Red Flag Warning: Coming This Month From AK Press
by Dani Burlison & Margaret Elysia Garcia
Red Flag Warning: Mutual Aid and Survival in California’s Fire Country comes out later this month from AK Press. The book itself has been an act of mutual aid and brings together folks from different corners of California who share their experiences with not only surviving California’s wildfires, but the ways they’ve taken action to uplift their communities. The following is an excerpt of our preface, which will give you a sense of what we believe this book will offer survivors of an assortment of climate catastrophes.
***
The idea for this book came to us during a California fire season, the time of year that sometimes starts in May (from never quite adequate snowpack or rainfall the winter and spring before) and ends in October or November. Each season we hope we are lucky, and each season more of us are not. (Note: in 2024, Southern California had fires in January)
Fire season is always stressful for folks in Northern California, but the fire that really drove home the inevitability of continued major climate catastrophes for Dani was the October 2017 North Bay Firestorm. The Tubbs Fire, one of numerous fires in the region, burned over 36,000 acres where she lived (and had lived for thirty years) at the time. It roared over the mountains just east of Santa Rosa at night, chewing up thousands of homes and burning ruthlessly for three weeks, while the Redwood Complex fire burned to the north, in Mendocino County. Both fires took lives and destroyed thousands of homes.
During the fires, however, Dani witnessed an amazing surge of mutual aid efforts anchoring around Sonoma County: pop-up mental health clinics, fund-raising efforts for undocumented people, holistic healing pop-ups for firefighters and evacuees, DIY evacuation sites on private property for undocumented workers, bioremediation efforts to protect local water sources, language justice in the form of assistance for non-English speakers in shelters, free food, yoga classes, clothing drives, more people eager to learn about indigenous fire practices, and more. She began writing articles about how folks were navigating home loss around Northern California, how communities were banding together to rebuild and support each other. Growing up in a rural, working-poor community in Tehama County—where the Park Fire burned through 315,000 acres in 2024 while we put finishing touches on this manuscript—Dani watched several special places from her rural childhood burn up in Butte, Shasta, Lassen, and other counties. It was a lot.
Simultaneously, and for the better part of five years, Margaret was a reporter and columnist for Feather Publishing, whose four Plumas County newspapers were known as some of the last remaining independent papers in the West. During COVID, the newspapers ceased publication, and regional news was then posted to the website Plumas News (www.plumasnews.com). During the Dixie Fire of 2021, that was several times a day. Margaret had been evacuated a few times but hadn’t felt the totality of fire. Then came her fire. It burned over 960,000 acres. She wanted to remember the details even as they were overlooked for more-urban perspectives on fire. She wanted to change the narrative set forth by national news and have people’s voices heard, and she wanted to report on hope and community coming together. Margaret wanted to collect stories from the fire that focused on issues like dealing with smoke, evacuations, and resourcefulness in low-income communities. She began a column at Plumas News called “Greenville Rising” and then “Communities Rising” as more communities faced the difficult task of rebuilding their lives and communities after fire.
Between Sonoma and Plumas Counties, we texted one another about all the tangential elements of wildfire disaster that we weren’t hearing, the parts that didn’t fit into a neat, quick segment, the parts that weren’t for viewers, readers, or listeners far away from the disaster, but rather the stories and information needed for those in the thick of it: the community—the voices of people who had been living rurally for decades and knew and loved these mountains and forests and communities. We laughed about tales of so many firefighters flooding friends’ dating apps. We worried about the same firefighters getting enough sleep. We checked in with each other about evacuations, offering each other a safe, fire-free place to stay, relaying stories about community members’ heroics, and complaining about outsiders—those with no experience living in rural California—writing disparagingly about fire survivors in places outside of Northern California’s typical tourist destinations that frequently take so much of the fire spotlight in mainstream media.
It was the lack of rural voices and the stories of mutual aid that led us to create this anthology, something you can hold in your hands with some of Northern California’s finest essayists and minds giving voice to living through these giant climate catastrophes.
The contributors to this book are just a small slice of the wide array of people impacted by California’s fires and working toward climate and community resiliency. Yet, in our minds, they offer essential perspectives. We definitely can’t cover every aspect of living in a fire ecology in this book. While many see fires as great equalizers and climate anxiety is something felt across class and race lines, the ways fire impacts each individual and each community as a whole can differ depending on factors like class, citizenship status, location, geography, population size and demographics, housing status (renting vs. homeowning), and Indigenous knowledge (or lack of it). What we wish we had room to include is discussion of the dire mental health consequences for low-income people, firefighters, immigrants, people with disabilities, seniors, and others affected by wildfires. We also wish we had room to include all of the individuals, mutual aid networks, and nonprofit organizations (like North Bay Jobs with Justice, Sonoma County Legal Aid, and others) who have worked tirelessly to center and support farmworker organizing and legal support around housing for low-wealth families.
Red Flag Warning explores the ways these fires take root and impact rural and urban Northern California. It examines our relationships to place and community. We want to share our love of Northern California and its people and ecosystems. We also want the reader to examine what fire can and does mean to them, what it means to reimagine the world, to prepare for the worst, to examine flames through different lenses. We want readers to understand the importance of mutual aid, of organizing, of community care, of resilience.
For the reader outside of Northern California, we hope this anthology brings more understanding of what we lived through and will continue to live through as our mountainous forests of mixed pines and oak woodlands become mountains with a few new root balls of oak trees and museum pieces of pine, and as more people from California join the growing global population of climate refugees. For the Northern Californian, may this serve as an extension of our complex and diverse communities and provide mutual aid for the soul. We’ve attempted to address the many aspects of living with fire that we face as we learn more and more to rely on each other for both solace and recovery—whatever that looks like for each of us.
With love and solidarity from California,
Dani & Margaret
