Times in 2021. “Now, we have one-million-acre fires.”
Read: A clear indication that climate change is burning up California
Considering all of this, one could be forgiven for assuming that forests are burning more frequently than ever. In fact, the opposite is true: The United States, like Australia and many other countries, is operating at a fire deficit. In the Pacific Northwest, for example, nearly 4 million acres of forest burned between 1984 and 2015, which sounds substantial until you consider that, based on precolonial fire rates, about 10 times that area should have burned. The U.S., observes the journalist M. R. O’Connor in her important new book, Ignition, is “both burning and fire starved.”
These conditions—the fire deficit and our susceptibility to megafires—are connected. A principal reason megafires have become common and destructive is that the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies have quelled minor fires for a century, thus allowing fuel—brush, shrubs, dense clusters of skinny saplings—to accumulate on the landscape. By routinely stamping out smaller, beneficial fires, land managers have inadvertently spawned gargantuan infernos that threaten lives and property, a disastrous loop that climate change only exacerbates. This, O’Connor writes, is the fire paradox: “Putting out fires contributes to the creation of even bigger blazes.”
Ignition investigates both sides of the paradox; its primary focus is on the side that gets less attention, the U.S.’s “missing fire.” Once, O’Connor explains, Homo sapiens inhabited a world of flame. Many fires were ignited by lightning, but most were anthropogenic, set by Indigenous “pyrotechnicians” to stimulate the growth of food plants and enhance habitat for game animals like deer. In New York’s Catskills, up to 95 percent of fires were once Native-set, producing a “nut orchard” rife with walnuts, chestnuts, and hickories. European colonists approaching North America reported that they could smell the “sweet perfume” of forest fires before they glimpsed land.
The preponderance of fire honed nature. Plants and animals evolved to exploit the low-intensity blazes that regularly swept through forests and grasslands. Lodgepole pines developed serotinous cones, which require fire’s heat to free their seeds; sequoia saplings thrived after fires opened canopies and permitted the ingress of sunlight. In the 20th century, however, fire became ignis non grata on American landscapes. In 1935 the Forest Service adopted its infamous 10 a.m. policy, which, as O’Connor writes, meant that any new fire, whether sparked by humans or lightning, “should be under control by ten the following morning.” In her telling, America’s fixation on fire suppression stems largely from its bias against Indigenous practices. Forest Service scientists dismissed traditional burning as “Paiute forestry” unbefitting an enlightened society. Later, environmentalists advocated for preserving forests as “untouched wilderness,” heedless of the Native people who had artfully managed them for millennia.
Although O’Connor persuasively argues that fire suppression has roots in racism, she might have spent more ink implicating capitalism. As the journalist Timothy Egan notes in The Big Burn, his comprehensive history of a legendary 1910 fire that seared the Inland Northwest, commercial logging interests and their political toadies first pushed the Forest Service to stamp out wildfire. After 1910, Egan writes, “the Forest Service became the fire service, protecting trees so industry could cut them down later.” Wilderness advocates may have contributed to the culture of fire suppression, as O’Connor claims, yet timber companies and their lobbyists are even more culpable.
O’Connor is an intrepid reporter whose journalism has taken her to Sri Lanka, Haiti, and Afghanistan; her previous books include immersive explorations of the science of de-extinction and the history of human navigation. In Ignition, she’s likewise disinclined to her desk. She travels to Nebraska to participate in an intentional, or “prescribed,” burn. She learns to wield fusees—“basically dynamite-sized matches”—and drip torches, canisters that “pour out fuel and flame.” She falls quickly for fire: its scent, its aliveness, its “intense aesthetic pleasure.” “Other than when I have given birth,” she writes, “I had never felt so integral to a life-giving process as I did lighting a fire.”
Over the course of a year, O’Connor pursues her “pyrowanderlust” to prescribed burns around the country and meets a growing “fire counterculture”—environmentalists, scientists, Native practitioners—seeking to restore fire to its rightful place. Just as every ecosystem contains its own flora and fauna, it has its own flavor of blaze, and O’Connor excels at describing these regional varietals. In the pine forests near Albany, New York, lapping flames turn “flaky bark into purple rosettes that glittered with charred reflectance”; in North Carolina’s lowlands, the “smoke smelled of caramel and hog fat and citrus.” In New Mexico, as night settles after a day of burning, she shuts off her headlamp and stares, mesmerized, at the sizzling ground: “The floor gently flickered with thousands of points of white light like a galaxy of stars had draped across the earth.”
O’Connor also explores the megafire side of the paradox, enlisting on a crew battling California’s 2021 Dixie Fire, a nearly million-acre inferno. There, she spends her days pulling hose, unearthing smoldering roots, chipping wood, and performing other mundane tasks, only occasionally glimpsing the fire front itself. The fight against the Dixie consumed significant resources with dubious gain: The operation cost more than $600 million, yet the fire raged for more than three months. Later, one fire-crew leader compares fire suppression to the Vietnam and Korean Wars: “Who are we fighting? And why?”
What we’re fighting is, in large measure, the U.S. government’s sordid history of delegitimizing and criminalizing “good fire.” In Ignition’s final act, O’Connor travels to California’s Klamath Mountains, where the Yurok Tribe singed the forest for thousands of years to improve elk habitat and cultivate hazel stems for basket-weaving—until the practice was classified as arson. There she joins a mixed crew of Indigenous people and wildland firefighters that, with the Yurok’s blessing and guidance, sets the mountains ablaze, rekindling timber and tradition alike.
To O’Connor’s delight, a third of her teammates are women, a high proportion in the hypermasculine world of wildland firefighting. For generations, one female captain says, the firefighting industry, with its flame-retardant-spraying airplanes, heavy machinery, and legions of troops, has taken a “militaristic view of wildfire as a war to be won,” a chauvinistic approach that, O’Connor writes, led “to a permissiveness around abuse of land.” In the Klamath, O’Connor glimpses a future in which people collaborate with nature rather than dominate it.
Although O’Connor doesn’t say it, wildfire literature, too, has historically been the domain of men. To name but a few books, there’s Young Men and Fire, Norman Maclean’s meditation on a fatal Montana fire; On the Burning Edge, Kyle Dickman’s harrowing account of the deaths of 19 firefighters in Arizona; and John Valliant’s recent Fire Weather, which chronicles the 2016 blaze that virtually obliterated the Canadian city of Fort McMurray. These excellent works treat fire as a fearsome adversary against which humans must battle; Ignition is an invaluable addition to the canon precisely because it considers fire an ally.
Read: We’re in an age of fire
But does humanity still have time to heal its broken relationship with fire? As O’Connor notes, climate change has made it harder to keep burns under control. In California and many other places, the viable “burn window”—the period in which crews can apply prescribed fire without undue danger—shrinks each year. In the future, O’Connor writes, burning “will depend on people who are ready to exploit any and every opportunity as windows open and close with less and less predictability.”
It will also depend on people’s tolerance for smoke and risk. Although fewer than 1 percent of prescribed fires break containment, those rare mishaps can sour the public. Last spring, the skies over my home in Colorado blurred with smoke from a 340,000-acre megafire in neighboring New Mexico that sprung from a planned burn that had escaped human control. The Forest Service responded by issuing a 90-day suspension on prescribed fire until the agency could investigate the debacle—an understandable reaction, perhaps, but one that also perpetuated the notion that burning is inherently perilous. As Ignition ably demonstrates, though, the far more dangerous proposition is not letting forests burn at all.
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