What its like to fight a wildfire

KERA's Think

KERA

Society & Culture, 071003, Kera, Think, Krysboyd

4.8 • 861 Ratings

🗓️ 16 July 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Wildfires are more dangerous than they’ve ever been — take if from a former firefighter. Jordan Thomas is a former Los Padres hotshot wildland firefighter and currently an anthropologist and chancellor’s fellow at the University of California. He joins host Krys Boyd to discuss why climate change doesn’t tell the whole story of why today’s fires rage out of control, our complicated relationship to fire, and what it’s like to run directly into the flames. His book is “When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Humans have a complicated relationship to fire.
0:13.2	Our ability to produce and manage it literally changed our species.
0:17.9	Being able to take in the extra nutrition from cooked food allowed us to evolve
0:21.6	more powerful brains. But when it escapes our control, fire is among the most destructive
0:27.9	forces we know. And our fear of fire has sometimes led us to very poor decisions. From KERA in
0:35.4	Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris Boyd.
0:38.1	My guest today is an anthropologist, a chancellor's fellow at the University of California,
0:42.9	who has studied indigenous cultural practices around fire and its management.
0:47.3	And the phrase complicated relationship to fire both fascinates and describes Jordan Thomas,
0:53.3	because he is also a veteran of one of the
0:55.5	country's most elite wildland firefighting teams, the Los Padres Hot Shots.
1:00.4	His book is called When It All Burns, Fighting Fire in a Transformed World.
1:05.5	Jordan, welcome to think.
1:07.9	Thanks for having me on, Chris.
1:09.1	So talk a little bit about the way that fire fascinated you and what made you think that you wanted to play a part in firefighting?
1:20.3	You know, I think fire is just an inherently interesting topic for anthropology because fire takes the shape of the context in which
1:29.9	it burns. It's a product of relationships. And we normally think of those relationships as
1:34.6	relationships between weather, fuel, and topography. Those are often the ingredients that shape fire.
1:41.1	But more and more people are shaping the patterns of vegetation, and we're also
1:45.7	shaping the weather through climate change. So I was really interested in what fires could tell us
1:49.7	about people, but then what also I could learn from the people whose lives depend on their
1:54.2	abilities to inhabit fires that are bigger than anything humanity has ever seen, which is what we're
	...

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