Fire Season's Lessons

An interview with 'The Last Fire Season' author, Manjula Martin, and a rundown of the latest climate news.

Dear friends,

In August 2020, Manjula Martin and her husband, Max, were working from home and sheltering in place when a series of lightning storms hit California, spurring the now-infamous Lighting Complex Fires.

That fall, as three massive fires burned nearly one-million acres and intermittently filled the sky with smoke, the couple evacuated their home in West Sonoma County. When they returned, they spent months living in a state of heightened anticipation and dread.

Martin wrote about that experience and what it taught her about living with the ongoing climate crisis—and with her own chronic pain after a hysterectomy—in her moving new memoir, The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History (out January 16).

Here’s an excerpt of our recent conversation:

The 2020 fire season was a kind of turning point for a lot of people. It arrived so early, lasted until November, and turned the sky orange. Can you talk about why you wanted to interweave your own story with that collective experience?

That year was highly unique. But to me, it was also very emblematic of what people call polycrisis or cascading crises, which is increasingly the experience of everyone in the era of climate change. I grew up experiencing natural disasters; they were somewhat normalized for me. And I moved to Sonoma County in 2017, so I had experienced very bad fires before. But 2020 was really the year that I realized that it wasn't an anomaly, and I was going to be experiencing things like this for the rest of my life.

We haven't had a huge fire in Sonoma County since then. Which is unusual. It happened every year for four years and it has been relatively quiet since then. Now a lot of people are saying things like "Oh, man, that was terrible. I’m so glad it's over."

But the crises are not behind us, we're very much living inside of them still. So this book is really about digging into that messiness, into the state of being where we don’t know and there isn’t a clear solution—or if there is a clear solution, it's not being enacted [by the people in power]. So that was the initial point at which I started to work in the storyline about my chronic pain and my body, as I realized that there were these commonalities for me in understanding how to exist or inhabit crisis in a way that isn't just about gunning for a happy ending, but that actually takes into account the very real experiences that you, I, and everyone else are having during climate change.

The pandemic has helped me understand that people who live with chronic illness or pain are in a unique position to help the rest of us understand how to live through very challenging times.

I agree. I mean, obviously that’s not the case of everyone. Some people don’t want that job, and that’s totally their right. I wanted to be really careful about the ways in which I was drawing these analogies between, say, my pain and the fires, or between my garden and fires. On the one hand, the pain and the experience of pain did teach me how to constantly live within an uncertain moment, and that was really instructive. But at the same time, pain is a very unique thing, and I don't want to devalue it or suggest it's just a metaphor. And as a person whose life is structured around story and narrative, I became fascinated with the ways in which both pain and wildfire resist easy narrative arcs.

And even if I don't find healing in my garden, what is my responsibility to these plants? We can take meaning from nature and we can have these relationships with the land around us, and also the land exists in its own right, it's not just there for me to make metaphor out of.

You spent time that fall—and in the intervening years—really diving into the science of fire, and in particular into the work being done to get more “good fire” such as prescribed burning and cultural burning on the land. You write: “To burn intentionally at [a large] scale would …mean the loss of a fantasy: an acknowledgment that although humans could have a large-scale effect on nature, we couldn’t actually control it. If people not native to this land allowed fire to return, we would have to allow for the fact that the land was not ours.” How did you arrive at that place?

When I started doing the research for the book, I was like, “I’m an environmentalist, I get it. We have to change our relationship to nature.” But encountering people who work with fire, and people who were deep into it, was mind-blowing. They are not only looking at good fire as an obligation that people have to take care of the land and help it along in its cycles, they are also thinking pretty radically, on a society-wide level as well as in their daily life, about what that shift would look like.

[The U.S. Forest Service has a plan to treat 20 million acres over the next decade.] If we do that, it's going to be smokey; that’s just the truth. It's not just this rosy idea that, "We will heal everything through fire." People who work directly with fire are very aware of its bifurcated nature—that it is a healer, and it can also be a destroyer. And, as José Luis Duce Aragüés [a prescribed-fire training specialist] says in the book, you never know what it's going to do.

Before 2020, I was afraid of fire. But the more I was around fire and the more I interacted with it, the less afraid I became. And that doesn't necessarily mean that it's all going be okay. But that was my experience emotionally, in addition to understanding the science and the history of fire in California specifically.

I've only observed one prescribed burn, but I had a similar experience. It was life changing. In the book you describe a conversation with José Luis and another prescribed fire specialist, Andrea Bustos, about how they see fire as alive. I had the same sense. And I understood how much respect it required of me in a new way.

Yes, a constant and vigilant respect. It’s active.

Yes. And seeing people who were comfortable working with it, but who knew that they couldn’t ultimately control it, was instructive.

In many ways that is a very convenient metaphor for the natural world. Climate change, for me, is all about understanding that humans can have a large-scale effect on the planet, but we cannot control the planet. And that's a very subtle line that talking to these prescribed-fire practitioners really helped me understand. It's almost a negation of ego.

You write about how conservationists and extractive industries appear to hold opposing views about nature, but both ultimately “saw landscapes as ripe for possession” and say "the history of the world was so often the history of men not knowing how to respond to beauty." That brought me to the question I’m often asking these days, which is: What has it looked like, and will it look like in the future, if Indigenous folks, people of color, and women are given space to manage land and natural resources differently?

I think any conversation about fire has to ultimately be grounded in the knowledge that the use of fire is something that many if not all Indigenous and land-based cultures have understood for thousands of years. And there's a lot to be learned there.

The question of how women approach nature was definitely one I was exploring in the book. I spent time with a handful of fire practitioners, and most of them were women. That wasn't something I set out to find. But it wasn't a surprise to me that the leaders in this other way of interacting with the landscape, many of them are women—Andrea, but also Margo Robbins (Yurok) of the Cultural Fire Management Council and folks like Sasha Berlin at Fire Forward.

The question of what constitutes a woman-focused approach to land management is a fun one. I think having grown up in California in the 70s, there's this image of Mother Earth as the center of a utopian paradise. And I'm personally resistant to that, because I think that’s another way of misunderstanding nature. It’s a romanticized ideal that leaves a lot out, and it just doesn't resonate with everyone. I'm a little bit punk rock and I don't vibe on “Mother Nature.” But that doesn't mean I don’t have a deep and abiding respect, love, and fear of the planet I live on.

That idea about men not knowing what to do with beauty was a bit of a revelation for me. And to me the underlying thrust of that sentiment is that everyone feels that beauty and everyone feels that love—so it’s a matter of what we do with it. And what we do with it can be catastrophic, given the systems that we’ve created.

Well, the way fire has been suppressed in California and throughout the West for the last century has certainly been catastrophic. I think that's something that a lot of people don't fully realize.

Yeah, and it was directly related to the colonization of this place. And a lot of really horrible behavior.

Can you tell us about the fire poppy on the cover of the book and what you learned about post-fire ecology?

Like many people who live in fire-prone places, I have driven through burned landscapes and felt immense grief and devastation; they look like moonscapes. And post-fire ecology is very real and very nuanced.

Fire poppies are a native, fire-dependent species, which means that they require the circumstances of wildfire in order to germinate. They're these gorgeous, delicate, very small flowers. I've never seen one in person, but I became fascinated with them because they embody this idea of life from ashes. The extreme wildfires that we've been having lately, due to the history of fire suppression and extreme weather, are devastating to landscapes, and some of them do kill entire species in the areas where they burn. But even when that happens, the landscapes aren’t 100 percent devastated either. Landscapes and ecologies are constantly changing, dynamic places—communities

Can you speak to how the philosopher Donna Haraway's book Staying with the Trouble informed your thinking about the climate crisis?

I was reading her book that fall, so it played an outsized role in shaping my understanding of the wildfire crisis and the climate crisis more generally. Haraway’s whole thesis is that to move forward in the era of climate change, we need to develop what she calls a way of staying with the trouble. She categorizes people's reaction to climate change in two different ways: One is to assume that we will solve the problem through technology—"techno-fixes” that are really wound up with capitalism and extraction, and many of them don't actually work; the other main category of people that she identifies is “game-over people” who have given up. I was very much a game-over person [prior to 2020].

Haraway proposes many things in the book, but one that really stuck with me was the idea that it's actually in the process of surviving through these experiences that you find new solutions, new ways of living, and new ways of telling the story. And she talks about the importance of building what she calls kin—a concept that she takes from Ursula K. Le Guin and many cultural traditions. I was literally reading her book as these wildfires were occurring, and I was like, “I can work with this process of finding new ways to build community and new ways to experience the beauty and the joy of crisis, as well as the pain and suffering of crisis and new ways of structuring our entire existence on the planet.”

That is part of why I started this newsletter. I had so many smart, sensitive friends who were so deep in the game-over phase. I wanted to see if I could engage people in essentially that—staying with the trouble.

It is very hard to move forward within these crises. It's daunting, there is a lot of despair, there is darkness. And I was existing within that darkness at the same time that I was existing within a really literal, physical despair and darkness. So when I heard that phrase I was like, “This I can do! I'm already doing it.”

There's this fetishization of hope right now, and hope is not an emotion that I have really clicked with. But once I got into this idea of existing within the unfolding crises, that was when I was able to find certain kinds of hope that I hadn't encountered before. It’s not an unearned sense of hope, but an everyday, dirtier kind of hope.

That makes sense to me! I think of hope as a bonus that arrives occasionally, often when I least expect it, and I don't turn it away when it does.

Yes, that connects back to my experiences with prescribed fire explicitly. There was a moment, just standing there in the forest gazing, rapt with these flames, and I was like, “This makes me feel exhilarated.” And I think you have to listen to those feelings. You have to allow for the sadness too—they're related to each other.

Climate news you may have missed

On the edge of the Anthropocene

For those of us paying attention to the climate crisis, 2023 is an especially difficult year to look back on. Not only was it the hottest year on record, but greenhouse gas levels are at a record high and Antarctic sea ice is at record low, which means sea-level rise is at a record high. Extreme weather and temperatures have ravaged communities and destabilized entire regions throughout the world at great cost. And scientists aren’t expecting it to change for the better in 2024.

Last week, several outlets spoke with NASA scientist James Hansen, who told the Guardian that when the next generation looks back at 2023 and 2024, the years “will be seen as the turning point at which the futility of governments in dealing with climate change was finally exposed.” 

It’s fitting then that scientists are preparing to declare our official entry into a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. The term has been in use for the last few decades, and a group of scientists called the Anthropocene Working Group announced last summer that they had identified a lake in Canada where the muddy sediments contain a record of over 1,000 years of human impact.

In an op-ed this week, Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard professor of the history of science and a member of the working group, wrote that naming the new era “is a way for scientists to declare—as loudly as they can while still behaving as scientists—that the shifts going on around us are no small issue.” And, she added, it’s also a way to mark the fact that humans have changed more than the climate: “What geologists can now see in rocks—from the subtle (think changes in the ratios of carbon and oxygen isotopes) to the gross (think plastic residues in marine sediments)—points to large-scale, far-ranging and utterly pervasive human impacts.”

Highway to the danger zone

While deforestation has changed the hydrology of the Amazon and vastly reduced its size in recent years, the massive tropical rainforest still plays a vital role in storing carbon and shaping the global water system. And while the rate of deforestation decreased by 20 percent this year under President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the trend could once again be reversed. In late December, Brazil’s Congress approved a plan to redevelop a massive dirt road that runs through the undeveloped Western part of the Brazilian Amazon, despite opposition from environmental groups and Indigenous groups.

In December, the nation’s Congress voted to use conservation funds (including some from the U.S. and Europe) to develop BR-319, a road that was built in the 1970s and never finished. According to the Ecologist, the road already “serves as an unguarded gateway to illicit side roads in areas with a high density of indigenous territories, legally designated reserves, and protected conservation areas. This accessibility grants illegal miners, loggers, settlers, and land invaders entry into untouched forest.”

Further paving and developing the road would exacerbate the situation, say experts, as nearly all the deforestation that has taken place in recent decades has occurred near a road. Nearly three years ago, Brazilian researchers published a study that found that the reconstruction of BR-319 would bring more illegal logging to the region and increase deforestation by as much as 60 percent.

The problem with the terminal

When it comes to the ongoing development of fossil fuel infrastructure, global politics can sometimes appear like a giant game of chicken. Despite abundant scientific evidence that points clearly to the need to stop—yesterday—the major world players all seem to be driving straight toward one another hoping their opponents will change course before they have to.

Liquified natural gas (LNG) is a good/bad example. We’ve been fracking for it and extracting it in the U.S. for decades, but now the federal government is on the threshold of approving a massive LNG export terminal, the Calcasieu Pass 2 or CP2, on the Louisiana coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The industry, which has dozens of similar smaller projects planned across the country, is positioning LNG exports as a way to help Europe wean itself off Russian gas and it claims that it is less harmful to the climate than coal.

In fact, research out of Cornell has found that because it leaks methane, LNG is much more damaging to the climate than coal. A forthcoming study found that it can be 24 percent worse for the climate than coal and warns against the expansion of the industry.

In December, 170 scientists signed a letter to President Biden, sharing their strong opposition to the project. They pointed to the fact that the CP2 facility would release 20 times more greenhouse gas emissions than the ConocoPhillips Willow project in Alaska, which also faced considerable public pushback but was approved by Biden last year and is beginning construction this winter. In the letter they wrote: “As scientists we are telling you in clear and unambiguous terms that approving CP2 and other LNG projects will undermine your stated goals of meaningfully addressing the climate crisis and put us on a continued path toward escalating climate chaos. We implore you to turn back from this course, reject CP2 and other fossil fuel export projects, and put us on a rapid and just trajectory off fossil fuels.”

The project would also add insult to injury for the communities of color and low-income communities located along the Gulf Coast, which are already disproportionately impacted by pollution from the oil and gas industry. Advocates in those communities have also been speaking out in opposition to CP2 for months and last month Greenpeace projected dramatic images of methane gas flares and messages from concerned community residents on buildings around Washington D.C.

On the brighter side

1. A recent report from the International Energy Agency found that jobs in the renewable energy sector surpassed those on the fossil fuel side of the industry in 2021, and now make up over half of the jobs in the energy sector.

2. Ireland is considering a nationwide referendum that would recognize the legal rights of ecosystems, similar to humans and corporations. If it goes through, Ireland would join six other nations (Ecuador, Bolivia, Panama, Uganda, New Zealand and Spain) in acknowledging the rights of nature, and the act could make it possible to protect vulnerable ecosystems against extractive industries in new ways.

3.  Some mobile home owners are forming ownership co-operatives, which allow them to adopt solar and other forms of renewable energy. “There’s nothing more perfect than these resident-owned communities because they already have a cooperative structure and, generally, commonly own the piece of land,” Kevin Jones, the director at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at the Vermont Law and Graduate School told Grist. “[They] are just kind of natural communities to be able to bring the benefits of solar to more low- to moderate-income people.”

4.  If renewable energy production is going to scale up enough to truly decarbonize the U.S., the power grid needs to change and grow in a serious way. I found this overview from The Conversation of the grid expansion taking place—and the work still on the table—illuminating.

5.  Vineyard Wind, the first offshore wind operation in the U.S. went online last week near Martha’s Vineyard. And while there are still some big questions about whether and how the large turbines will impact fishers and the fishing industry, the fact that they have begun adding power to the grid in Massachusetts is no small thing.

I will think of 2023 as a year that opened many people’s eyes to the climate crisis in new ways—out of necessity for many and for others out of a realization that it no longer truly serves them to look away from what’s happening. If that describes you, welcome. It takes courage to open your eyes even when it makes life less convenient and much less comfortable.

I take heart in the fact that we can stay with the trouble together and I/we don’t have to go it alone. Thanks for reading in 2023 and here’s to more understanding, more courage, and more connection as we navigate this strange and disorienting time.

Onward into this new year,
Twilight