Living With Fire When It’s Fire Season All Year Round

THE LAST FIRE SEASON: A Personal and Pyronatural History, by Manjula Martin

Even after evacuating her home in Sonoma County, Calif., as wildfires burned nearby, Manjula Martin reflected on her stubborn longing to exempt herself from what was happening.

“I wanted to continue to be an exception to the consequences of climate change,” she writes in “The Last Fire Season,” her powerful account of the dry lightning storms of 2020, which ignited an increasingly parched landscape throughout much of Northern California. After all, being white and middle-class had long bestowed on her some undeniable advantages. She had also been clinging to the meritocratic fantasy — even if she didn’t quite articulate it to herself — that her smarts would save her.

“But my desire to remain an observer of history instead of its victim was banal,” Martin admits. “It was the same desire everyone had.”

Martin, formerly the managing editor of the literary magazine Zoetrope, is the editor of a book about how writers make a living and the co-author, with her horticulturalist father, of a guide to growing fruit trees. “The Last Fire Season” includes a moving record of her life as well as a repudiation of all kinds of exceptionalism, not just her own or her country’s. “Humans are not the main characters in the great drama of Earth,” she notes — an inconvenient truth that the extreme weather effects of climate change have made painfully clear. Her book joins a number of others published over the last few years about catastrophic wildfires.

“The idea of fire being a season was also an expression of hope, or perhaps wishful thinking,” Martin writes. “If fire was a season, that meant it was temporary, and at some point it would go away.” So she chose a title for her book that suggests there is no real reprieve in sight. Instead of containing discussions to “fire season,” the people she knew had started to talk about “living with fire.” Even picking up and leaving wasn’t the escape some people wanted it to be; more often it merely meant “moving to a locale blessed with slightly less urgent evidence of climate change.”

This, though, isn’t a hand-wringing chronicle of climate despair. Nor is it a can-do narrative buoyed by inspirational hash tags and techno-optimistic hopes. Martin’s book is at once more grounded and more surprising. She braids together strands of various histories — a personal one, along with the larger story of humans and fire — all set against the background of the summer and fall of 2020, when both the pandemic and wildfires were raging.