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A conversation with Manjula Martin about her new book The Last Fire Season.
When Manjula Martin was growing up in Northern California in the 1980s, wildfires weren’t something she thought about much. She knew about disaster — the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, which killed 63 people and injured thousands, hit when she was a teenager — but fire, she thought, was just something that happened up in the mountains in the summer.
Things are different now. In 2017, Martin left the high prices of San Francisco for the redwoods of Sonoma County. The night of their housewarming party, a firestorm swept through Santa Rosa and Sonoma and Napa counties. The next year — 5 years ago this week — the Camp Fire, the deadliest and most destructive fire in the state’s history, destroyed the town of Paradise and killed 85 people.
In her new book, The Last Fire Season (out on January 16 next year), Martin writes about the fires that swept through California in 2020, weaving her personal story with that of fire in California writ large. It’s a beautiful book, and I called her up to talk about her relationship with fire and how we can learn to live with the changing world. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The book opens in 2020, which was a year of multiple fire complexes. Was that the first time fire made itself known in the immediate vicinity of your home?
No, it wasn’t. But it was the first time that I realized that it wasn’t an anomaly.
We had horrible fires near my area in 2017. In 2018, the Camp Fire happened in Northern California, which was like a four-hour drive away, but the smoke from that fire lingered in the Bay Area for weeks. And then in 2019, the Kincade fire was a huge fire up here in Sonoma, and the entire west of the county was evacuated in basically the course of a night, including ourselves.
Then in 2020, the Lightning Complex fires happened in late August, which is what the book starts with. And that was the moment where I personally was like, “oh, this is going to keep happening.”
Before that a natural disaster to me felt like a thing that happened once and then that’s it, right? It wasn’t connected to larger things for me. But the fact is that the new wildfires that we’re having are bigger and hotter and far more destructive than the previous wildfires we’ve had, and 2020, which is probably far too late, was the year that I personally put that all together under the name of climate change. It wasn’t the first year I knew about fire, but it was the moment I realized that I was going to be living with fire for the rest of my life.
I was struck by your description of the 2020 fires and the ways that COVID complicated your experience of them. It reminded me of the concept of cascading events; it was striking to read about how your go bag was filled with these N95 masks that were there for the sake of the fires, but also, of course, turned out to have utility for this other thing that you’re dealing with at the same time.
That was one of the reasons why I chose to center the book around 2020. I think that was a moment where it became clear for a lot of people that disasters don’t take their turn. When it was happening, I felt it was a historic moment.
You named your book The Last Fire Season. But, of course, it wasn’t the last.
Unfortunately not. The book began as an essay, and since I was writing it in 2021 I thought I was writing about the last fire season I had experienced. But then I realized that it was actually a really great title for a book. It’s pretty commonly acknowledged now that in the North American West, fire season isn’t really a thing anymore. Now fire authorities talk about having a fire year.
That is directly linked to the changing of the weather and the climate. But for me, the deeper meaning of it is this idea that fire being seasonal also sort of implies that it’s temporary, and that it’s going to go away. But really it’s not seasonal, it’s part of this land. And we’re going to be living with it forever.
There’s a point in your book where you write that the California ecosystem was fire-adapted, but also that fire is changing. What do you mean by that?
Since time immemorial, California’s ecosystems — from oak woodlands to redwood forests to grasslands and chaparral — evolved with fire as part of their natural cycle. Fire is actually something that helps the cycle of the landscape reset and continue.
And this was something that Indigenous people knew and really sort of harnessed and used in the way that they tended the lands. But the genocide of Indigenous people in California really sort of stopped that cycle, as is the case with colonialism in most places.
Right, you have a chapter about the Indigenous history of fire in California and the suppression of fire both through violence against Indigenous communities and also a long history of policies against fire.
Yeah, the colonial policies of managing the land in California had been what they call ”total fire exclusion,” which is basically the idea that all fire is bad and we need to extinguish fires right away. There was a policy in place called the 10 AM policy that actually said every new forest fire needs to be extinguished by 10 AM the next morning. And, you know, there are a lot of reasons why that happened, including profits and fear and prioritizing human habitat and recreation over the landscape. But the result is that the landscapes here are actually neglected at this point, 150 years after colonization.
You wrote at one point about going to prescribed burns and there was a section that really stood out to me:
Fire is exuberant. It’s joyous. It dances. I can see why people joke that all firefighters are secret pyros. It’s so much fun.
I fully relate to this feeling. Has going to prescribed burns changed your own relationship with fire?
Good fire and cultural fire, which is generally the term we use when we’re talking about Indigenous use of fire, have radically changed my feelings about fire. Humans have evolved with fire, and the more I engage with fire, the more I learn about it, the more I understand its role in both the land and the history of this place, the less afraid I feel.
You write about your own experience with getting a hysterectomy and how that affected your life afterwards, and I thought that was an interesting choice. You could have written a book that was just about fire, and we could have never learned about your hysterectomy. But you chose to include it. Can you tell me a little bit about how that came to happen?
I could have written a straight journalistic look at wildfire right now or at the 2020 fire season specifically. And that was something I toyed with. But I ultimately realized, in thinking about this idea of cascading disasters, that they’re all happening while people are living their lives. Climate change, wars, economic ruin are all happening on top of whatever else is going on in your life. So I thought this part of my life was worth including.
The hysterectomy, and many associated health crises, led me to having chronic pain. And one of the only things that helped me with that was gardening. For me, the physical act of literally touching the land, being in this dialogue with the environment and the ecosystem around me, was the thing that helped me recover from this health crisis. I wasn’t quite well. And more importantly, nature wasn’t quite well. And gardening in this environment is what really made it click for me that this environment is going through a crisis as well.
That garden was partly how you knew about the oncoming fires in 2020, right?
Yeah, when the Lightning Complex fires started, I was out in my garden watering the roses. I saw this little black object on the ground, and when I leaned down and picked it up I saw it was a leaf of a California bay laurel tree. And it was burned black, but it was still whole. It had been blown on the wind and landed in my garden. It was sort of like a messenger, telling me that a few miles away these trees were burning.
Bay trees are a natural part of the forest understory here, but they are highly flammable. They’re basically made of oil, and they serve as what’s called a ladder fuel; if fire gets in that tree, it will shoot up it and then can get into the crowns of taller trees like redwoods or oaks that would normally be more fire resistant. It’s literally a fire spreader. Anyone who lives in the area will tell you that when there’s a fire nearby it rains burnt leaves.
Parts of the book are unexpectedly written in the past tense. You write, for example, that “Northern California was a very large place,” but the depictions of events in the past or future are written in the present tense. Was that intentional? Did you mean to contract the idea of Northern California?
I absolutely did. The convention in nonfiction is to write events in the past tense, but to phrase facts, or things that are still true, in the present tense. I felt like it was important to acknowledge that the things we take as granted, these truths about the way the environment works, might not always remain that way. It was also partly a pragmatic decision, because I didn’t know what would happen before the book came out. What if my house burned down before that, or if I have to move? Things are just so chaotic right now.
The other time I break with convention is when I write about Indigenous nations and Indigenous management practices. I intentionally used the present tense there as a way to push back against the trope of a lot of non-Indigenous writers portraying Indigenous people and worldviews as extinct when in fact they’re very, very alive.
Throughout the book you’re constantly talking to your partner about whether to stay in your home or move away to a “safer” area. I think it can be really hard for people who don’t live in areas under threat to grasp just how hard the concept of migrating really is.
Right, that’s such a common binary: to stay or go. And the reality is actually a lot messier. I’m fortunate to even have the choice of whether to stay or go; I am a person who has a lot of different privileges. I have resources, I have friends, I’m educated, I’m white.
Most people don’t willingly leave their homes unless things are really bad. But it’s never really all bad: Sometimes there’s extreme weather and disasters, and then there isn’t. It’s up and down. There’s a lot of talk around what the perfect solution is, where the safe places are. And the truth is that nowhere is safe because of climate change.
For me, the point of living at this moment on this planet is that it’s messy. It’s full of grief, it’s full of joy and beauty, and it’s also dangerous. There may be a time when I leave this place, for a variety of reasons. But I think the idea that you can run away from climate change is false.
Something I’ve learned a lot from talking with people who are deeply connected to the land here and who work with fire is that you have a responsibility to the place where you live. If I love this place so much, what do I owe it? The idea of tending a place for its overall health, not just for my personal survival, is very powerful.
Right, at one point you write about you and your partner thinking about doing prescribed burns in the woods near you to help reduce the risk of more fires.
We have thought a lot about the idea of reintroducing good fire where we live. Our neighborhood has been getting together and doing work days where we clear fuels from the forest floor together. And it’s really proof of how much work is needed, because you can clear brush and cut dead limbs off trees for a day with a group of 15 people, and then you look at this tiny quarter acre that you’ve worked on, and it still needs so much more work.
Stewardship is a constant act.
Absolutely. And it might not be perfect, and honestly it might not make a difference. These woods might still burn. But if and when they do burn, they are going to be healthier afterwards because the fire is going to be healthier.
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It was a curious alliance from the start. On the one hand, Donald Trump, who made antipathy toward electric vehicles a core part of his meandering rants. On the other hand, Elon Musk, the man behind the world’s largest EV company, who nonetheless put all his weight, his millions of dollars, and the power of his social network behind the Trump campaign.
With Musk standing by his side on Election Day, Trump has once again secured the presidency. His reascendance sent shock waves through the automotive world, where companies that had been lurching toward electrification with varying levels of enthusiasm were left to wonder what happens now — and what benefits Tesla may reap from having hitched itself to the winning horse.
Certainly the federal government’s stated target of 50% of U.S. new car sales being electric by 2030 is toast, and many of the actions it took in pursuit of that goal are endangered. Although Trump has softened his rhetoric against EVs since becoming buddies with Musk, it’s hard to imagine a Trump administration with any kind of ambitious electrification goal.
During his first go-round as president, Trump attacked the state of California’s ability to set its own ambitious climate-focused rules for cars. No surprise there: Because of the size of the California car market, its regulations helped to drag the entire industry toward lower-emitting vehicles and, almost inevitably, EVs. If Trump changes course and doesn’t do the same thing this time, it’ll be because his new friend at Tesla supports those rules.
The biggest question hanging over electric vehicles, however, is the fate of the Biden administration’s signature achievements in climate and EV policy, particularly the Inflation Reduction Act’s $7,500 federal consumer tax credit for electric vehicles. A Trump administration looks poised to tear down whatever it can of its predecessor’s policy. Some analysts predict it’s unlikely the entire IRA will disappear, but concede Trump would try to kill off the incentives for electric vehicles however he can.
There’s no sugar-coating it: Without the federal incentives, the state of EVs looks somewhat bleak. Knocking $7,500 off the starting price is essential to negate the cost of manufacturing expensive lithium-ion batteries and making EVs cost-competitive with ordinary combustion cars. Consider a crucial model like the new Chevy Equinox EV: Counting the federal incentive, the most basic $35,000 model could come in under the starting price of a gasoline crossover like the Toyota RAV4. Without that benefit, buyers who want to go electric will have to pay a premium to do so — the thing that’s been holding back mass electrification all along.
Musk, during his honeymoon with Trump, boasted that Tesla doesn’t need the tax credits, as if daring the president-elect to kill off the incentives. On the one hand, this is obviously false. Visit Tesla’s website and you’ll see the simplest Model 3 listed for $29,990, but this is a mirage. Take away the $7,500 in incentives and $5,000 in claimed savings versus buying gasoline, and the car actually starts at about $43,000, much further out of reach for non-wealthy buyers.
What Musk really means is that his company doesn’t need the incentives nearly as bad as other automakers do. Ford is hemorrhaging billions of dollars as it struggles to make EVs profitably. GM’s big plan to go entirely electric depended heavily on federal support. As InsideEVsnotes, the likely outcome of a Trump offensive against EVs is that the legacy car brands, faced with an unpredictable electrification roadmap as America oscillates between presidents, scale back their plans and lean back into the easy profitably of big, gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks. Such an about-face could hand Tesla the kind of EV market dominance it enjoyed four or five years ago when it sold around 75% of all electric vehicles in America.
That’s tough news for the climate-conscious Americans who want an electric vehicle built by someone not named Elon Musk. Hundreds of thousands of people, myself included, bought a Tesla during the past five or six years because it was the most practical EV for their lifestyle, only to see the company’s figurehead shift his public persona from goofy troll to Trump acolyte. It’s not uncommon now, as Democrats distance themselves from Tesla, to see Model 3s adorned with bumper stickers like the “Anti-Elon Tesla Club,” as one on a car I followed last month proclaimed. Musk’s newest vehicle, the Cybertruck, is a rolling embodiment of the man’s brand, a vehicle purpose-built to repel anyone not part of his cult of personality.
In a world where this version of Tesla retakes control of the electric car market, it becomes harder to ditch gasoline without indirectly supporting Donald Trump, by either buying a Tesla or topping off at its Superchargers. Blue voters will have some options outside of Tesla — the industry has come too far to simply evaporate because of one election. But it’s also easy to see dispirited progressives throwing up their hands and buying another carbon-spewing Subaru.
Republicans are taking over some of the most powerful institutions for crafting climate policy on Earth.
When Republicans flipped the Senate, they took the keys to three critical energy and climate-focused committees.
These are among the most powerful institutions for crafting climate policy on Earth. The Senate plays the role of gatekeeper for important legislation, as it requires a supermajority to overcome the filibuster. Hence, it’s both where many promising climate bills from the House go to die, as well as where key administrators such as the heads of the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency are vetted and confirmed.
We’ll have to wait a bit for the Senate’s new committee chairs to be officially confirmed. But Jeff Navin, co-founder at the climate change-focused government affairs firm Boundary Stone Partners, told me that since selections are usually based on seniority, in many cases it’s already clear which Republicans are poised to lead under Trump and which Democrats will assume second-in-command (known as the ranking member). Here’s what we know so far.
This committee has been famously led by Joe Manchin, the former Democrat, now Independent senator from West Virginia, who will retire at the end of this legislative session. Energy and Natural Resources has a history of bipartisan collaboration and was integral in developing many of the key provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act — and could thus play a key role in dismantling them. Overall, the committee oversees the DOE, the Department of the Interior, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, so it’s no small deal that its next chairman will likely be Mike Lee, the ultra-conservative Republican from Utah. That’s assuming that the committee's current ranking member, John Barrasso of Wyoming, wins his bid for Republican Senate whip, which seems very likely.
Lee opposes federal ownership of public lands, setting himself up to butt heads with Martin Heinrich, the Democrat from New Mexico and likely the committee’s next ranking member. Lee has also said that solving climate change is simply a matter of having more babies, as “problems of human imagination are not solved by more laws, they’re solved by more humans.” As Navin told me, “We've had this kind of safe space where so-called quiet climate policy could get done in the margins. And it’s not clear that that's going to continue to exist with the new leadership.”
This committee is currently chaired by Democrat Tom Carper of Delaware, who is retiring after this term. Poised to take over is the Republican’s current ranking member, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia. She’s been a strong advocate for continued reliance on coal and natural gas power plants, while also carving out areas of bipartisan consensus on issues such as nuclear energy, carbon capture, and infrastructure projects during her tenure on the committee. The job of the Environment and Public Works committee is in the name: It oversees the EPA, writes key pieces of environmental legislation such as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, and supervises public infrastructure projects such as highways, bridges, and dams.
Navin told me that many believe the new Democratic ranking member will be Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, although to do so, he would have to step down from his perch at the Senate Budget Committee, where he is currently chair. A tireless advocate of the climate cause, Whitehouse has worked on the Environment and Public Works committee for over 15 years, and lately seems to have had a relatively productive working relationship with Capito.
This subcommittee falls under the broader Senate Appropriations Committee and is responsible for allocating funding for the DOE, various water development projects, and various other agencies such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
California’s Dianne Feinstein used to chair this subcommittee until her death last year, when Democrat Patty Murray of Washington took over. Navin told me that the subcommittee’s next leader will depend on how the game of “musical chairs” in the larger Appropriations Committee shakes out. Depending on their subcommittee preferences, the chair could end up being John Kennedy of Louisiana, outgoing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, or Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. It’s likewise hard to say who the top Democrat will be.
Inside a wild race sparked by a solar farm in Knox County, Ohio.
The most important climate election you’ve never heard of? Your local county commissioner.
County commissioners are usually the most powerful governing individuals in a county government. As officials closer to community-level planning than, say a sitting senator, commissioners wind up on the frontlines of grassroots opposition to renewables. And increasingly, property owners that may be personally impacted by solar or wind farms in their backyards are gunning for county commissioner positions on explicitly anti-development platforms.
Take the case of newly-elected Ohio county commissioner – and Christian social media lifestyle influencer – Drenda Keesee.
In March, Keesee beat fellow Republican Thom Collier in a primary to become a GOP nominee for a commissioner seat in Knox County, Ohio. Knox, a ruby red area with very few Democratic voters, is one of the hottest battlegrounds in the war over solar energy on prime farmland and one of the riskiest counties in the country for developers, according to Heatmap Pro’s database. But Collier had expressed openness to allowing new solar to be built on a case-by-case basis, while Keesee ran on a platform focused almost exclusively on blocking solar development. Collier ultimately placed third in the primary, behind Keesee and another anti-solar candidate placing second.
Fighting solar is a personal issue for Keesee (pronounced keh-see, like “messy”). She has aggressively fought Frasier Solar – a 120 megawatt solar project in the country proposed by Open Road Renewables – getting involved in organizing against the project and regularly attending state regulator hearings. Filings she submitted to the Ohio Power Siting Board state she owns a property at least somewhat adjacent to the proposed solar farm. Based on the sheer volume of those filings this is clearly her passion project – alongside preaching and comparing gay people to Hitler.
Yesterday I spoke to Collier who told me the Frasier Solar project motivated Keesee’s candidacy. He remembered first encountering her at a community meeting – “she verbally accosted me” – and that she “decided she’d run against me because [the solar farm] was going to be next to her house.” In his view, he lost the race because excitement and money combined to produce high anti-solar turnout in a kind of local government primary that ordinarily has low campaign spending and is quite quiet. Some of that funding and activity has been well documented.
“She did it right: tons of ground troops, people from her church, people she’s close with went door-to-door, and they put out lots of propaganda. She got them stirred up that we were going to take all the farmland and turn it into solar,” he said.
Collier’s takeaway from the race was that local commissioner races are particularly vulnerable to the sorts of disinformation, campaign spending and political attacks we’re used to seeing more often in races for higher offices at the state and federal level.
“Unfortunately it has become this,” he bemoaned, “fueled by people who have little to no knowledge of what we do or how we do it. If you stir up enough stuff and you cry out loud enough and put up enough misinformation, people will start to believe it.”
Races like these are happening elsewhere in Ohio and in other states like Georgia, where opposition to a battery plant mobilized Republican primaries. As the climate world digests the federal election results and tries to work backwards from there, perhaps at least some attention will refocus on local campaigns like these.