Cultures of Fire Suppression: An ethnographic analysis of socio-ecological interactions on California firefighting crews

Wildfires are growing more destructive around the world. California exemplifies this trend. Seventeen of the state’s largest recorded fires have burned since 2000; eleven since 2016; five in 2020, and three in 2021. The general global drivers of this increasingly extreme fire behavior can also be traced through California, where histories and cultures of fire suppression intersect with colonialism, corporate forest governance, and climate change to produce the industrial-scale suppression operations that meet megafires in the present. By conducting six months of ethnographic fieldwork on a “hotshot” crew, an elite branch of wildland firefighters who operate on the most extreme edges of the largest wildfires, I documented the socio-environmental interactions that occur in spaces of unprecedented fire behavior. The culture of wildland firefighting, I argue, can provide insight into the broader social imperative to suppress wildfires, as well as the current struggle to contain the megafires that have grown in their place.