The American West needs fire, but the kind of fire matters. What it isn’t adapted to are the all-consuming megafires that have resulted from 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 and managing the right kind of fire 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 started in some places and suppressed elsewhere, and collectively, federal wildland firefighters represent one of the deepest wells of knowledge and experience in doing both jobs. Every summer, these highly-skilled professionals 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 underpaid.
Even so, many firefighters return to the fireline, season after grueling season, for the simple reason that they love the work and the people that they do it with, and know of little else that compares. When I moved to Oregon in 2020, I had never experienced anything like the mixture of pride, camaraderie, and sheer aliveness that defines crew life. Four seasons later, including two with interagency hotshot crews, I found myself deeply conflicted about leaving it all behind—torn between the desire to attend to other needs and interests that fire had consumed, and the desire to feel a part of a family and lifestyle like no other. It’s an internal struggle that many of us know well.
For now, I’m back on the outside, and missing the crew everyday. But so long as the primary tools of my trade are a pen and a camera instead of a pulaski and chainsaw, I will use them to say the following. Fire should not be thought of as an enemy to be killed, but as an inevitable force to be coexisted with. And firefighters should not be thought of as soldiers waging an unwinnable war against nature, but rather as stewards of one of humanity’s oldest tools and allies. They should be paid and recognized accordingly.
