Editor’s note: Daniel Godwin is a longtime collaborator with FLN and TREX. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author. They do not reflect the official policy or position of any agency, organization, or employer.
Fire Country
Planes: Fire and Rescue
Firestorm
Always
The Lost Bus
Those Who Wish Me Dead
Various romance novels
There is no shortage of fiction valorizing wildland firefighters and dramatizing wildfires.[1] We are awash in stories about how things are, how things must be: fires put out by heroes, towns saved, the rightful order maintained.
In this way, wildfire fiction is inherently conservative. Not in a political sense, although some of it certainly is, but in the sense that it imagines no future but the present and assumes the present is both positive and continually maintainable. The past and present are the same and there is no other option. Wildfires will always need fighting, and we must maintain the vast systems of firefighting to support the heroic efforts to fight them small and large.
Stories have a way of coming true, though. They teach us what normal looks like and reinforce the other stories we learn. These stories reify fire suppression and make it into the natural order.
Gleasonian Exegesis
But what if it wasn’t so? Paul Gleason’s great commission was that we become students of fire. This is generally interpreted narrowly to mean that we should both continue our fire education and learn experientially from fire through keen observation and reflection. All of which is good! But it also misses many critical skills that students should have. Being a student is a creative process, too. Students should be able to critically interrogate the subject of their studies. They should be able to imagine different scenarios and evaluate them.
Which brings me to the point of this essay: we need to tell more and better stories about beneficial fire. I recognize that Indigenous peoples have many beautiful stories about fire. Those are not the stories I am talking about.
The Godwin Test
You may have heard of the Bechdel Test.[2] Briefly summarized, it asks whether in a particular piece of media, two named women talk to each other about something other than men (there are variations, such as requiring that the conversation be relevant to the plot.)
In my hubris, I propose the Godwin Test (unrelated to Godwin’s Law):
- In a work of adult fiction
- Do two or more named characters
- Conduct a prescribed fire
- For beneficial purposes
I can think of one, the dystopian Tropic of Kansas (2017).
If you know of another, please comment.
If we can’t pass that basic test, how can we create stories about fire futures we want, or even don’t want?
Punk’s Not Dead
I want to take a brief diversion to talk about the various literary subgenres that have spun off of cyberpunk. While perhaps most popularized by William Gibson’s Neuromancer, cyberpunk is defined by high tech, seedy, gritty futures, full of hackers, corporate espionage, and no hope. While steampunk might be the most famous spin off from cyberpunk, biopunk, dieselpunk, and even elfpunk have their own thriving communities.
Two of the newest subgenres out of this multitude are solarpunk and the closely related hopepunk. These subgenres explicitly reject climate doomerism and embrace radical hope. They ask, “what if we got it right? How would we get there?”
Solarpunk gives us a model for thinking about fire futures. We are not destined for a constant confrontational battle against the chaotic forces of fire. Maybe there’s no need for battle, and no chaos after all.
I think it’s crucial that we write hopeful, just, kind stories about the future of fire. We need to be creative students of fire and create the futures we want. If we won’t tell these stories, we know what stories will be told – and the futures they will bring.
[1] I purposefully excluded Only The Brave from this list. While imperfect, I feel that it is a good faith effort to interpret the event and could provide value for processing the tragedy.
[2] One variation of the Bechdel Test that I propose is whether two women in overhead roles in Operations discuss something relevant to the fire. This is not to minimize the other ICS sections, but to highlight how few women are in operational overhead positions. This same test can be applied for other minoritized groups in fire.
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