Riley Yuan

The landscapes and ecosystems of the American West need fire, but the kind of fire matters. What they are not adapted to are the all-consuming megafires that have become commonplace in recent fire seasons due to the combined effects of climate change and a century of aggressive fire suppression. As historian Stephen Pyne puts it, "messed up forests yield messed up fires."

Restoring low-intensity fire to the landscape is no simple matter, however. We are playing a sisyphean game of catch up on warming landscapes that are already tinderboxes, all while the WUI (Wildland-Urban Interface) steadily expands into them. Fires need to be lit and managed in some places, and kept out of others, and it is the same workforce doing the bulk of both jobs: federal wildland firefighters. For seven to eight months each year (and sometimes longer, as fire seasons turn into fire years), they light and fight fire across the nation's wildlands, enduring smoke inhalation, chronic fatigue, disrupted family and personal lives, and general wear-and-tear accumulated over thousands of hours of overtime. And yet, they remain largely invisible to much of the lay public and critically underfunded.

But we also love our work. Before I moved to Oregon for grad school in 2020, I knew nothing about fighting wildfires. Four seasons later, including two with hotshot crews, I found myself deeply conflicted about leaving the job behind. Four seasons is nothing compared to the careers of some (a captain of mine has spent 23 years with one crew). But they were enough to give me some idea of what motivates us to keep coming back for more. Simply put, we love to work really, really hard. We need to challenge ourselves and push our mental and physical limits. We value how alive and excellent our job forces us to be. We gain from it a sense of pride and camaraderie that few other things make us feel.