Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0004-4430-7597

Date Available

12-19-2027

Year of Publication

2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College

Arts and Sciences

Department/School/Program

Sociology

Faculty

Loka Ashwood

Faculty

Robyn Lewis Brown

Abstract

Wildland firefighters are a workforce and culture caught in between divergent ideologies of governance, safety, and labor. Their federal ranks are a force dedicated at once to the seemingly conservative priority of public safety, as well as to conservation efforts commonly coded as liberal. Sometimes termed public servants or first responders by the public, they are just as often described (sometimes by their own members and leadership) as unskilled “knuckle draggers,” paid to pound dirt, keep their heads down, and dig. These are images commonly found in rural caricatures, especially among working class men, who make up the majority of the field. The flashier moments of wildland firefighting are celebrated and admired by the public. Meanwhile, the mundane, preventative, forest-hidden duties of ecological maintenance and restoration in our nation’s wilderness commons, where visitors consume nature and where the bureaucratic state partners with capital to commodify forest “products,” are ignored, defunded, or worse, derided as marginal work to be done by marginal (and disposable) people. Their work, a societal form of reproductive labor, is devalued in a system of social organization bent toward profit and growth for growth’s sake. Beyond the fireline, firefighters struggle to establish and maintain intimate ties with their partners and families, limiting relational possibilities and creating obstacles to the wider spectrum of social reproduction necessary to lifemaking.

This dissertation is grounded in data collected through a mixed method qualitative approach including ethnographic data from the 2024 fire season, as well as 34 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with wildland firefighters and fire partners. Drawing on classical sociological theories of Weber and Marx, as well as anarchist and ecofeminist theories, I argue that current approaches to social ecological organization not only facilitate the wildfire crisis but also produce what I term social ecological alienation and degradation of the intimate ecologies of social reproduction. The findings of this dissertation offer insight into the theoretical and practical connections between labor, life-making, gender roles, and ecological politics, arguing that top-down, bureaucratic solutions, models extractive of humans and nature, and approaches inattentive to gendered relations of care and intimate social ecologies will continue to fail. I offer the firearchy, a system for human-fire relations that engages fire as a central leader and partner rather than a disaster to suppress, as an alternative pathway already charted by firefighters and partners themselves. Interlaced with critique, my findings urge on a collective network of embodied, embedded strategies attentive to specificities of place, labor, and social reproduction ranging from the interpersonal to the macrological.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2025.610

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Available for download on Sunday, December 19, 2027

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