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• From the Ashes of the OldA New Deal for Wildland Firefighters
• Daniel Boguslaw (bio)

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The Texas Canyon Hotshot crew fights a fire July 2016. (David McNew/AFP via Getty Images)

[End Page 102]

Last summer, the fires creeping up from Salem, Oregon, and the base of the Cascades colored Portland’s skies a sickly red. While it’s extremely difficult for an urban metropolis to burn, the satellite images of smoke spreading out over the Pacific made it seem as though cataclysm wasn’t far off. In the fall, after what might have been the worst fire season ever recorded in the western United States, the smoke subsided, but the sense of unease remained.

In the summers of 2017 and 2018, I lived in Portland while waiting for the call to pack up and head to my fire crew’s dispatch in the Columbia River Gorge. I worked on a twenty-person handcrew, chainsawing snags in the pine stands of eastern Oregon and driving across barren straits of sage scrub in Montana’s wilderness. Once, atop granite cliffs in Idaho, we scouted for spot fires smoldering out between the juniper and cattle carcasses, tongues of dry lightning flickering above the hills.

During sixteen-hour shifts in the smoke, under the roar of helicopters, a new reality takes shape, divorced from the familiarities of a world not yet ablaze. After just a few days, your sense of smell is cut in half, and soon it almost completely disappears. During long truck rides and in thickets of poison oak, civilization faded. The people I worked with were the only constant in an ever-changing natural landscape. On the crew, we developed a fragile but potent solidarity.

We were one part of a privatized and fractured workforce mobilized each summer then abandoned in the winter. Across California and the Pacific Northwest, tens of thousands of workers battle fire without labor protections or benefits, for wages that fluctuate wildly between state minimums and more than $20 an hour for the veteran U.S. Forest Service employee or private crew boss. Between private contractors, state agencies, and federal bureaus, there are vast discrepancies in training and efficacy.

As the United States slips closer to ecological collapse, the organization of America’s wildland labor force must be radically overhauled if there is to be any hope in combating our climate emergency. A massive job [End Page 103] mobilization expanding the public workforce, reversing the trend of privatization, securing a living wage for tens of thousands of firefighters, and multiplying year-round positions that address the increasingly complex factors that lead to megafires is the best hope we have to confront the fire-storm that threatens to engulf the West Coast.

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In 2020, more than 58,250 wildfires burned some 10.3 million acres across the United States. California was hammered by the fires, as were Colorado, Arizona, and the Pacific Northwest. At a high-profile September meeting with President Donald Trump, California Governor Gavin Newsom blamed climate change for the crisis. Trump prescribed forest management. Media on both sides of the political spectrum began the usual onslaught of op-eds and news segments confirming their preferred causal mechanism.

The exact impact climate change has on wildfires is still not completely understood, but there is no doubt global warming plays a complex and increasingly severe role. Warming has accelerated the creep of invasive flora across California’s deserts, which dry out into an alien mat that serves as a novel fuel source in an ancient and once predictable ecosystem. Carbon emissions have not only accelerated warming but also changed wind patterns, the predictability of snow melt, and soil erosion—all of which affect wildfires. Over the past fifty years, data from the Congressional Research Service shows that the biggest burn years by acreage were 2006, 2007, 2012, 2015, 2017, and now 2020.

To claim that the catastrophic fires are solely the result of climate change, however, misses the forest for the trees. As Mike Davis details in his 1995 essay “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” catastrophic wildfires are intimately tied to development in natural fire areas. For...

中文翻译：

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从旧的灰烬：荒地消防员的新政

代替摘要，这里是内容的简要摘录：

• 从旧的灰烬中走出荒地消防员的新政
• 丹尼尔·布格斯劳（生物）

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得克萨斯州峡谷热门射击队在2016年7月扑灭大火。（David McNew /法新社，盖蒂图片社）

[第102页]

去年夏天，俄勒冈州塞勒姆（Salem）的大火蔓延，喀斯喀特山脉（Cascades）的底部使波特兰的天空染上了病态的红色。尽管都市大都市很难燃烧，但散布在太平洋上的烟雾的卫星图像使灾变似乎不远了。在秋天，可能是美国西部有史以来最严重的火灾季节之后，烟雾消退了，但仍然感到不安。

在2017年和2018年夏天，我住在波特兰，一边等待电话收拾电话，然后前往消防员在哥伦比亚河峡谷的派遣。我用了二十个人的螺丝刀工作，在俄勒冈州东部的松树林中锯断了锯齿，然后在蒙大拿州的荒野中穿越了鼠尾草的贫瘠海峡。有一次，我们在爱达荷州的花岗岩悬崖顶上搜寻，发现uni火在杜松和牛的尸体之间冒出，干燥的闪电的舌头在山上闪烁。

在直升飞机的轰鸣声中，烟气转变了16个小时，一个新的现实成形了，这与一个尚未燃起的世界的熟悉情况相去甚远。短短几天后，您的嗅觉被减半，很快它几乎完全消失了。在长时间的卡车旅行中以及在毒木丛中，文明逐渐消退。我与之共事的人是不断变化的自然景观中唯一不变的人。在机组人员上，我们建立了脆弱但强大的团结精神。

我们是每年夏天动员起来并在冬天被抛弃的私有化且支离破碎的劳动力的一分子。在加利福尼亚州和西北太平洋地区，成千上万的工人在没有劳工保护或福利的情况下进行大火，其薪水在各州的最低工资标准之间浮动，而资深的美国森林服务局雇员或私人船东的工资每小时超过20美元。在私人承包商，州机构和联邦局之间，培训和功效之间存在巨大差异。

随着美国越来越接近生态崩溃的边缘，如果要在应对我们的气候紧急情况方面有任何希望，就必须彻底改革美国的野地劳动力组织。最好的工作是[End Page 103]，动员起来扩大公共劳动力，扭转私有化的趋势，确保成千上万名消防员的生活工资，并增添常年职位以应对导致大火的日益复杂的因素是最好的希望我们必须面对可能席卷西海岸的大火。

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到2020年，全美国超过58,250场野火燃烧了约1,030万英亩。加州，科罗拉多州，亚利桑那州和西北太平洋地区也遭受了大火。在9月与唐纳德·特朗普（Donald Trump）总统举行的备受瞩目的会议上，加利福尼亚州州长加文·纽瑟姆（Gavin Newsom）将气候变化归咎于这场危机。特朗普规定了森林管理。政治两面的媒体开始对行动和新闻片段进行平常的猛烈攻击，证实了他们偏爱的因果机制。

气候变化对野火的确切影响仍未完全了解，但毫无疑问，全球变暖在其中起着越来越复杂的作用。气候变暖加速了加利福尼亚沙漠中入侵性植物的蔓延，后者逐渐变干成异质的垫子，在古老且曾经可预测的生态系统中充当了新型燃料的来源。碳排放不仅加速了变暖，而且改变了风型，融雪的可预测性和土壤侵蚀，所有这些都会影响野火。在过去的五十年中，美国国会研究服务局的数据显示，按面积计算，最大的烧伤年份是2006年，2007年，2012年，2015年，2017年以及现在的2020年。

断言灾难性大火仅仅是气候变化的结果，但是却错过了森林。正如迈克·戴维斯（Mike Davis）在其1995年的论文“让马里布燃烧的情况”中所详述的那样，灾难性的野火与自然火区的发展密切相关。为了...