MY STORY

In 2023, standing on the porch of my cabin in the northern Jemez Mountains of New Mexico, surrounded by dense forest, I watched smoke billow from the Black Feather Fire a few short miles away and waited for the evacuation alert. I had lived with fire since moving to Santa Fe in 2003. I endured days of darkened skies when ash fell from the sky and we sealed up our home from smoke from the 2011 Las Conchas Fire and again in 2022 with the Hermit’s Peak-Calf Canyon fire. I walked through burn scars while hiking in the Sangre de Cristo and Jemez Mountains. But in that moment at my cabin standing in dense, overgrown woods, I felt the fear, the helplessness, and the recognition that this was no longer a distant story. It was the landscape I live in, and to live here well, I needed to understand fire.

Cultures of Fire highlights the work to restore our relationship with fire, and also follows the emotional journey of how people, myself included, relate to fire. In modern times, most people’s connection to wildfire begins and ends with fear. News coverage shapes this: footage of flames, evacuation orders, scorched hillsides. Fear is a reasonable response to fire as most people currently encounter it—sudden, uncontrollable, seemingly catastrophic.

But fire was always part of these landscapes. For centuries, Indigenous communities worked with it deliberately. Mid-elevation ponderosa pine forests evolved with fire returning every five to twenty years—not as an intruder, but as a shaping force that kept forests open and rich with wildflower, grasses, and biodiversity. The fear we feel today is at least partly a consequence of the suppression era, which removed fire from the land, allowed fuels to accumulate, setting the stage for the catastrophic burns we now dread.

The southern Jemez gives that emotional arc a destination. It is what a restored relationship with fire looks like on the ground: a landscape where the work has been done, where fires stay small, where the forest is resilient. That place exists. You can walk into it. The question the northern Jemez poses—and that the whole project holds open—is whether the work can reach more of the landscape before the next mega-fire arrives.

Cultures of Fire aims to carry audiences through this arc: from fear and grief—which are legitimate and honored—toward engagement, and then toward the possibility of a different relationship with fire. Not the impossible goal of keeping fire away, but the harder and more hopeful work of learning to live with it well.