Fire Lessons: Notes on Learning to Live in a Burning World

Part adventure memoir, part manifesto, a fire researcher makes an impassioned argument that to survive in a burning world, we have to let some fires burn

At 20 years old, Clare Boerigter joined a Forest Service crew of wildland firefighters in Utah, leaving behind her bookish, indoor life in Iowa in search of high adventure in the American West. During the fire season that followed, Boerigter was initiated into the dangerous world of firefighting, a surreal existence that saw her fighting wildfires in rural subdivisions, remote wilderness areas, and on a National Guard base littered with bombs. The fireline was more than Boerigter had bargained for, and yet even as it threatened to break her, it made her feel remarkably and wildly free.

In Fire Lessons, Boerigter traces her journey from fighting wildfires to studying them. Along the way, Boerigter is confronted by a complicated reality – while firefighters like her have prevented terrible losses by suppressing wildfires, this strategy of near-total suppression has also made it much more likely that bigger, more extreme fires will burn in the future. This is the wildfire paradox: the more wildfires we deny – through water, containment, fighting – the worse the inevitable conflagration becomes.

Through vivid personal stories from her three seasons on the fireline, Boerigter takes readers into the heat, smoke, and exhaustion of fighting wildfires. But she also reveals another side of this work: Boerigter’s crew was one of the few trained to manage wildfires so they could burn safely, a strategy that brings fire back into ecosystems that have evolved over thousands of years to depend on cycles of burning.

Back in the Midwest after her fire seasons are over, Boerigter begins to learn important lessons about fire lighting from Indigenous cultural burners. For millennia, many Indigenous peoples have tended their homelands by intentionally burning them, a caretaking practice that can bring many benefits, including making fire-prone lands safe to live in.

While our nation’s fire strategy remains one of ironclad suppression, Fire Lessons asks us to imagine a world in which fire is not feared but is instead recognized as a powerful and complex force – one that we must learn to coexist alongside.