Welcome to our second episode with women and non-binary firefighters who have written books about their experiences working both in fire and on hotshot crews more specifically. Our guest for this episode is HOTSHOT author River Selby (they/them), who spent seven years as a wildland firefighter—four of which were as a hotshot—from 2000 to 2010. They've since gotten their undergrad and MFA (in fiction) at Syracuse, and are currently working towards a PhD in Nonfiction with an emphasis in postcolonial histories, North American colonization, and postmodern literature and culture. This unique background allowed River to create a phenomenally in-depth book that covers not only their own experiences of working on crews and personal vignettes of life on and off the fireline, but it also paints a rich history of different fire ecologies across the American West (and world), and how colonization and fire suppression in the Western US (and elsewhere!) have set the stage for our modern relationship with fire.

In our conversation, River and I talked about how firefighting allowed them to heal and grow, in a way, from the addiction, homelessness and violence that they had experienced in their youth. We spoke about some of the more academic themes of the book, including how colonization really informed our modern culture of fire suppression and—by extent—the culture of hotshotting. We spoke about the importance of Indigenous practices and land stewardship in righting this ship, as it were, and chatted a bit about our own experiences with hotshot culture and how it framed our experiences on fire crews.

Click here to buy River's book HOTSHOT: A Life on Fire!

Click here to read an excerpt of HOTSHOT, which was published in High Country News in August.

Click here for River's book tour dates over the next few weeks.

Click here to support Life with Fire's Patreon, which is helping keep this ship afloat while Amanda is in grad school.

We're bringing you two, count em TWO, episodes with women and non-binary firefighters and writers who have written books about their experiences working both in fire and on hotshot crews more specifically. The first in this short series is with author Kelly Ramsey, whose book WILDFIRE DAYS was released in June. Kelly and I spoke about some of the emotional toll of fighting fire—including the terrifying feeling of not feeling like you belong, especially in such an intense work environment—as well as the process of writing a book (including the nearly 50,000 words she wrote in her Notes app during her time in fire). A large part of our conversation centered on the many intricacies of hotshot culture that we both witnessed (and which, in some cases, left us both confounded). Many anecdotes, laughs and shared experiences ensued. This was a fun one to record and hopefully it's just as fun to listen to!

Here's another link to Kelly's book in case you missed the first one ;)

Here's the Life with Fire Patreon, in the event you'd like to support me through the transition to grad school (where I will continue to publish podcast episodes, and will have much more access to lots of smart fire people as I'll be in Missoula!)

Welcome to our second episode with THE Stephen Pyne! Stephen is a renowned author and fire historian who, in addition to his academic life, also spent over a decade working on a fire crew on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon early in his career. Given this background, he seemed like quite possibly the perfect person to chat with about the recent Dragon Bravo Fire in Grand Canyon National Park.

For a quick primer, the Dragon Bravo Fire started three miles north of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon during a lightning storm on July 5th. On Sunday, it destroyed the historic Grand Canyon Lodge and dozens of other buildings in the adjacent complex. It was being managed for resource benefit, or was in other words a "managed fire". I’m not going to go into all the details on the fire itself, but here’s a thorough, measured analysis from my friend Zeke at the Lookout regarding what took place over the week or so that the fire was being “managed for resource benefit” (I’ll get into what this means in a minute). Zeke also provides some of the behind the scenes context on wildfire decision making and some other educated thoughts that are very deserving of your time.

Stephen, as you'd expect, had some great perspective to share about this event. While we avoided armchair quarterbacking the decision making on the fire, Stephen was able to speak a bit about the decades of precedent for this kind of wildfire tragedy in the Southwest, about the background of managed fire use in the National Parks, and how important managed fire can be to reducing wildfire risk—but only if we acknowledge the limitations of managed fire policy and take more strides to improve our processes and learn from our mistakes.

One of the improvements Stephen advocates for is being more forthcoming about managed fire with the public, which would include agencies being very clear about what managed fire is and isn't, what the objectives of managed fire typically are, what preparations have been made to make managing a fire the right decision and also—importantly—that mistakes can happen and how we can better prepare in the event that they do.

The biggest takeaway from this episode is that we've done a poor job of building trust with the public, and especially so around the practice of managed fire. Perhaps now is a good time to have that conversation, and to figure out how we can reframe this conversation so that people get more of a glimpse at managed fire when it goes right?

For more background on Stephen, check out his TED Talk on how fire shapes everything, or this great essay he published in Scientific American last spring.