The selection for the 2026 Whittier Reads is When It All Burns, by Jordan Thomas.
Overview
A gripping firsthand account of a record-setting fire season, from a cultural anthropologist who spent a year working as a hotshot firefighter, exploring the history and future of fire in America.
Eighteen of California’s largest wildfires on record have burned in the past two decades. Scientists recently invented the term “megafire” to describe wildfires that behave in ways that would have been nearly impossible just a generation ago, burning through winter, exploding in the night, and devastating landscapes historically impervious to incendiary destruction.
In When It All Burns, wildland firefighter and anthropologist Jordan Thomas recounts a single, brutal six-month fire season with the Los Padres Hotshots—the special forces of America’s firefighters. Being a hotshot is among the most difficult jobs on earth. Thomas viscerally renders his crew’s attempts to battle flames that are often too destructive to contain. He uncovers the hidden cultural history of megafires, revealing how humanity’s symbiotic relationship with wildfire became a war—and what can be done to change it back.
Thomas weaves ecology and the history of Indigenous peoples' oppression, federal forestry, and the growth of the fire industrial complex into a riveting narrative about a new phase in the climate crisis. It's an immersive story of community in the most perilous of circumstances, told with humor, humility, and affection.—inside the book jacket
Copies of When It All Burns are available for checkout at both Libraries. Books will be available for purchase at both libraries starting March 1.
About the Author
Jordan Thomas is a climate-change ethnographer and narrative nonfiction author with a background in critical social theory. He previously served as a wildland firefighter on the Los Padres Hotshot crew. His public-facing work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Review of Books, The Drift, and elsewhere. His debut book, When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World, traces the historical, ecological, and sociological factors fueling California’s increasingly catastrophic wildfires, woven through the story of one brutal fire season on a hotshot crew.
In his academic research, Thomas explores how individuals and institutions understand and respond to unprecedented environmental conditions, particularly wildfires in California. His work employs multi-sited, multi-scalar ethnographic methods and a phenomenological approach to climate change, examining how human bodies, senses, and emotional registers interact with rapidly changing environmental systems. Thomas holds graduate degrees from the University of Cambridge and Durham University as a Marshall Scholar. He is currently a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He lives in Boston.
Programs
- Fire Safety Storytime + Touch a Truck (Children Ages 4+) - Branch @ 3:30pm - Free