When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World

Name: When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World
Author: Jordan Thomas
ISBN: 9780593544846

Jordan Thomas

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Jordan Thomas

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When It All Burns won the California Book Award Gold Medal and was a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award and the LA Times Book Prize. A gripping firsthand account of a record-setting fire season, from a cultural anthropologist who spent a year working as a hotshot firefighter, exploring the history and future of fire in America. Eighteen of California's largest wildfires on record have burned in the past two decades. Scientists recently invented the term "megafire" to describe wildfires that behave in ways that would have been nearly impossible just a generation ago, burning through winter, exploding in the night, and devastating landscapes historically impervious to incendiary destruction. In When It All Burns, wildland firefighter and anthropologist Jordan Thomas recounts a single, brutal six-month fire season with the Los Padres Hotshots—the special forces of America's firefighters. Being a hotshot is among the most difficult jobs on earth. Thomas viscerally renders his crew's attempts to battle flames that are often too destructive to contain. He uncovers the hidden cultural history of megafires, revealing how humanity's symbiotic relationship with wildfire became a war—and what can be done to change it back. Thomas weaves ecology and the history of Indigenous peoples' oppression, federal forestry, and the growth of the fire industrial complex into a riveting narrative about a new phase in the climate crisis. It's an immersive story of community in the most perilous of circumstances, told with humor, humility, and affection.

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