In The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History, Manjula Martin offers her mesmerizing, beautifully written account of living through and trying to come to terms with the harrowing impacts of the climate crisis.
Her memoir recounts the 2020 wildfires that surrounded her Northern California hillside home under the redwoods, causing her and her partner, Max, to evacuate. Martin’s writing is so immersive that readers will feel the stress of living through “two months of near nonstop emergency mindset,” as she scrolls fire maps, listens for warning sirens and sleeps with her phone, keys and go bag by her side.
In 2017, Martin and Max moved from San Francisco to a Sonoma County neighborhood of former vacation cabins that was “by all accounts, a fire trap.” But the land nurtured her in illness when a routine removal of a birth control device caused an abscess to form, resulting in astonishing, ongoing pain that eventually necessitated a hysterectomy. The land became a refuge that “helped me to heal to whatever extent I could be considered healed”—and she desperately fears losing this place.
Martin is uniquely positioned to write this book. She was born in Santa Cruz in the mid-1970s in a trailer next to a half-built geodesic dome nestled under the redwoods. Her parents were part of a community called the Land, devoted to yoga and the teachings of an Indian monk. She probes the many thorny issues of California’s land history and conservation efforts, especially those tied to colonialism, capitalism and white male supremacy. Lacing the memoir with a well-researched history of fires in the region, she shows again and again how colonizers and settlers lit the match and stoked the flames.
In the spirit of Rebecca Solnit and Terry Tempest Williams, Martin’s knowledge of nature and the land illuminate every page. With The Last Fire Season, she joins the ranks of esteemed, provocative nature writers who use their own experiences to examine our past and our future. She concludes, “To inhabit the new shape of these cycles of damage and renewal would require new ways of being. . . . [A] constant state of reckoning with the beauty and pain of what we had done to our home.”
