Episode 1: Suppressed
When Lily Clarke arrived at the August Complex Fire, it was a fire of sensational size. The blaze eventually burned more than 1 million acres, becoming the largest recorded wildfire in California history. Across the country in 2020, flames charred an area size nearly 5 times the size of Yellowstone National Park — the largest swathe of land burned since reliable records began. Wildfires across the country are getting bigger, hotter, and more devastating. But what's all this fire really mean — for the west, for firefighters, and for everyday folks? And what's it really like to fight fire on the ground? Lily Clarke fights wildfire for the US Forest Service and received her Master of Science in Systems Ecology from the University of Montana. John Maclean is the author of 5 books about wildfire.
This media record is part of a series:
Fireline
Fireline probes the causes and consequences of the increasingly devastating wildfires burning in the U.S. It taps into the experience of firefighters, tribal land managers, climate scientists and others to understand how we got here and where we're going. Fireline is a six part series about what wildfire means for the West, planet and our way of life.