Feeling Through Fire Part 3: Seeking Truth in an Emotional Blaze

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is part of a Mountain Journal series exploring our emotional relationship to wildfire through a collection of people who have varying relationships with the element. Through presenting a mosaic of experiences, we hope to explore the complexity of one of the most dominant forces on Earth. Part 3 in this series explores fire through the work of two journalists.  

“Unless we are willing to escape into sentimentality or fantasy, often the best we can do with catastrophes, even our own, is to find out exactly what happened and restore some of the missing parts.” – Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire

The first item in the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics—somewhat of a Ten Commandments for reporters—is “Seek Truth and Report It.” Written with the same candor as “Thou Shalt Not Steal,” it would be a simple enough directive were it not for that sticky second word. A modern reckoning has left media experts abandoning the understanding of truth as a monolith of consensus. Getting to the bottom of truth is a process of excavation. It requires bearing witness to stories, and disentangling the sprouts of truth on the surface to reveal the root to which everything attaches. Perhaps one of the best exercises in this is reporting on wildfire.

In the opening to their book, This is Wildfire: How to Protect Yourself, Your Home, and Your Community in the Age of Heat, Livingston-based multimedia journalist Nick Mott and coauthor Justin Angle revive in vivid language the progression of the Bridger Foothills Fire, a 2020 blaze ignited by a lightning strike near Bozeman. The wildfire burned more than 8,000 acres, claiming 68 structures, 30 of which were homes.

Mott and Angle write about the fire’s “mad dash” across the landscape, frantic evacuations and the shining silver shelters deployed by firefighters who couldn’t escape the flames in time. But they also explore another story of the Bridger Foothills, one of rebirth that emerged the following year in the form of vibrant green plants shooting up from nutrient-rich black soil and Tyvek siding on homes being rebuilt. Mott and Angle conclude this anecdote by asserting there’s are at least two major stories to every wildfire: destruction and regeneration. In the first few pages, they lay out their intention to reconcile these seemingly contradictory realities, unearthing a nuanced yet robust truth about wildfire.

“Journalism’s role in society is to bring light to stories exactly like this,” Mott said in an interview with Mountain Journal. “To hold power accountable, to show new ways forward, to educate and bring information on all kinds of things that folks otherwise wouldn’t have information about. And fire, I think, is something that's just really in need of that.”

As this series has explored in parts 1 and 2, wildfire is a phenomenon loaded with emotion. And somewhat contrary to traditional views that hold journalist’s feet to the fire of neutrality, Mott doesn’t believe in avoiding emotions in wildfire reporting. In fact, he says, they must play a role.

“I think emotion is impossible to separate out from humanity,” said Mott, who’s received a numerous awards for his reporting, including an Edward R. Murrow Award for his work as an executive producer, writer and editor on Fireline, a podcast exploring what wildfire means for the West. “Journalists can strive to be objective all they want, but I think what’s more important is being accurate but also transparent. I don't think objectivity is being devoid of emotion. It's important to recognize the very real impact that wildfire can have on humans.”

Emotion is among the sprouts of truth that appear on the surface of the story, but it also doesn’t represent the complete picture. Mott says strong emotions around fire often derive from loss and destruction, which are crucial to understanding the consequences of fire. But in a vacuum, emotional response to destruction as a singular source of understanding wildfire can actually be destructive itself. He points to America’s past mandates of complete suppression of all wildfire, and the modern understanding of how such policy has contributed to the exacerbation of current fires.

One University of Montana study from 2011 explored the media’s coverage of wildfire and how it impacts public perception, suggesting some news coverage plays a role in the limited understanding of fire. The study emphasized the extreme influence the media has on the public’s perception. “News media outlets framed the 1988 wildfires in Yellowstone National Park as destructive and detrimental, leading the public to believe that [they] destroyed a national treasure,” the study reads. “The truth is that fire is a natural part of the Yellowstone ecosystem—in the long-term the 1988 fires provided enhanced wildlife habitat and restored ecosystem health.” The study concluded that the dominant themes it identified in media coverage of wildfire “contribute to the framing of wildfire as a harmful event which needs to be suppressed or excluded.”

Journalists like Mott seek to honor the truth in the destruction wildfires can cause, while also guiding their audience from individual emotional understandings to that bigger picture—capital T Truth—one that includes a sustainable way to live with fire.

Standing next to Mott and other reporters at the forefront of this truth-seeking storytelling about wildfire is Amanda Monthei, a former wildland firefighter who has dedicated most of her writing career to building understanding around the complex world of wildfire. In most conversations about storytelling and wildfire, Monthei’s name comes up. She’s made a name for herself in this niche through applying her own experience as a wildland firefighter to her reporting, which often serves as a bridge between an insulated and technical industry and an emotionally charged yet underinformed outside world.

“That’s the root of what I do, really, is trying to empower people with information,” Monthei told Mountain Journal. “[I eventually hope] to reach this point where everyone has a baseline understanding of fire ecology and of fire management and how we've gotten to the point where we've gotten. And then maybe, ideally, we can work from that foundation to start talking about more nuanced topics, or some of the more complicated aspects, of how this plays out in specific ecosystems.”

It's hard to cast a big enough net to capture all the work Monthei is doing in this space: She’s the creator of the increasingly popular Life with Fire podcast; she contributes articles to various outlets, like the candid profiles of wildland firefighters she published in The Washington Post highlighting the many tolls the job takes; she consulted on a multimedia website project that provides interactive learning on intentional fire; she’s been recruited for speaking engagements; and she recently served as the public information officer for the Columbia Gorge Prescribed Fire Training Exchange in South Central Washington. Her writing about fire is at once clinical and personal, capturing the human element with compassion while also fulfilling her primary goal of educating her audience. And she believes it’s making a difference.

“I really feel like the last five, six years, journalists and writers, myself included but also dozens of other people, have done such a good job of building that baseline understanding with their audiences, whether that's a local newspaper’s audience or an audience for a podcast or an audience on their Instagram.”

Monthei often brings up the word “nuance.” For someone who spends all their time in the weeds of wildfire, learning from experts of various concentrations within the broader topic and often spending time camped out on active burns, it makes sense that the task of simplifying would be hard. But it’s also intentional. Wildfire is a unique character in each unique ecosystem’s story, but our common narratives don’t treat it that way. Instead of watching a dramatic news story about a massive burn in California and looking out your window in Montana with dread, Monthei wants people to have access to information that accurately describes the role of fire in their respective ecosystems.

“I hope a big part of my podcast is that I can produce content that's helpful to journalists—and a good portion of my listeners are journalists—but hoping to give them the tools to better understand the conversation so that they can then disseminate it to their audiences at the local level,” she said.

Monthei agrees with Mott that emotion must be present in telling stories about wildfire, but she and Mott both seem to wrestle with their own thoughts when discussing how emotion plays a role in their work. Both acknowledge emotion as an inevitability, one that’s not always limited to fear. Mott references a “deeply emotional” story from the Flathead Reservation in Montana, where tribal members were able to bring fire back to a small plot of land and in turn inspire the growth of camas flowers, a longtime Indigenous food source for which the Kalispel people are named, that many elders hadn’t seen in decades. And Monthei loves any opportunity to celebrate the innovators and solution-driven groups working to address the challenges wildfire poses. These stories foment another emotion for her: hope.

And still, their work is driven by an understanding that goes beyond emotion. Monthei and Mott suggest part of the common limit in a more holistic understanding of wildfire is the limit in our understanding about many things. People tend to think on a short-term scale—the scale of our own lives. But forces like wildfire will exist long after we do, and long after our emotions about them fade with us. Indeed, understanding our own limitations in perceiving the truth of wildfire might be the fruit of excavation; when the sprouts of truth are disentangled, this is the root to which everything attaches.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Mountain Journal is a nonprofit, public-interest journalism organization dedicated to covering the wildlife and wild lands of Greater Yellowstone. We take pride in our work, yet to keep bold, independent journalism free, we need your support. Please donate here. Thank you.