Jan 15, 2025
5. JANUARY 17, 2026 at 3 PM ET. Jordan Thomas, on his debut book, When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World.
Jordan Thomas is a climate-change ethnographer and narrative nonfiction author with a background in critical social theory. He previously served as a wildland firefighter on the Los Padres Hotshot crew. His public-facing work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Review of Books, The Drift, and elsewhere. His debut book, When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World, traces the historical, ecological, and sociological factors fueling California’s increasingly catastrophic wildfires, woven through the story of one brutal fire season on a hotshot crew.
In his academic research, Thomas explores how individuals and institutions understand and respond to unprecedented environmental conditions, particularly wildfires in California. His work employs multi-sited, multi-scalar ethnographic methods and a phenomenological approach to climate change, examining how human bodies, senses, and emotional registers interact with rapidly changing environmental systems. Thomas holds graduate degrees from the University of Cambridge and Durham University as a Marshall Scholar. He is currently a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he lives.
