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It was a perfect day—one of those blue skies, white clouds, gentle breeze days—when I wandered into a tent at the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival to hear Ayana Elizabeth Johnson talk about her latest publication, What If We Get It Right (available on Amazon and Bookshop). Her impressive collection of interviews with climate leaders is intended to give us hope. With the current anti-climate climate, she admits the best she can say to buoy herself these days is, “I refuse to give into pessimism.” If she were to do another book, she said, she would interview ordinary people doing amazing things.
A perfect example of an ordinary person doing extraordinary things was the next speaker that day, anthropologist and wildfire-fighting hotshot Jordan Thomas.
When Thomas took his seat on stage, I felt an instant connection. He hails from Santa Barbara, is currently studying at UCSB, and has worked in Los Padres National Forest. I survived the Thomas Fire in 2017, and, like every resident of Montecito and Santa Barbara, I feel grateful to the firefighters who saved our homes and labored exhaustively during the mudslides. Since then, there have been multiple megafires in California and elsewhere, and Thomas’s book is filled with important insights.
His interviewer introduced the book, When It All Burns: Firefighting in a Transformed World (available on Amazon or Bookshop), and told the audience the book was already sold out. Understandably, excitement about the charismatic Thomas swept the book festival early on because of the power of his story. On previous panels he had been a stand-out in an impressive literary lineup.
His interviewer asked us: “Who knows what a hotshot is?” I was about to raise my hand but sensed I’d be wrong. The word that was once a mild insult to describe a successful person with a swelled head has become a badge of honor attached to the highly skilled men and women who work the most dangerous part of a fire—who sometimes start fires to stop fires.
A perfect example of an ordinary person doing extraordinary things was the next speaker that day, anthropologist and wildfire-fighting hotshot Jordan Thomas.
The Los Angeles Times beautifully captures the essence of Thomas’s book with a rave review of his writing: “Exceptional. . . . When It All Burns is one of those books that immerses the reader in the nuances of a world most of us know only through the lens of tragedy and destruction. Thomas’ visceral, crystalline prose only adds fuel to the fire … A hotshot firefighter’s gripping firsthand account of a record-setting fire season.” And the Santa Barbara Independent put Thomas on its cover with an excellent interview by Tyler Hayden.
As we face the proliferation of fires everywhere, the wisdom and reflections of Thomas’s book is important reading if we want to understand ways to safeguard our future.
