THE LAST FIRE SEASON: A Personal and Pyronatural History, by Manjula Martin

Even after evacuating her home in Sonoma County, Calif., as wildfires burned nearby, Manjula Martin reflected on her stubborn longing to exempt herself from what was happening.

“I wanted to continue to be an exception to the consequences of climate change,” she writes in “The Last Fire Season,” her powerful account of the dry lightning storms of 2020, which ignited an increasingly parched landscape throughout much of Northern California. After all, being white and middle-class had long bestowed on her some undeniable advantages. She had also been clinging to the meritocratic fantasy — even if she didn’t quite articulate it to herself — that her smarts would save her.

“But my desire to remain an observer of history instead of its victim was banal,” Martin admits. “It was the same desire everyone had.”

Martin, formerly the managing editor of the literary magazine Zoetrope, is the editor of a book about how writers make a living and the co-author, with her horticulturalist father, of a guide to growing fruit trees. “The Last Fire Season” includes a moving record of her life as well as a repudiation of all kinds of exceptionalism, not just her own or her country’s. “Humans are not the main characters in the great drama of Earth,” she notes — an inconvenient truth that the extreme weather effects of climate change have made painfully clear. Her book joins a number of others published over the last few years about catastrophic wildfires.

“The idea of fire being a season was also an expression of hope, or perhaps wishful thinking,” Martin writes. “If fire was a season, that meant it was temporary, and at some point it would go away.” So she chose a title for her book that suggests there is no real reprieve in sight. Instead of containing discussions to “fire season,” the people she knew had started to talk about “living with fire.” Even picking up and leaving wasn’t the escape some people wanted it to be; more often it merely meant “moving to a locale blessed with slightly less urgent evidence of climate change.”

This, though, isn’t a hand-wringing chronicle of climate despair. Nor is it a can-do narrative buoyed by inspirational hash tags and techno-optimistic hopes. Martin’s book is at once more grounded and more surprising. She braids together strands of various histories — a personal one, along with the larger story of humans and fire — all set against the background of the summer and fall of 2020, when both the pandemic and wildfires were raging.

Covid protocols told people to spend time outdoors; wildfire smoke protocols instructed them to stay inside. Martin and her partner, Max, eventually decided to return to their home in the middle of a redwood forest. Max, she recalls, traveled to Nevada to canvass “for the nonfascist candidate in the upcoming presidential election.” Martin tended the garden in an N95 mask.

She also tended the garden while she was in pain. A couple of years before, when her doctor tried to remove an IUD that was causing complications, a piece of the device had embedded itself in Martin’s uterine wall. Many specialists and procedures later (her description of having to tug on a wirelike contraption known as a “cutting seton” is so vividly described I felt faint even while sitting down), she was finally healing. To a point, that is: “My scars went away but my pain never did.”

Each specialist seemed intent on isolating part of her body “without looking at the whole picture, which incidentally led to further injury.” The experts she was told to trust had failed her. When the lightning fires arrived, she had already been experiencing “a long season of not trusting human interventions into biology.”

Yet Martin also bristles at the notion of pristine organic matter that can only be harmed by interventions. “The problem with the idea of untouched nature is that nothing ever is,” she writes. Nearly everything in this book she depicts as more complicated than simple binaries allow. (Except, that is, for the 2020 presidential election; when writing about politics she shelves her lyricism and deploys the word “fascist” a lot).

Fire, for instance, is destructive; but it can be generative, too. Martin describes Indigenous fire practices and “intentional, managed, low-intensity burns set by humans” that can help prevent harmful wildfires by depriving them of fuel. “An intervention was not inherently good or bad; it was part of a dialogue,” she explains. “It mattered how the relationship was structured, not just that there was one.”

The paradox of fire is just one of a number she explores in the book. She works through her own contradictory experiences and confusions. Pain can signal that something is acutely wrong in the body, but her chronic pain had long ago “stopped delivering new information.” She writes scathingly about how settler colonialists in the Americas laid claim to land that wasn’t theirs, but she concedes that the impulse isn’t so alien, even to her. “I felt not merely refreshed, I felt powerful,” she notices while hiking in the Sierra. Overwhelmed by the grandeur of what she sees, “the colonizer inside me wanted dibs on the lake.”

But the urge to dominate is what fueled the climate crisis in the first place. “Fire was man’s perceived power and man’s great fear,” Martin says, later quoting the scholar Donna Haraway, who observed that the devastation of climate change has generally provoked two kinds of responses: utter despair (“game over”) or an abiding faith that “technofixes” can save us. Between these two poles lies a recognition that the relationship between humans and the land is irrevocably tangled and reciprocal, along with a sense of humility when it comes to the world and our place in it. Haraway calls this “staying with the trouble.” Martin writes about an “ongoing practice of care.”

She admits how difficult it has been for her to accept what’s needed: “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.”

The change required is profound; the range of this book coaxes us to confront our own failures of imagination. “Anything that ever happened to anyone had been unimaginable at one time, until it happened.”

THE LAST FIRE SEASON: A Personal and Pyronatural History | By Manjula Martin | Pantheon | 327 pp. | $29