Smoke, Heat, Flame

On January 7, as eighty-to-ninety-mile-per-hour winds approached Los Angeles, Emilio Sweet-Coll was visiting his family in Mexico City. His phone pinged with a notification that warned of inclement weather back home. He checked Watch Duty, a fire-tracking app, and saw there was an ignition on a dirt road in the foothills on the outskirts of Altadena, where he often hiked.

Emilio is an animator by trade, but in the past year he has been leading an effort to use controlled fire as a conservation tool around Los Angeles. Though he had never fought a wildfire, he had learned enough about fire behavior to understand that conditions were dangerously explosive. He called his partner, John,¹ who was at the home they rented together in Pasadena. “I don’t want to scare you,” Emilio said, “but you should pack a bag.” Within minutes, John smelled smoke. The fire was three miles away and the wind was driving it straight toward him.

The two of them stayed on the phone as John ran around knocking on neighbor’s doors, distributing masks, and ensuring that residents knew to evacuate. Over the phone Emilio could hear wind howling, a dog barking. A gust ripped a solar panel off a neighbor’s roof, blocking another’s car. Breathing became difficult as smoke filled the air. Returning home one last time, John asked if Emilio needed anything from there. “I can’t think of anything that’s irreplaceable other than you and our dog,” he replied. 

Emilio and John are among the hundreds of thousands of people whose lives were upended when a series of wildfires burned in and around Los Angeles this January (the sources of ignition remain under investigation). The firestorm swept through the city on winds exceeding a hundred miles per hour. It destroyed much of Altadena, near the San Gabriel mountains; Pacific Palisades, near the coast; and came within miles of downtown. It moved so rapidly that people were forced to abandon their cars in gridlocked roads and flee on foot. Bulldozers shoved through abandoned vehicles to clear paths for fire engines. At a senior care facility in Altadena, bystanders helped wheel nearly a hundred patients into a parking lot where they awaited rescue. But the air itself was toxic—thick with burned paint, asbestos, and molten plastic. Atmospheric concentrations of lead were one hundred times over the average. Dozens of people across the city died. Tens of thousands lost their homes. Hundreds of thousands evacuated. 

The political response was prompt. President Joe Biden promised that the federal government would cover all disaster costs for 180 days. Wildland firefighters fanned throughout Los Angeles. For crews accustomed to battling blazes in the wilderness, the spectacle of an incinerated city was striking. Most firefighters camped in the Rose Bowl, where they were treated to celebrity visits. Angelina Jolie stopped by. The rapper The Game brought them coffee and paid for their engines to be cleaned. McDonald’s sent free happy meals. 

These flashy gestures stood in contrast to the firefighters’ grim labor conditions. They deployed tactics normally reserved for burned forests in the toxic rubble of neighborhoods, such as placing their bare hands into ash to ensure the heat was gone. M. R. O’Connor, a journalist embedding with a firefighter crew—she herself is credentialed—stopped for lunch one day, only to realize that she was sitting in front of what had been someone’s bedroom. She thought of the chemicals coating everything in sight and tossed her food away.

The federal wildland firefighting system is publicly funded and frequently subject to austerity measures. Many firefighters are hired on a seasonal or contract basis; they lose their health care in the offseason. For incarcerated firefighters, the situation is worse: the threat of being sent back to prison discourages them from filing complaints or questioning the safety of assignments, contributing to much higher rates of injury and illness.² They are usually paid between five to ten dollars per day—far less than the state’s minimum wage. 

In the weeks since the fires struck, Elon Musk has claimed, among other nonsense, that they were caused by diversity initiatives. Trump, for his part, blamed state water misallocation and threatened to withhold disaster relief funds for victims until Governor Gavin Newsom diverted more water to agricultural plantations in the Central Valley, the regional base of Republican power and a consistent source of donations to the MAGA movement. This is likely how all disasters will unfold in the future: the poor will suffer disproportionately while the rich distort accountability. Bill McKibben has warned that the spread of corporate misinformation can, in effect, dismantle our collective ability to make sense of climate change. 

But the Trump administration is also dismantling science directly. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s playbook for his second term, proposes withholding funding for climate research because science “is one of the main drivers of the climate alarm industry.” This assault is well under way: Trump’s administration has ordered the removal of references to climate change and atmospheric data from federal websites and the elimination of all federal environmental justice offices. It is also poised to insert “diverse viewpoints”—that is, researchers skeptical of climate change, and typically funded by the fossil fuel industry—into the National Climate Assessment. 

Several years ago, as a wildland firefighter in Big Sur, I helped battle the largest conflagrations then on record in the state. Those wildfires were sparked by a lightning storm of record proportions and an instance of arson, then fueled by record heat levels and unhealthy forests. By now it is common knowledge that we have too thoroughly altered both our land and our climate for any wildfire to be “natural.” 

Yet this January the standard lines of human incrimination did not hold. Was the firestorm a result of poor “forest management,” as House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed? This has, in recent years, become a favorite talking point of America’s right-wing commentariat, who emerge to cosplay as foresters each time a large fire breaks out. The forests of California should be turned over to private logging corporations, they argue, because corporations know how to manage forests. But the hills around Los Angeles are covered in grass and brush. 

What about the notion that reckless homeowners are moving into high-risk zones? Not really. California has the strictest wildfire building codes in the country. As of 2008 nearly every new structure built in a fire hazard zone requires fire-resistant siding, tempered glass, and vegetation management. These measures failed. The fire didn’t just burn properties on the fringes—it incinerated neighborhoods deep inside the city limits. The journalist Emily Witt described watching a house burn on the coast, miles from the blaze, ignited by embers carried on the wind.

Preliminary analyses have found that climate change, on the other hand, had a decisive part in exacerbating the fire’s intensity. The past two years brought anomalous rains that left an overgrowth of kindling, and the months leading up to the disaster were some of the hottest and driest on record. Scientists estimate that vegetation in the area where the Palisades and Eaton Fires ignited was 25 percent drier than it would have been without climate change—which is “bordering on unprecedented,” according to the UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain. These conditions have been predicted for decades, and they are sure to get worse as carbon emissions rise.

Although California’s recent firestorms may be unprecedented in their intensity and damage, they also result from longstanding political conditions. The issue has to do less with fires than with their management. For millennia—as scholars such as Scott Stephens and M. Kat Anderson have demonstrated—fire existed in a sort of symbiosis with local ecosystems.³ Indigenous people often lit these fires, applying flames with precision to ensure they burned in ways that enhanced ecosystem health, restored soil, and encouraged vital flora and fauna. But colonial fire suppression policies led vegetation to accumulate, making the landscape vulnerable to ignitions. 

The intensity of California’s wildfires has dramatically increased in recent decades, but less land burns now than it did before European colonists arrived two and a half centuries ago. Today’s catastrophic wildfires, in other words, are the outcome of deliberate policies. What seems like a new crisis is just the latest chapter in a longer history of exploitation.

There is nothing natural about fire suppression. Before the rise of industrial capitalism, communities across the world burned fields to enrich pastures, open forests, and encourage useful plants. In 1749 the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus documented how farmers used fire to keep the soil healthy.⁴ “Fire,” he wrote, allowed them to secure “an abundance of grain from otherwise quite worthless land.” He warned that without burning, the land would degrade, leaving farmers with empty stomachs.

Linnaeus’s scientific patron, Baron Hårleman, an architect and confidant of the king, was furious when he read the report. He withheld further research funding until all favorable portrayals of fire were removed. What the botanist hadn’t grasped was that elites across Europe were concerned less with keeping farmers fed in the long run than with exploiting the land as much as possible in the short term. Their aversion to fire was part of a broader ideological shift. In the eighteenth century, with the rise of market-based approaches to land management, administrators came to see agricultural and ecological practices that were not geared towards profit-making as worthless, even threatening. These negative perceptions inspired legislation that dismantled traditional rural livelihoods. Hunting, fishing, communal land use—and fire—were increasingly banned. 

In 1743 in Ireland—where farmers and shepherds had used fire since the end of the last Ice Age—English colonists passed a law “to prevent the pernicious practice of burning land.”⁵ In 1760 settlers in New England restricted fire as a “destructive practice taken from the Indians.” Dutch authorities in South Africa threatened to execute Indigenous Africans for burning grasslands. A British official for the East India Company lamented that “the wild tribes” of Central India were “devastating the forests,” leaving behind “a heap of ashes.” As the French colonized Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, they described the fires used by local people as “plagues.” 

This colonial antagonism toward fire had dramatic implications in California. Until the eighteenth century, when the Spanish invaded, the region’s Indigenous peoples burned millions of acres per year—often more than the area consumed in 2020, the state’s worst fire season on record. According to the ethnobotanist Jan Timbrook and her colleagues, in parts of California, Indigenous people burned the land in ways that produced food more efficiently than sedentary agriculture would have. 

Fire has many uses. In southern California Indigenous people used it to germinate over two hundred species of plants, purge pests from oak acorns, and stimulate the growth of soaproot (which, in turn, was pounded and sprinkled into water to temporarily paralyze fish, allowing them to be harvested). The coastal Chumash have historically used fire to encourage the growth of protein-rich chia grasses. In the northern mountains, tribes have used it to create pastures for game animals, alter soil conditions to support pyrogenic edible fungi, and to clear canopy space for berries to grow. 

But fire is not simply a tool for procuring food. In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, the Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer reflected on the lessons her father taught her about burning. He described it as a paintbrush for the landscape: 

Touch it here in a small dab and you’ve made a green meadow for elk…. Draw the fire brush along the creek and the next spring it’s a thick stand of yellow willows. A wash over a grassy meadow turns it blue with camas. To make blueberries, let the paint dry for a few years and repeat.⁶

In 1769, during the first Spanish overland incursion into California, the colonizers documented evidence of Indigenous burning from San Diego to San Francisco. Rather than grasping its ecological function, they described the practice as an annoyance. One soldier complained that he couldn’t find anywhere to graze his horse because of “the great fires of the gentiles, who, not having care for more than their own bellies, burn the fields as soon as they gather up the seeds, and that [burning] is universal.”

In 1793 the interim Spanish governor of California criminalized fire use, describing Indigenous peoples as childish for starting burns that caused “widespread damage.” He ordered his soldiers to “uproot this very harmful practice” using “the most severe punishment” necessary. The soldiers and friars who administered Spanish missions indeed enforced the bans strictly. A government questionnaire from 1798 confirmed that “the fathers have shackles, chains, stocks, and lockups” to punish transgressions.

By criminalizing fire, Spanish authorities effectively criminalized forms of Indigenous knowledge—like the cultivation of certain plants and management of ecosystems—that relied on controlled burning. This put Indigenous people in an impossible situation. Those who persisted with burning risked arrest and forced labor. Those who abandoned the practice could no longer feasibly pursue their traditional economy and were often forced to join Spanish missions, where they were similarly confined and coerced into labor. Since Indigenous Californians had long been the primary drivers of the region’s fires, the new laws also brought an end to the burns.

This trend accelerated under American rule. In a Vox interview, Bill Tripp, a fire specialist from the Karuk tribe of northern California, explained that fire suppression was part of a broader pattern of American expansion. Just as the US government eliminated the Plains tribes’ main food source, the buffalo, they targeted fire in California: “it became part of the policy to remove that connection to the food systems.” During these same decades, from 1850 to 1890, state-sanctioned militias murdered approximately 90 percent of California’s Indigenous peoples in what historians widely consider the clearest case of genocide on the American frontier.⁷

The United States Forest Service was founded soon after, in 1905, to protect the land from which Indigenous people had been dispossessed. Fire suppression quickly became its primary mandate. In its first years, when its employees used little more than horses and shovels, the agency claimed a 97 percent success rate in suppressing fires on public lands. Funding cuts soon forced the service to turn to the logging industry for support: forests were now to be protected not to maintain ecological health but to facilitate exploitation. By the 1920s, after the invention of the chainsaw, the Forest Service laid roads deep into forested areas, allowing lumbermen to clear vast swaths of land. By midcentury most of California’s old-growth forests had been logged. After felling native trees—coastal redwoods, giant sequoias, black oaks—the Forest Service and the logging industry worked together to plant species chosen for their market value, often Douglas firs and Lodgepole Pines.

Today many of California’s forests—which from a mountaintop view can be mistaken for wilderness—are in fact covered by whatever was planted following logging operations. These plantations are often crowded with trees of the same species and age, lacking the diversity that might have slowed the spread of fire. They are also much denser than naturally managed forests, making them susceptible to drought and disease. It is difficult to imagine a more explosive fire environment: “pines in lines,” as foresters describe them.

While the disaster in Los Angeles was not driven by degraded forests, it was exacerbated by the same imperatives embedded in California’s fire management system. Indigenous people, once incarcerated for fire stewardship, were then coerced into suppressing fires that threatened commercial assets. This pattern began in the early twentieth century in the Klamath Mountains of northern California, where Indigenous people convicted of crimes were forced to fight fires to pay off their “social debts.” The pattern continues today: incarcerated people—disproportionately Black, Indigenous, and Latinx—now make up about 30 percent of the state’s firefighting force.

I first met Emilio last November, at a prescribed burn in Santa Barbara County where we lit fires to restore ecosystems along the coast. I was there because, after years of fighting wildfires, I wanted to learn what it would mean to view fire as a restorative tool. Emilio noted that California’s landscapes are among the most fire-dependent on earth. The survival of many endemic plant species relies on fire as much as on water. For years, as part of a broader effort to combat the loss of biological diversity, he had been collecting and preserving seeds, which John managed to save from their home. Some only germinate after being washed by smoke or touched by flame.

For roughly a year Emilio has worked to organize a prescribed burn program around Los Angeles County. He told me he encountered support from unlikely allies: progressive activists who view prescribed fire as a decolonial social movement and traditionally conservative fire departments. 

Perhaps because the colonial suppression of fire was a global phenomenon, the movement to restore fire to ecosystems has become international. In 2023 in northern California, I participated in a burn led by a couple from Ecuador and another from Spain. The Karuk Tribe hosts prescribed burns specifically for women; women-only fire training events are also held in Mexico. “Everyone has a sphere of influence,” an elderly First Nations man—who had driven more than a thousand miles south from British Columbia to California to help with a burn—told me. “We’ll need to build relationships with each other if we want to build solutions.”

Emilio and John were luckier than many. In the end the Eaton fire stopped just before reaching their home. But now they feared that the residue of the urban firestorm had made their living area toxic. John developed a sinus infection while cleaning the ash; a friend of theirs suffered from irritated skin. The couple did not know when they could return home—or if it would feel like home when they did. 

In the decades to come, Emilio told me, we’re going to face more conflagrations. “We don’t really have a choice about that.” But he hoped that communities could work together to choose the kind of fires they face. “Are we going to have ember showers,” he asked me, “or something more beneficial for the land?” He acknowledged that the barriers are considerable: insufficient funding, excessive restrictions, and exacerbating climate change. Still, even if prescribed burns cannot prevent disasters, they can help in the aftermath. At burns he often met people whose own homes had been destroyed or towns damaged. They felt driven to act, to help others avoid the same loss. It was the community, Emilio said, that kept people involved. I agreed. After all, that was how we had met.