The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History
“Martin’s writing is ominous yet profoundly beautiful . . .”
The Last Fire Season is set in California’s 2020 megafires, where forests burned to ash, communities disappeared in blazes, and human and non-human lives were incinerated in a year harrowed by the Covid pandemic. Those fires were “a matter of odds, earth science at work. But they seemed to behave like something out of myth.”
So starts Manjula Martin’s weaving of memoir with the past and future history of humans and fire. Certain of destruction, Martin and her husband flee their house alongside a redwood forest. Yet Martin can’t outrun another damaged landscape, that of her body, which was forever altered by the unlikely failure of a common birth control device that led to infections, the removal of her reproductive organs, and chronic pain.
“The history of the world was so often the history of men not knowing how to respond to beauty,” writes Martin. California’s forests, long managed for profit or the purity of wilderness, were once “a gardened landscape” overseen by Indigenous people who used “good fire” (regular, moderate, and controlled burns) and other techniques that promoted greater biodiversity but fewer and more sparsely placed trees, which helped prevent massive fires. California’s present forests, all too often filled with trees, flammable deadwood, and invasive plants are “wild because it was neglected: a garden left to ruin.”
Martin’s geography is California, but she covers a wide ground of topics, including the emotional and physical chaos of megafires, the transformative power of grief, the fire poppies and other species that signal the rebirth of burned landscapes (“Fire had laid bare the contours of the landscape until there was nothing left but the land itself: nothing left, everything possible.”), the intricate role fire has played in human evolution, and how tending her garden nurtured a nuanced perspective of body and landscape (“The slow, repeating act of being in direct physical relationship to a piece of land was beginning—slowly, repeatedly—to teach me to understand the physical world in terms beyond well or unwell, fertile or sterile, whole or broken.”) among many other topics.
Martin’s writing is ominous yet profoundly beautiful, as when she says, “Weeks of heat and smoke had turned the flowers and trees into memories.” Yet Martin is a problematic narrator to follow in this overly long, complicated book.
Even prior to 2020, Martin was a “game-over person” who obsessively followed disasters, rejected spirituality and seemingly any belief system not dominated by dogmatic left-wing politics, enjoyed “blockbuster disaster movies in which comets, geology, disease, or zombies ran amok and brought out the inevitable conclusion to human existence” and “felt at home in these nightmarish, if improbable scenarios.” Often her reflections are less a conversation with a reader than an argument with herself, one she’s determined to win, replete with an insider’s code of progressive jargon, most often “settler colonialism,” a term that neatly evades that whether human or non-human, sooner or later, every newcomer become native and enmeshed in the landscape called home.
Martin’s observations are often self-righteous and just as often self-protective. She readily calls out her practice of creating alters as appropriation of the Day of the Dead and other aspects of Latin American cultures, an accusation she reminds readers was also made against poet Gary Snyder’s engagement with Indigenous and Asian philosophies, as if rectifying her quoting him in a letter to family.
Yet without irony or cultural sensitivity, she blithely describes discussing the Torah with her stoned, half-Jewish husband as being “the ideal way to receive spiritual teachings: someone else read the big old boring book and then, a little bit buzzed and a lot reinterpreted, related it back to me with a socialist-environmentalist, liberation slant.”
Similarly, she recounts participating in the Jewish High Holy Days without seeming to realize how deeply the prayers and rituals are rooted less in blame than in restorative actions. When reminded that she chose the contraceptive device that damaged her greatly, and that other options were available, she perceives “an underlying morality that made me bristle” from women “whose tastes trended toward turquoise jewelry and Tibetan prayer flags.”
Similarly, Martin rebels when told by therapists that while suffering is inevitable, she can nonetheless change the story she tells herself about her pain. Yet by book’s end, Martin journeys from an understandable fear of fire to an appreciation of its power and acceptance of its place in the world, succumbing at last to the ruthless necessity of hope. Arguably The Last Fire Season’s most engaging sections are Martin’s “future memories,” when post-2020, she visits or participates in restoration practices that will hopefully allow forests and the human communities near them to better survive the next fire.
“The truth was that my past life without fire had been exceptional,” Martin writes. “I happened to be born and live at a moment in which fire, while never truly gone, had been by force, law, and denial pushed—suppressed—to the margins of human experience. But it belonged here, it had always been here, underground somewhere, and anyway, it would be back soon.”
Fire is our future, as it has been our past. We will have to learn to live with it well.