'Get bitten by the fire': Book explores wildfire's mystique, science in a shifting climate

Science journalist M.R. O'Connor's new book "Ignition," published Tuesday by Bold Type Books, will make you fall in love with the flickering, challenging mystery of fire, and even, cautiously, with its fearful ferocity.

At first, readers may be uncertain about the need for this book or what its Brooklyn-based author can add to a conversation about worsening Western wildfires that already includes so many scholarly and Indigenous voices of wisdom. Sections of her text lean heavily on the published research of Arizona fire historian Stephen Pyne. Others derive from following wildland firefighters around, trying not to slow them down as they work quickly and skillfully to protect landscapes and human settlements from burning to oblivion, as ever-increasing acres do each year now.

Almost right away we learn that, until shortly before setting out to write this book, our tour guide through this fire chronicle "had never heard of people starting fires on purpose," a simultaneously ancient and current practice known to many in fire-prone habitats by names like "prescribed fire," "good fire," "managed fire," "beneficial fire." On page 9 we discover that she "had never seen a wildfire or any active fire outside a hearth," a statement not likely to resonate with anyone who grew up in the modern American Southwest.

But these admissions in the book's prologue do the rest of the narrative a disservice. Or perhaps it's a sly setup designed to get us into the right mindset about the unpredictability of fire, a lesson to watch and wait before judging its course. Just as a small flame threatening to lose its grasp on kindling can suddenly burst into a brilliant blaze, the story's initial lackluster spark quickly ignites to take us into new and fascinating terrain.

On page 99, for example, she teaches us the word "pyrocumulonimbus," or "pyroCbs," one my spellcheck software didn't recognize either. It refers to the meteorological phenomenon of "fire-cloud chimneys," or huge, mushroom clouds pushed into higher levels of the atmosphere by the extreme heat and speed of massive forest fires.

In the 1980s and 1990s, scientists often mistook pyroCbs as evidence of a volcanic eruption, since nothing so large was known to occur from wildfires alone. By 2003, wildfires in Canberra, Australia, produced several pyroCbs at once, in addition to a "fire tornado." Fifteen years later, Australia logged 38 pyroCbs in a single summer, marking the undeniable arrival of a new age of "megafires," thought to be a result of the drying, warming influences of climate change combined with 100 years (in the U.S.) of fire suppression politics.

"Ignition" weaves fire science, history, folklore, culture and magic together into a compelling story stemming from O'Connor genuinely getting "bitten by the fire," as one of her burn crew mentors terms it in her third chapter titled "Pyrophilia." Be it a "fire bug" or a virus, the intrigue proves infectious.

'We get bitten by the fire'

Throughout the rest of her 324 pages, O'Connor repeatedly proves that she can not only keep up with the wildland fire crews she trains with and joins as a real, active member but that she can indeed shepherd us on a journey to a deeper understanding of fire — one that we perhaps could not have embarked on with anyone who had themselves risen from the ashes of experience or been forged in flames from a lifetime steeped in fire.

O'Connor is brave. She is curious. She is humble. And she is a studious and dedicated athlete on the fire line, writing that "I put my head down and began digging (a fire break) line. I had discovered that if I switched dominant arms — six swings with my right and then six with my left — the muscles in my shoulder didn't cramp." When not reporting from the field, she spent time carrying her 45-pound, 4-year-old son on timed hikes to train for the demands of fighting, or sometimes running from, wildfire.

Another climate book review: New book tells the story of water across three ages, offering a path forward

Combining these attributes with her skill and experience as a science writer, she takes a full-immersion approach to writing this book, putting herself into the story and into harm's way of blazes like California's infamously destructive Dixie Fire to start from the beginning, learning to light and fight fires so she can tell readers the story of ignition through fresh eyes. We are all the better for it.

"For me, it felt like a strange time to fall in love with fire," O'Connor writes. "Huge swaths of the country were in the grips of historic drought. The dry period was so biblical, so prolonged and parching that reservoirs were shrinking, groundwater disappearing, and wells drying up. Scientists were calling it a megadrought. Meanwhile, warmer air temperatures, less rain, and earlier spring snowmelt created prime conditions for wildfires."

It is a joy to follow O'Connor through her travails in pursuit of legitimacy, understanding and belonging as a wildland fire crew member. She begins in Nebraska, learning to light relatively predictable fires on square-shaped, flat prairies to restore the ecosystems there to their natural, oft-singed balance. Across 13 chapters she progresses into more perilous and wildfire scenarios, sharing what she learns about a natural but out-of-control force that can be beneficial at times and psychologically abusive or deadly at others.

'To be a dragon-slayer in the twenty-first century.'

In addition to sharing her own personality along the way, O'Connor's book is rich with real-life characters readers are unlikely to meet in other ways.

Perhaps most compelling are the members of various crews she works with on different assignments. She writes at length about the experience of Mike West, a wildland firefighter who suffered from PTSD after losing dear friends to firefighting disasters and experiencing a few close calls himself. The stress extended to West's wife, who eventually sought solidarity among other wildland firefighter spouses dealing with depression related to the ups and downs of a life spent chasing fire.

"Ignition" shines a light on the burden wildland firefighters take on to protect homes increasingly built into areas with known risks, termed the "wildland urban interface." In 2015 and 2016, O'Connor writes, "fifty-two wildland firefighters died by suicide in the US — twenty-five more than were killed in the line of duty." In 2020, Mike West made $22.80 an hour as a wildland firefighter, often working 18-hour shifts of hard, physical labor in dangerous conditions with high exposure to smoke and other health concerns. The Republic recently reported on elevated rates of cancer among Arizona firefighters.

O'Connor reports that American wildland firefighters take more risks than those in other countries. They are the only ones who carry emergency shelters because they are the only ones expected to go into potentially deadly conflagrations. They have the highest rate of burnovers, which as any Arizonan who remembers the tragedy of the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire will recall, are not always survivable.

Fire tragedy: Seven miles to remember the Yarnell Hill Fire, and learn the lessons from the land

But the combination of climate change, drought, a history of fire suppression accumulating fuel on the landscape and more homes built further into forests is making Americans increasingly vulnerable to a new, bigger beast that some of O'Connor's sources referred to as a "dragon," necessitating a fearless workforce of modern-day dragon slayers.

"I thought about the dragon-fighting analogy a lot," O'Connor writes. "It conveyed something of the monstrous qualities of the wildfires themselves and hinted at the quixotic nature of fighting them. To be a dragon slayer in the twenty-first century is anachronistic, but won't we need to call on the same qualities — courage and strength — in the battle to limit climate change?"

"Ignition" explains how this battle at hand is largely of our own making.

The Republic investigates Hot Houses: As Arizona builds to solve a housing crisis, will its homes withstand future heat extremes?

A runaway train

Indigenous knowledge once maintained "wild" places through careful "good fire." From Europe to New Zealand to Africa to Alaska, "wherever humans went, they ignited their surroundings," O'Connor writes.

Fast forward to the expansion of rail lines across the then-ununited western states in the 1800s. Train travel caused sparks, which ignited small fires across rural landscapes, initially helping to maintain fire-adapted ecosystems to some degree. But as development spread west and with it a desire to keep new settlements from burning, the U.S. Forest Service adopted a new policy in 1911 that villainized fire.

All fire starts were expected to be out by 10 a.m. the next morning. Wildland firefighters were sent into escalating burns, risking their lives to accomplish this goal. Meanwhile, white settlers set out to "educate" Indigenous people about fire. One ranger, O'Connor reports, proposed a program to send missionaries out to "work amongst the Indians on a general education basis," pressuring people to stop igniting fires and shooting arsonists who might be caught "sneaking around in the brush like a coyote."

Read the climate series: The latest from Joan Meiners at azcentral, a column on climate change that publishes weekly

Later, as climate change, drought and a century of fire suppression started fueling bigger and more intense fires, the connection to trains surfaces again in O'Connor's text when she writes about a hotshot crew running for their lives from the out-of-control Nuttall Complex Fire that burned more than 29,000 acres in the Sky Island region of southern Arizona in 2004:

"The roar of a running crown fire is sometimes compared to that of a freight train or jet engine, the thunder of a heavy surf," she writes.

With this and a thousand other terrifying and eloquently-articulated mental images, "Ignition" makes it clear that, while the study of fire is infinitely mesmerizing and nuanced, the current megafire situation threatening to demolish life as we know it — while emitting massive carbon emissions that will exacerbate climate change — is very clearly a human creation.

It will require human-derived solutions and some big changes, ones that books like this are poised to help spark.

Joan Meiners is the climate news and storytelling reporter at The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Before becoming a journalist, she completed a doctorate in ecology. Follow Joan on Twitter at @beecycles or email her at joan.meiners@arizonarepublic.com. Read more of her coverage at environment.azcentral.com.

Sign up for AZ Climate, The Republic's weekly climate and environment newsletter.

Support climate coverage and local journalism by subscribing to azcentral.com at this link.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: 'Ignition' explores wildfire's mystique, science in a changing climate