Tl;dr - Great book covering a wide range of angles to understand wildfires out west, including frontline firefighting experience, indigenous fire management, modern fire management, and environmental policy. When you grow up east of the Mississippi, wild fires don’t take up much space in your day. It’s rainy, snowy and icy (if you’re north enough) — and wet. It rains. It’s humid. But then I moved to Salt Lake City where it’s literally a desert. A very dry desert. Out west, fires burn. Smoke fills the air. And wildfires are part of the weather. Smoke forecasts are looked at with the same regularity as the precipitation and temperature when making outdoor plans. Despite living out west for the last six years, I’ve yet to read much about wildfires until now. So, I picked up When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World by Jordan Thomas who takes field research to the next level to better understand how people shape fires and how fires have shaped the land. Thomas is a PhD student in anthropology at UC Santa Barbara and joined the Los Padres Hotshots for a six-month stint during a record-breaking fire season. Thomas ties together memoir, anthropology, and policy to explain how indigenous populations used fire to shape the land, how the relationship with fire changed in a post-colonial America, and how today’s climate changes and policies have served as a catalyst for the mega fires we’re experiencing out west today. He organizes his book into four parts, covering training, firefighting, consequences, and next steps (but with more interesting names). As the book progresses, a mostly memoir gives way to mostly anthropology and policy about wildfires. The memoir aspects of the book were fascinating. I didn’t know there were “hotshots” — about 100 crews across the U.S., 25 of them in California. These are the front line firefighters, working two weeks straight at at time, as close to the fire’s edge as possible, sleeping on the dirt overnight, and doing the...