M.R. O'Connor Archives - Knight Science Journalism @MIT

by Knight Science Journalism / October 20th 2023 / Alumni News

Ignition: What sparked M.R. O’Connor to write a book about fire?

Sometimes you have to set land on fire to save it. Setting fires intentionally was a land stewarding practice long before the industrial revolution began accelerating carbon output and human impact on the climate. It was this revelation—that burning landscape isn’t always a bad thing—that prompted former Knight Science Journalism Fellow M.R. O’Connor to delve into the science and culture around wildfires, fire management, and land conservation.

For her latest book, “Ignition: Lighting Fires in a Burning World,” O’Connor reported from the ground, on the edge of fire lines — as up close and personal as it gets. Through email, she spoke about her experience writing the book, and how it changed her view of the relationship between humans and nature. (The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.)

Book cover: Ignition, lighting fires in a burning world by M.R. O'Connor — “Ignition: Setting Fires in a Burning World,” by M.R. O’Connor (Bold Type Books, 384 pages)

Knight Science Journalism: How did you come to write a book on both the science and cultural history of fire?

M.R. O’Connor: I’m not sure I had ever given much thought to fire–culturally or ecologically–until I had the opportunity to travel in Australia and saw recently burned landscapes in the country’s Northern Territories. I was so surprised to learn about the concept of fire-adapted landscapes and the fact that people had intentionally set these fires to benefit the land. It genuinely puzzled me why I had never heard about this practice before, it seemed so revolutionary. I read Bill Gammage’s incredible book “The Biggest Estate” on the plane ride home to America. Gammage’s book offers historical context for the ingenuity of Aboriginal land management practices that support plants and animals and culture through fire. The facts in that book subverted so many beliefs I had about wilderness, culture, and environmental degradation. It took a couple more years before various dots connected and I understood that the North American continent has a similar history of cultural burning. That’s when the opportunity to learn and report on the history of fire use and the people who practice this form of landscape management today became really exciting to me as a journalist. I find it hard to pass up a story that is capable of subverting people’s assumptions.

KSJ: As you researched for “Ignition,” was there anything you found that surprised you?

MRO: I didn’t expect to love working with fire. Initially, I thought I would do the basic training for wildland firefighting qualifications. It seems counterintuitive but most prescribed burns require these basic qualifications to ensure safety etc. I thought if I had them, I could observe and not be a hindrance to anyone. I also thought having basic qualifications would help me gain access if people thought I kind of knew what I was doing and they didn’t have to worry about me. But you can’t really be on the fireline and just stand around watching, someone is going to hand you a tool and give you a job. Once I had that experience, I kept wanting to do more. I started pursuing more training opportunities and qualifications. I am currently working on a Firefighter Type I qualification, which would allow me to be a squad boss on a firefighting/prescribed fire crew. I’m also a qualified Fire Effects Monitor (FEMO). I think how much I enjoyed the work changed the trajectory of the reporting and the shape of the book. It wasn’t really possible to write from the perspective of an observer, or as an objective reporter. I had to include some of the transformations I had undergone personally as a result of being close to fire. Prior to writing this book, including anything personal about myself in my reporting would have made me unbearably anxious yet, here we are.

KSJ: How did your own perspective and life experiences influence how you wrote “Ignition?”

MRO: My family background is very blue-collar, my dad is a house painter and my mom was a weaver, housecleaner, and cook. My grandparents were bus drivers and bakers. I suppose this might have influenced how I approached writing about the work and tools of firefighting and fire lighting. It’s a very demanding job that doesn’t pay nearly as much as it should. I certainly felt one of the things the book could try to do was highlight for the public what this work actually looks and feels like and the commitment and integrity demonstrated by those who do it.

You can’t really be on the fireline and just stand around watching, someone is going to hand you a tool and give you a job.”

KSJ: Ahead of your book launch at the Mass MoCA, the museum described “Ignition” as offering, “a wildly hopeful vision of an alternative environmental future.” Can you describe your own hope for the future of humans and fire on our planet?

MRO: I think there is a feeling today that people are inevitably a destructive force on the environment and if we weren’t here, things would be better from an environmental point of view. We pollute, exploit, ruin. Fire challenged that notion for me. In Australia, for example, it’s pretty much the exact opposite: the absence of people’s fire-lighting practices has created a less diverse and resilient landscapes and contributed to the catastrophic fires like those seen a few years ago during the Black Summer. Another example: many of us have internalized this notion of a carbon footprint, which creates this sense that each of us is causing harm simply by existing–eating, traveling, clothing ourselves. I’m not saying there isn’t reality to the concept of an individual carbon footprint but it is reductive, it can’t begin to capture what it means to be human today. Working on prescribed fires showed me one way that people are a positive force on the environment and can have an impact that benefits the full spectrum of life: carbon, soil, plants, animals. I’m not here to say fire is the solution or panacea to the grave crisis we face but I am here to report this evidence of an alternative relationship between people and nature, one that stands in small defiance to the doom of global warming.

KSJ: What do you hope your readers take away from the book?

I find it hard to pass up a story that is capable of subverting people’s assumptions.”

MRO: I hope readers might start to question their ideas about wilderness and nature, maybe even get inspired to look at the landscapes around them and get interested in their natural history. Folks might be surprised how many places are historically fire-adapted and the ways that people had influence in shaping them. Especially in America, we’ve been given this impression that until European settlers arrived, this continent was “pure” or “untouched.” Where did that idea come from? Whose interests did it serve?

KSJ: Do you have any advice for science journalists interested in writing books?

MRO: Obviously, some books do become successes and a few become bestsellers. But many excellent books, the majority in fact, don’t. So, I would advise people to have an extremely good reason outside of financial benefit to write a book. Wildland firefighters have a saying about “getting paid in sunsets.” Book writing is a bit like that too, you should probably be ok with getting paid in cool experiences. The ability to follow my curiosity over a long period of time is what has made book writing worth it. But I’ve always finished them barely breaking even.

KSJ: If people want to keep up with your journey as an author and journalist, where should they follow you?

MRO: Instagram! @The_OChronicle, but only if you are okay with seeing pictures of my boys in addition to flagrant tree-hugging and fire-lighting. Otherwise, I have a personal website with links to clips and occasionally publish in cool outlets like The New Yorker and Undark.

by KSJ@MIT / April 13th 2017 / Fellowship Life

2016-17 Update: A Ride and a Review

Chloé Hecketsweiler, a 2016-17 KSJ fellow, specializes in the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries for the Paris-based newspaper Le Monde. So Meals on Wheels, the program that provides meals at home to more than 2.4 million seniors in the U.S. each year, is not exactly on her beat.

But when she read that the Trump administration’s budget blueprint called for deep cuts to nonprofits like Meals on Wheels — which receives 35 percent of its funding from the federal government — she packed up a camera and a notebook and hit the road.

“As a photojournalism student at Boston University,” Chloé says, “I joined a Meals on Wheels driver on his four-hour round in Cambridge and Somerville. I met people with various kinds of physical and mental disabilities who are not able to shop or cook. On March 31, I published a short photo essay featuring some of the persons benefiting from the program who agreed to share their experience with me.”

She met people like James Lynch, 72, above, who lives by himself in a studio with a tiny kitchenette and doesn’t cook much. He is recovering from cancer and is still under heavy medication. Without Meals on Wheels, he told her, “I wouldn’t be alive.”

You can see the photo essay here.

Maura O’Connor’s book, “Resurrection Science: Conservation, De-extinction, and the Precarious Future of Wild Things,” is reviewed in the April 20 issue of The New York Review of Books.

The reviewer, Tim Flannery, a noted Australian scientist and environmentalist, writes that “‘Resurrection Science’ demonstrates unequivocally that the Anthropocene has already dawned, and that we are ill equipped to deal with its consequences. There is no doubt that we humans have now crossed a technological Rubicon, and at some time in the future extinct species will once again be breathing and interacting with other living things, in zoos if not in nature.”

by Greta Friar / December 6th 2016 / KSJ News & Events

Author, Author, Author: Three Books From KSJ

From left, Meera Subramanian, Maura O’Connor, and Mark Wolverton spoke to KSJ classmates about the joys and perils of writing and publishing. (Photos: Fabio Turone, left; Meera Subramanian, center and right.)

“I never thought that I would be in competition with Bill Clinton,” said Mark Wolverton, a current Knight Science Journalism Fellow. He was referring to how his second book, The Depths of Space: The Pioneer Planetary Probes, was published in the same month as the former president’s autobiography, My Life, in 2004. It was one of the many unexpected challenges confronted by the book authors in this year’s class.

The three authors — Wolverton, Meera Subramanian, and Maura O’Connor — shared their experiences of writing and selling their books with the rest of the fellows in the comfort of the conference room on the dark, rainy afternoon of November 15.

The authors gave practical advice about writing a book proposal, finding the right agent, and paying for travel and research, among other topics. Subramanian showed a step-by-step slide presentation called “Anatomy of a first book deal (and how to survive while actually writing the book).”

But along with giving specific tips, such as looking at the acknowledgments pages of books you admire to find agents and editors who might be a good fit, the authors tackled the issue of — as Wolverton put it, adding a choice expletive — “Why do you write a book in the first place?”

All three KSJ authors emphasized that writing a book could be a painful process — as could trying to sell it — and that there were no guarantees of fame and fortune. Most authors will never earn out their advances, let alone get large royalty checks or hit the top of the best-sellers list.

So why bother?

Subramanian knew she was ready to write a book when, after struggling for years with a difficult book proposal that she could not quite make work, she was inspired by a new idea and came up with a complete proposal in three weeks. She said the idea that became a published book felt different. The narrative arc came easily and the idea was something that wouldn’t let go of her. To get through the slog of finishing a book, the writer needed to be captivated by the topic, to feel “even straight-up obsession,” she said. The result was A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis, From the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka (2015), which features five stories of sustainability efforts in India.

As a career journalist, O’Connor knew that not every assignment she got was going to excite her. “The best reason to write a book is that it is intellectually satisfying,” she said, adding that the size of the advance and the size of the audience aren’t important. “Does this make me happy?” she asked. “If yes, do it.” O’Connor’s first book, Resurrection Science: Conservation, De-extinction, and the Precarious Future of Wild Things (2015), discusses the complexities and contradictions of wildlife conservation, as well as the possibility of reviving extinct species.

Wolverton described a different type of satisfaction. “I’m sure all of us remember the first time we published something, but that’s not the same as having something you can hold,” he said. A book felt more permanent than an article, more lasting. “There will be times when you hate the stupid thing,” he said, but “after all the agony, you get to walk into a bookstore and see this.” And he showed a picture of a tall stack of copies of his third book, A Life in Twilight: The Final Years of J. Robert Oppenheimer, in a bookstore, waiting to be sold. His expression as he looked at the photo was clear: All of the bad writing days, the arduous negotiations, and the unexpected challenges had been worth the joy of picking up his work from a bookstore table and holding it in his hand.