Manjula Martin’s ‘The Last Fire Season’ Reflects on Living with Wildfire

KQED's Forum

KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 3 January 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When Manjula Martin fled her West Sonoma home in the summer of 2020 with wildfire raging around her, she realized her go bag was packed for an apocalypse, not a sleepover. She had flashlights, but no toothbrush. Books, but no shampoo. In her debut memoir, “The Last Fire Season,” Martin reflects on how Californians are simultaneously preparing for the end of the world, while also going about their day-to-day lives. “I had little capacity to navigate the everyday experience of living inside a slow decline,” she writes. We talk to Martin about living life in the Pyrocene, the age of fire. Guests: Dhruv Khullar, contributing writer, The New Yorker; practicing physician, Weill Cornell Medicine; assistant professor, Weill Cornell Medical College. Diana Thiara, medical director, UCSF Weight Loss Management Program Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:58.0	From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Grace Wan in Formina Kim.
1:20.1	There's a certain monotony to living in a constant state of alarm, writes author Mangelo Martin
1:24.8	in her memoir The Last Fire Season.
1:33.2	Like many Californians, Martin has become familiar with the unease and uncertainty of living with wildfire,
1:35.9	which is no longer limited to just a season.
1:40.9	We'll talk to Martin about what it means to live in a world perpetually on the cusp of burning down.
1:43.2	That's coming up after this news.
2:06.4	Welcome to Forum. I'm Grace Juan in Fermina Kim. In the summer of 2020, wildfire scorched four million acres of California. Smoke, trapped by the atmosphere, blocked the sun and turned the sky
2:12.0	orange. Authorities coined a new term, the gigafire, to try and capture the immensity of the disaster.
2:19.7	And it is capturing that immensity which Mangella Martin is able to do so beautifully in her new memoir,
2:25.6	the last fire season, a personal and pyrrownatural history.
2:29.9	When she fled her home during that hot, dry summer, COVID was raging, and the natural world to which many people had migrated to, for space and social distancing, was rebelling against its inhabitants.
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