What the Public Doesn’t Know About Fighting Wildfires

It’s every author’s worst fear: Your book is one of three coming out on the subject in a single season.

But Kelly Ramsey, Jordan Thomas, and River Selby’s first-person narratives about fighting fires in the American West could not be more different or more complementary to each other. While all three worked as hotshots — the U.S. Forest Service’s elite wildland firefighting division — their different experiences, approaches, and perspectives offer a multi-faceted (and rarely overlapping) look at the state of fire management in the U.S.

Ramsey’s memoir, Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West, is a narrative of self-discovery chronicling her time with the pseudonymous Rowdy River Hotshots during the historic 2020 and 2021 seasons. As the only woman on the 20-person crew — and the first woman the crew had brought on in 10 years — Ramsey faced all the normal pressures of being a rookie firefighter while also having to prove her mettle to be on the fireline in her colleagues’ eyes.

Thomas, an anthropologist by training, spent the 2021 season with the Los Padres Hotshots to learn more about “the cultural currents that stoked this new era of fire.”

“I wanted to get close to the flames,” he writes, “to understand how people navigate new scales of destruction — emotionally, physically, and tactically.” The resulting book, When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World, is a first-person account of Thomas’ time on the hotshot crew, interwoven with his research into how forest mismanagement long predates the common narrative tying today’s megafires to the creation of the U.S. Forest Service at the start of the 20th Century. (It was also recently named as a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award.)

Finally, Selby’s Hotshot: A Life on Fire, is a braided memoir that follows the author’s tumultuous upbringing and relationship with their mother to their escape into the unforgiving world of wildland firefighting. Having started out on a contract fire crew based out of Oregon, Selby joined the Solar Hotshot crew in 2002, setting off a career in elite firefighting that would take them from California to Nebraska to Alaska. As the only woman on the crew (Selby now identifies as nonbinary), Selby faced marginalization similar to what Ramsey experienced; read together, the two memoirs offer a discouraging portrait of how little the hypermasculine culture of hotshot crews has changed, even over the course of decades.

Their books arrive at a moment when federal firefighting crews are receiving more public attention than at any point in recent memory — both because of the prevalence of fire in our climate changed world, and due to mounting concerns about the health effects and treatment of the workers on hotshot crews. The Trump administration has also pushed to consolidate fire programs under a single federal agency, ostensibly to address cost inefficiencies and improve the coordination of operations, which are currently spread across five agencies.

I spoke to Ramsey, Thomas, and Selby separately about their books. Common themes emerged, including the urgency of wildfire narratives, the importance of prescribed burning, and their views on resiliency and rebuilding. The interviews have been condensed, lightly edited, and arranged in conversation with each other, below.

On rebuilding after wildfires

Wildfire recovery interests me so much, and from multiple perspectives, because I think this is a space where you find the recovery of people’s emotional trauma from wildfires is closely related to the recovery of landscapes from fires.

Prescribed burns are often where you find people trying to implement wildfire recovery. In Northern California, in a national forest up there where I was working, 98% of that forest burned. Part of the recovery plan process involves using intentional fires to foster the kinds of ecosystems that reemerge alongside them. They’re trying to plan this around climate change as well, thinking about what sorts of plants and trees will survive in the new climate. It also means working with communities like the tribal people in the region, who — for a very long time — weren’t allowed to use fire, and who saw a lot of species that were important to them disappear because of the lack of fire.

As you’re doing that, you’re encouraging fires that aren’t so destructive and aren’t so scary. So for people who’ve lost homes or had emotionally distressful experiences with wildfire, these prescribed fires are also an opportunity to rebuild an emotional connection to fire in the land as well — one that’s not traumatic, but in which fire is a useful, beneficial thing within your community and within your landscape. — Thomas

Communities that build back successfully do not build back the same. There are two parts to it: One is making your actual home more defensible and more fire-resistant. But there’s also building back the landscape around a community better.

The places I’ve seen that look the most fire resilient have done massive landscape-size treatments around the community. They’ve removed hazard trees following the fire, and they’ve stayed on top of the brush — because what happens, especially after a catastrophic wildfire, is you get huge regrowth of brush, and a lot of times you’ll see another fire in that same scar within a few years because brush carries fire so readily.

They’re also doing a lot of prescribed burning. Ideally, if you have a community that’s been hit by a fire, you also want to be on top of intentionally burning in the five to 10 years right after. You have to be aggressive about that; otherwise, you’re just going to get another fire pretty soon. — Ramsey

I’ve been thinking about rebuilding a lot after we had those fires in Los Angeles over the winter. There seem to be two camps: one camp of people who want to rebuild immediately, and another camp of people saying, “I think we should consider what we’re doing.” It’s challenging because a lot of population centers, especially in the West, are in the wildland-urban interface. So, yes, rebuild, but rebuild with safety in mind and ensure that everyone in the community, regardless of their economic status, has access to the resources necessary to rebuild in a way that protects them.

There’s a huge public lack of education and understandable fear when it comes to wildfire, but there are so many things that can be done as far as how houses are built, enforcing defensible space around houses, encouraging the growth of more fire-resistant native plants, making sure that you’re tending the land in a way that is keeping out the more volatile invasive grasses that are actually increasing the number of fires. But I think our national mindset has always been that we want to find one solution for everything, and that just doesn’t work in fire-prone areas. There have to be multiple solutions and multiple agencies and nonprofits and states and cities and counties all working together and supporting each other in having these goals of building fire-resilient communities. — Selby

On how being a hotshot has changed their perspective on fire

I think a lot of people have this indignation every season, where when a fire approaches a town, they’re like, “How could this happen?” But in certain places — like Redding, California, where I live — people are no longer shocked. They’re always ready. And I have landed in that extreme of being always ready; I’m not surprised.

When you decide to live in certain places— almost anywhere in California, but in certain places in the West — you have signed on an invisible dotted line and said, “I agree that my house may be burned, and I accept this.” Obviously, I will still grieve and be sad if I lose my home at some point. But I also just feel like, with what I’ve seen as a hotshot, I acknowledge that it could happen almost anywhere out here. It’s more likely than not that at some point, in the next 25 years, if I can continue to live in California for that long.

My partner and I talk a lot about this, how after being a hotshot, you have a switch in your brain where you’re constantly aware of what could burn and how it could burn. I look at a certain hillside, and if it’s a really dense forest, I’ll have two thoughts: I’ll think, “Oh, how pretty.” And then I’ll think, “Oh, that would burn really hot.” — Ramsey

There were very few instances on the fire line where the firefighters I was working with questioned or talked about or discussed how that fire started. There is a real immediacy to the work and an understanding that you would do your best to try to put the fire out, and you would work for 14 days, and if the fire was still going, then you’d come back after your days off. But the task didn’t hinge on how the fire started.

What interests me the most is why fires get as big as they do once they start. That’s what shines the light on climate change and the way that the capitalist management of our lands has made our forests so unhealthy, and how the genocide and colonialism of Indigenous people were the foundation of that. If you go back just a couple of hundred years, there were far more ignitions in California before Europeans arrived because Indigenous people were igniting around 10% of California every year. But those fires were not going out of control.

Every fire that’s not a prescribed burn — is it a success or a failure? I think it depends on the fire history in the area recently, and if there has been a prescribed burn there recently, or if there’s even been a lightning burn that occurred in conditions that were conducive to forest health. Then another ignition there probably won’t be as bad. But of course, climate change is shifting all of that. — Thomas

On how gender identity informs the experience of being a hotshot

It became a conscious decision to write about the experience of being a female hotshot. In the first draft, there were a couple of moments where I was like, “Oh, I had my period,” that were a bit throw-away. Like, I’d mention that it was happening, or I’d say that I had trouble finding a place to pee. But one of my dear, dear friends, who is a professor of Victorian literature, read the first draft, and she was like, “MORE OF THIS” in all caps. My editor pushed for it as well. He said, “We need as much of your physical experience as possible.” He didn’t really say, “your physical experience as a woman,” but he asked at one point, “Could you do a catalog of the damage to your body?”

It was really other people being like, “Okay, so what about your body, though?” because my tendency — and I think this happens in books by authors in male-dominated fields, there’s an abnegation of the body. You’re not supposed to think too much about the pain you’re dealing with. You necessarily compartmentalize and tune out your physical experience because a lot of times it’s painful, and to keep going through a 24-hour shift, you can’t think, “Oh, my shoulder hurts.” So I think the culture — and it’s also hyper-masculine culture, is “Don’t complain, don’t say what you’re going through at all.” — Ramsey

I was very aware when writing that there are better voices to be commenting on masculinity in this context than mine, necessarily. But, in my analysis, I never wanted to punch down or punch up; I wanted to think about the way that these cultures function. One of the things that masculinity does on the crew is it makes people hyper-aware of all of the small details of their actions, whether you’re taking care of your boots or keeping your chain sharp on your chainsaw, or whether you’re drinking enough water. All of these things that are enforced through masculine bullying are actually things that, if you’re not paying attention to them, can slow you down, or put you in a life-or-death situation, or put 20 other people at risk.

Masculinity also has a way of reframing the physical discomfort and suffering and the grind of getting kicked awake before sunrise and working until sunset in extreme heat for 14 days with two days off and doing that over and over and over for six months as your body breaks down, too. It blunts or numbs parts of it, because you’re not going to escape it by talking about it. But on the flip side of that, what does masculinity do within the system of fire suppression? One thing that these ethics do outside of the crew is create a system where suffering — “rubbing some dirt on it,” or not talking about your ailments, illnesses, or documenting your exposure to chemicals — becomes glorified and valorized so people are not advocating for themselves.

The ethic of masculinity on a hotshot crew also becomes a subsidy for the wealthy people who would otherwise be paying higher taxes to take care of these same people’s bodies. Who are you actually helping by “rubbing some dirt on it,” or by working a little bit harder, or by not reporting your torn meniscus? You’re serving the people who’d be paying for it, and the people who should be paying for it are the wealthiest strata of society whose properties you’re often protecting. There’s a perverse way in which this ethic of masculinity — while I think there’s a certain instrumentality to it within the crew — there’s also a real exploitative element to it within the role that it plays in the fire suppression system overall. — Thomas

A huge aspect of the culture on a hotshot crew was how they were performing masculinity for each other. They were very focused on performing a specific kind of masculinity, though, that was tough, invulnerable, doesn’t feel pain. The only emotion that is really okay is anger; even joy is not necessarily accepted. There was a strong undercurrent of competition — who is the toughest, who is the hardest.

Not everyone participated fully in this. I worked with a lot of different men, and all men are different. Some were sensitive or very artistic, and they experienced marginalization because they weren’t willing to opt into the hypermasculinity. But it does have physical repercussions because you’re not allowed to complain. You end up working through injuries. You end up hurting yourself. And if someone got injured — unless it was very obviously almost a deadly injury — then they were shamed for getting help.

I have gotten messages from people — even before my book came out, people of all genders, but a lot of women — talking about current experiences they’ve had that were similar to my own. In the epilogue, I wrote a little bit about some of the current lawsuits that are happening, and it’s something I would like to write more about. I hope that more folks come to me and talk about their experiences. But from what I’ve heard, the culture has not changed that much since I was a hotshot. — Selby

On writing a hotshot narrative

I definitely didn’t take the job thinking I would write about it. I had kind of — not given up on writing, — but I had definitely turned my attention away. Going to work for the Forest Service was me being like, ‘This writing thing doesn’t seem to be panning out.” I needed something else that felt meaningful to me, and I loved the outdoors so much, so I was like, “I’ll just do outside for a living.”

There was a moment in August of my first season when I started taking notes in my Notes app. I had this sense of, “This job is absolutely extraordinary, and all these crazy things are always happening, and these people I work with are such characters and they’re always saying the wildest stuff.” In the off-season, between my two seasons, I began trying to fill in some scenes based on the notes I had taken at the time. I was like, “Maybe I will write a novel when this job is done.” I really thought it was a novel!

After the two seasons, I started writing, and when I finished it, I was like, “Okay, this would make a great novel — except everything in here really happened.” So then I was like, I guess we’re working with a memoir! And that was when I decided to find an agent. — Ramsey

I won’t speculate about why other people are publishing [hotshot narratives], but I think there’s a real attempt to try to make sense of what’s happening. The baseline physical conditions are outpacing our abilities to comprehend them — around the planet, with climate change in general, but also with the wildfires. Fires are a concrete case study for the ways that environments are galloping beyond our comprehension.

So for me personally, this was an attempt to try to gain some mooring in this unmoored reality that we’re entering. There are a lot of abstract ideas about what it means to “navigate the climate crisis,” but working with hotshots gave me an anchor that I could use to make this real and ask, “How are people actually physically navigating the climate crisis on the fire line?” — Thomas

I started writing a proposal [for Hotshot] in January 2019. I thought that it was really important back then, though — due to a bunch of factors, some of them having to do with things out of my control — the book took a while to finish. I had honestly wanted this book to be out in 2022, and that was the expectation when I sold it.

In some ways, I’m glad it took so long, because that allowed me the space to do really thorough research and also a really thorough personal examination. I was working through my own emotional material, and I think I needed that distance, and that it’s made a better book. But I have thought that this has been important for a long time, and I hope that there are many more books about this subject. — Selby

On changing the narrative around wildfires

Our news cycle is built on sensationalism; that’s just a fundamental problem with the media. I have noticed a shift in the past few years where reports of fires will mention the importance of fire [recurrence to the health of the ecosystem] as a kind of side note, but who’s gonna read a side note? It is a problem of education, and that is one of the main reasons I wrote my book: I wanted to create something accessible that could provide a comprehensive education to the reader about why fires are a natural thing that happens and why they should be reintroduced. I do think that one solution might be for outlets to take more time to conduct in-depth analyses of very regional fire regimes, how they function, and possibly even partner with some nonprofits.

The way we deal with fire right now, on a large scale in the U.S., is reactive. Even in the marketing of my book, people are like, “Why would you want to write something about fire when there aren’t active wildfires threatening a community or something?” They want to leverage the threat in order to bring attention to this. And it’s like, “Well, actually, maybe you don’t want to try and educate people about this when they’re feeling actively scared.” — Selby

When people talk about forest management — or forest mismanagement — they often refer to “a century of forest mismanagement by the federal government and the U.S. Forest Service.” The reality is that most of the fires that were lit in California, and many across the American West, were lit by Indigenous people, and by the time the Forest Service was founded in 1905, most of the fires in the American West had already been extinguished [by the Spanish missionaries, who, beginning in the 18th century, had criminalized Indigenous burning as “childish” and damaging,] and orchestrated a systematic genocide against those communities. I think current dominant narratives that place forest mismanagement just a century ago do a real injustice to Indigenous people and to our ability to grasp the depth of this crisis. — Thomas

On the future and policy of firefighting

Hotshots are not looking for fame or glory or a pat on the back. Even in the way that you walk, there’s an ethic about not trying to be flashy — you have your shoulders hunched, you look down. But I think that there is a general appreciation in the hotshot community of the attempts to advocate for their general working conditions because the conditions have gotten so dire. While hotshots themselves are not the sort of people who will stand up on stage and clamor for better health care or higher pay, a lot of people who used to be hotshots are doing that work to try to uplift them.

The complicated part of this is, it’s easy to rally around hotshots as a group of people who are experiencing and suffering from the effects of climate change. It’s very hard to argue that they should be enduring that, or that they’re not skilled labor. Everybody wants to support the firefighters, right? But it provides an opportunity to highlight the needs of frontline communities; to expand universal healthcare coverage, for example. The danger, though, is it can easily become a competition — like, is this community of essential workers sufficiently skilled or sufficiently badass enough to deserve health care?

While advocating for hotshots can be really helpful in aiding people’s understanding of the increasing zones of violence that climate change is inflicting, it can also create a ridiculous standard for who should be considered an essential worker. Farm workers in California, people working in factories — people all over face similar categories of danger without having a flashy rallying point. I think that’s the danger, that you have a real opportunity with this sort of advocacy work for hotshots that is paired with that peril. — Thomas

The Forest Service should not be defunded and understaffed further than it already is. We’ve been in a staffing crisis for at least the last five years before the catastrophe that is the current administration. They’re absolutely going in the wrong direction by cutting any staff because so many of those people that they cut — while they may not be primarily firefighters, they’re all red-carded, qualified firefighters [meaning that they’re licensed and certified to respond to a fire], and they serve support functions during major incidents.

Regarding the creation of centralized fire management, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I think that could be really good because fires are managed through three different agencies in the federal government and that can cause problems. But I have also heard my friend Amanda Monthei, who’s a fire writer and podcaster, point out that firefighters also do a lot of prescribed burning and fuels management. Separate them out and create one federal fire agency, are they also going to do that preventative work?

The advocacy organization Grassroots Wildland Firefighters has a lot of good ideas about how [a centralized agency] could be done, but when it comes to the prescribed burning and intentional fire scene, there are a lot of concerns. To me, the biggest thing we need to focus on is more intentional fire and fuel reduction, and figuring out what best enables that. If the creation of a centralized fire service is going to help us do more intentional fire, then great. If it’s going to make that even harder, then no. — Ramsey

My book is clearly critical of federal agencies, but they are so important when it comes to fire management. I do think that if federal agencies could take more of a support role when it comes to local action — like with nonprofits, tribes, and Indigenous nations — that would be very helpful. But it’s hard to imagine with our current administration.

Say what you will about the Biden administration, but they made a lot of progress with some of their policies, and [former Secretary of the Interior] Deb Haaland did so much work to bring traditional ecological knowledge into the fray when it came to policy. I do have hope that, regardless of what happens with the administration, if it’s not federal agencies, then state agencies can play support roles for nonprofits, tribes, and burning networks to start implementing these things. I don’t know if it’s possible to implement such focused, specific ecological tending on a national level. It needs to be on a local level, with people who know their ecosystems. — Selby