Jordan Thomas

Jordan Thomas was born in Kansas City and is a Marshall Scholar. After getting his graduate degrees from the University of Cambridge and Durham University in 2018 he moved to California. He now works in California as an anthropologist who researches the relationship between fire, plants, and people. 

In 2019 Jordan became a firefighter in California and after two fire seasons was invited to interview for the Los Padres hotshots, a special forces unit of wildland firefighters. Elite athletes at their core, Los Padres hotshots hike for hours up mountains into raging fires, with hundreds of pounds of equipment on their backs, using chainsaws to cut back vegetation to keep the fire from spreading. When It All Burns is the story of how California wildfires have become increasingly violent and is also a riveting firsthand account of one season as a hotshot.

Jordan’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, and The Drift. He is currently a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California and lives in Santa Barbara, California.