Our Burning Era: Reading George Stewart’s Fire in Fire Season

My first trip to Chico, California, coincided by chance with the eruption of the Camp Fire, which grew at horrific proportions to destroy the town of Paradise, just up the ridge from Chico. I had just begun dating my wife, and went in order to visit her for the first time in her hometown. Driving in through the almond orchards, I saw flames on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada, and once at my wife’s house I was shortly introduced to family friends who had within hours lost nearly everything they owned and had come by for comfort and clothing donations.

One of our first official dates had us strolling Bidwell Park beneath a deep orange sky, ash falling around us thick as snow. Just a few years later, again in Chico and again under a nearly crimson sky, I watched my computer screen in horror as wide swathes of my hometown of Talent, Oregon, and the surrounding area—including my grandmother’s house—were destroyed by the Alameda Fire.

All of us living in Northern California, Southern Oregon, and indeed much of the West Coast, feel a sense of loss and instability, and fear always creeps about in the summers, especially when fire rears its head. When the Park Fire, still burning as I write, began in Upper Bidwell Park, just miles from my house, the tension and anxiety in the air were palpable. Though most of us in Chico were largely unaffected by the Park Fire’s explosive growth to 425,000 acres, the sight of smoke plumes alone can bring tears or panic attacks. Many of us feel our throats clench when discussing the destruction of recent years. We find ourselves confronted with the hostility of the elements the extent of which we never dreamed. Fire is nearly a constant in our lives, and we must learn to live with it and to understand it, to consider how we can keep ourselves safe and sane and how we can effectively manage this most destructive of elements.

George Stewart’s novel Fire, originally published in 1948 and recently rereleased by NYRB, tells the story of a wildfire in the northern Sierra Nevada mountains, in an area described as very close to where so much recent devastation has occurred. It is a masterfully crafted narrative, one that provides an intimate look at ecological destruction and the human efforts to prevent it. Rangers and lookouts, deer and rabbits, climate systems and pinecones—all play a part in the fire’s unfolding over eleven days. Yet the book is as much of interest for what it does not contain as for what it does, and both in depicting wildfire and revealing the blind spots of its time, it offers a unique opportunity to reflect on how our relationship to fire has and has not changed over the last seventy-some years.

The novel is largely concerned with the presence of forest fires as an ecological enemy, and warfare is a prevalent metaphor. From its very beginnings, the fire is described as a hostile entity, an army or beast ready to wage war against the forests and the men and women who manage them. As it grows in intensity from a dangerous, sleeping child to a monster, legions of firefighters are called to combat it. Small platoons of infantry rush in, are thrown back. Parachuters jump and join the ranks. Baggage trains and reinforcements arrive. Camps are built, machines acquired, leaders rendered haggard and sleepless.

It is a brilliantly choreographed spectacle, and its real-world equivalent has only increased in complexity and sophistication since the novel was written. And yet neither in the book nor in reality is this spectacle one of human triumph, but one of death and violence. Two men die fighting the book’s Spitcat Fire, and the destruction of the forest is depicted as a tragedy. For one ranger, Bart—an old hand and a great lover of the landscape being torched—it is excruciating. The forest, and one glen in particular, is for Bart a place suggestive of the grandest possibilities of love and cosmic harmony, and its destruction is likened in his thoughts to the mutilation of a young and beautiful woman.

Even if they are not as tied to the land as Bart, nearly every character involved with the fire sees it as a vile, murderous creature, and the trauma of previous fires and anxieties over the destructive possibilities of the season hang over all. Even before the Spitcat begins, the heat frays nerves and puts everyone on edge. Such anxieties will be familiar to many modern readers, and yet in the novel they are almost entirely limited to forestry personnel, with the exception of a few rural citizens who ultimately have little to fear.

Compare this to the collective trauma hanging over the average residents near the Sierra Nevada today, and the fears expressed by the book’s characters seem almost laughable. Yes, a dispatcher will lose some sleep, but no evacuation orders are given, no major cities rise to find smoke blotting out the dawn, and not a single building is destroyed. The size and speed of the fire, too, is insignificant compared to modern fires, and though the tragedy and fear involved with wildfire are well-displayed within these limited spheres, one cannot help but feel a chasm between the world depicted and our own.

That chasm is perhaps greatest in Stewart’s understanding, and thus his depiction, of planetary climate and its relationship to wildfires. To be clear, it is not fair to say that Stewart’s novel takes no account of the climatological elements that determine how and when fire appears. That these elements are an important part of the work is one of its most compelling features, and one of the most terrifying aspects of fire as Stewart depicts it. The moisture in a tree’s roots attract lightening, kindling the blaze, which is then fanned by air cooled over the Berring straight flowing down the mountain ridges.

The vast web of climatological forces flows and affects not merely the human and vegetal spheres, but the whole animal world. The book deserves praise for depicting such interconnectedness and for concretizing the effects of climate disasters, which are so often given as numerical abstractions. As Emma Rothschild puts it in her introduction to the new edition, “Fire, by contrast to these abstractions, is a profound work about the meaning of displacement and loss.”And yet humanity is largely passive in relation to these elemental networks, for Stewart could not have understood the human capacity to influence climate systems. He at times plays with ideas of man-made weather and makes the point that any local decisions of such weather manipulation would require a near-infinite knowledge of possible consequences, but this is the closest he can come to modern day concerns about human climate impact.

Today, such concerns are at the center of discussions around wildfire in California and elsewhere. A 2023 meta-study, for instance, has shown that one of the biggest factors increasing the size and severity of California wildfires is the increase in average yearly temperature as well as the increase in atmospheric vapor pressure deficit—that is, the amount of moisture in the air relative to how much moisture it can contain. When the vapor pressure deficit increases, the air sucks moisture out of plant matter, and this combined with increased temperatures leads to dangerously fire-prone conditions. As the study also shows, climate change fueled by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions is a prime culprit for the increased prevalence of such conditions in California over recent decades. Humanity is thus much more deeply enmeshed and active in climate systems than Stewart knew, and the smallness of his characters in relation to the overwhelming, seemingly hostile elements belies their role in shaping the climate.

In terms of forest management, too, the world of Fire is different from our own, with the book’s rangers concerned almost exclusively with complete fire suppression. The characters do display some differences in management philosophy, especially in the dichotomy between the ranger Bart and his supervisor, simply called “Super.” Bart loves the land and wants to protect it, almost as if it were his child, and he is thus reluctant to see it logged. The Super, on the other hand, views the forest primarily in economic terms, explicitly thinking of it as a “farm.” While we might be inclined to see Bart’s attitude as the more likely to lead to proper care for the land, he borders on sentimentality and is reluctant to thin trees that have grown thick enough to create danger. The Super, though he is cold in his views, is also more practical in certain ways and aims to use logging both as financial gain and for fire prevention.

What both views have in common, however, is that they view fire suppression as the clear-cut goal of forest management and firefighting. It is simply taken for granted, to the point that the narrator prophesies successful total suppression by “‘wet-water,’ baby cats, infra-red cameras from the scout planes, ‘man-made rain,’ chemical bombs with proximity fuses.” Such improvements in scientific forestry management will eventually usher in an age where fires are no longer permitted, where our stewardship of the forest will be so absolute that we “will not let it burn.”

This is deeply ironic given that total-suppression policies are another of the major factors linked to increased wildfire severity in Northern California in recent decades. While fire-suppression practices did lead to a record low of California wildfire in the 1980s, every decade since has seen an increase in burn area and intensity, with eighteen of the largest fires on California’s record occurring after 2002. As the meta-study referenced above details, prior to the 1850s, small, regular fires were a common part of the California ecosystem, with the same areas burning roughly every five to twenty years.

This effectively cleared excess fuel loads without destroying large trees and so did not destroy the forest or produce brushland, as occurs with modern mega-fires. In the twentieth century, however, especially after WWII (when Fire takes place), it became standard practice to suppress all wildfire as much as possible, leading to the dangerous buildup of debris and the increased growth of non-fire-resistant species, issues that have been further aggravated by logging practices that removed the largest, most profitable trees, as well as animal grazing, construction, and so on.

This lack of depth in depicting or considering land management is a flaw in Fire, but it is a flaw that accurately reflects the times in which it was written, and indeed of much of the history of government fire management in the United States, which saw a radical transition from Indigenous fire practices to the suppression philosophy of the settlers. The practices of the original inhabitants of these areas was much more involved than is often recognized.

As detailed in a 2001 article in the Journal of Forestry (to cite but one example), Indigenous land management included frequent controlled burns for a variety of purposes, from clearing village space to preserving important tree species. Indeed, the degree to which any number of American landscapes, including the Sierra Nevada forests, are a result of purely “natural” processes is now in question, as it may be the case that these ecosystems were formed by the involved and sustainable practices of Indigenous populations. These conversations are relatively new, and it is only in recent years that local tribes and traditional ecological knowledge are being given a greater voice, if still a far too marginal one, in discussions of how to effectively manage American ecosystems.

It is significant, then, that the Indigenous voice is entirely absent from Stewart’s novel, and besides a few Native American firefighters mentioned briefly as “some remnant of a slaughtered tribe,” the notion that alternative methods of fire management might once have been employed in the Sierra Nevada is never mentioned, nor is the fact that those methods were suppressed by the new government, as with the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, which outlawed Indigenous burning practices, or a California forest ranger in 1918 suggesting “renegade whites and Indians” intentionally starting fires should be “shot.”

This is especially disappointing given the interludes of historical reflection that Stewart offers. Many chapters begin with surveys of classical literature or settler experiences with fire, but only from a European, colonial perspective. That California forests are now firmly in the hands of newcomers, and that it is they who must determine their future without concern for those “slaughtered tribes” is yet another of the assumptions in Fire.

At one point, imagining a future in which fire suppression has been achieved and fire remains only as a legend, Stewart constructs a myth of a “red wolf” that destroyed and killed, but is a thing of the past: “There the red wolf broke from the forest; the houses were like brush-wood before the heat; the men and women ran jabbering like chipmunks until flame swept around them and left the charred bodies to grin, hideous, in the morning sun. All this too was part of the price of the taking-over of the land.” Stewart is here more correct than perhaps he knew, for that take over in so many ways has been the cause of so much recent destruction. Yet it need not have been, for the land need not have been taken over as it was—by violence—nor did the ecological wisdom of the locals have to be lost and replaced by a self-defeating war against the flames.

That war is still raging. Californians now more than ever live in fear of the red wolf, which has ravished our ecosystems, destroyed our homes, and left charred bodies in its wake. The air is getting dryer, hotter, and summers bring heightened nerves and relived trauma. Our forces are the most mobile and best equipped in history; we raise armies the size and sophistication of which far surpass Stewart’s predictions of a technologized, fire-free future. And yet the fires destroy more and more of our forests and our communities. This has all been a consequence of our hubris, a hubris that began in those early colonies, and before, a mix of our ignorance and our pride. Where George Stewart saw an enemy encroaching on the beauty of an ecosystem, we must now see a symptom of our own mistakes.

Stewart’s novel allows us to see all of this more clearly in what it depicts, but also in what it omits. Fire displays the interconnectedness of our world, but cannot see into the depths of that interconnectedness as we now know it. The story depicts the trauma and violence of fire and laudably highlights the pain of animals in ecological devastation, but cannot imagine the extent it has now reached or understand the history of violence and displacement that has lead us to our burning era. And yet by thinking with Fire, by contemplating its emphases and its omissions, its beauties and its war, we can learn to see our own time more clearly, and the wisdom and healing that it lacks but needs so desperately.