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TRANSCRIPT
Anasuya: Basil: “I woke up and I heard a crackling outside. When I looked out my window, I saw that the wooden fence about 100 feet away was on fire. The flames were going maybe ten feet off the ground. So immediately my heart starts pounding. And I call the emergency number, hang up, call two neighbours to come help. And then, get the hoses ready, get the tools ready, and then go down and start putting out the fire.”
It is early in the morning. August 2023. A five-acre ranchette on a mountain ridge in Butte County, Northern California.
“As I approached the fire, the flames — with my heart pounding, and at this point I was all by myself still — I noticed that the fire, the flames were moving across the land in this slow, relaxed way. And my whole body relaxed and it was like — oh. I know how to deal with this. This isn’t a scary fire. It’s going to be okay. My neighbors showed up. They helped me put out the fire. And by the time the fire department came, all that was left was a lot of smoke.”
Extinguishing that fire herself was a liberating moment for Anasuya Basil. She saved her property, but she also came away with a different relationship to the landscape around her – a landscape that just a few years earlier, had been ravaged by a massive wildfire which had left her deeply shaken.
Anasuya: “Like the feeling of watching the buildings fall on TV, on 9/11. That shock, amazement, horror. When I would smell a fire again, I would get some of that feeling.”
But her actions on that August morning also changed how she felt about fire.
Anasuya: “That experience gave me so much confidence. It made me realize how having a good experience with fire, being more educated about positive uses of fire — that makes a huge difference in being able to act without being paralyzed by fear. Fire is a big thrill.”
Putting out a fire to save your home is one thing. But what would make a wildfire survivor pick up a drip torch and light one on purpose? On this episode: why Anasuya Basil came to see fire differently, the push to bring good fire back to California’s landscapes, and the idea that the state’s wildfire crisis may have actually started with more than a century of trying to keep flames off the land. This is Living Planet. I’m Neil King.
Anasuya: “When I look out my window, I see the rolling foothills in the distance, and I’m looking across an organic vineyard. There are many trees around me. One-hundred-foot trees, Ponderosa pine, which has a wonderful smell, especially when the sun heats up the sap. And black oak, with very curvy branches. I see jackrabbits regularly. I see deer often. There’s so many birds. It’s very birdy, as the bird people would say. When I go out in the morning, I hear like an orchestra of bird songs.”
That beauty, that peace, is why she moved here from the Bay area 22 years ago. There’s just one problem for homeowners like her: This part of the American West is what ecologists call a ‘fire ecology’ — a place where wildfires are not a disaster, but a natural part of the ecosystem. Native plants are used to it, or even need heat, smoke, or chemical residues from fire to grow. In the dry months from May to October, Anasuya’s environment is, quite literally, tinder.
Anasuya: “As you walk across the land, it feels like you’re walking on Styrofoam. That dry, crunchy feeling. The land gets so dry.”
There had been fires in the area before, she says, but it never affected her or that many people that she knew. Then came the fire that changed everything.
Anasuya: “November 8th, 2018. I’ll never forget that date. Across the canyon on the other side of the canyon, we could see huge billows of smoke, just black, gray, orange. I packed up my belongings and my cat and evacuated out. The roads were full and the smoke had grown to such a degree that it had come across the canyon, blotted out the sun. So by then it was two in the afternoon, but it felt like evening time.
I stayed with my mother. I heard stories, I watched the news. You don’t know if you have a house anymore. You don’t know if you have possessions anymore. Fortunately, the fire did cross the canyon but did not reach my house, so it came very close.”
Others weren’t so lucky. The “Camp Fire” in Butte County was the deadliest wildfire in California’s history. It killed 85 people and burned down more than 18,000 buildings. But it also left a mark on the survivors, as Anasuya, who works as a therapist, heard from many of her clients in the weeks and months after the fire. A deep shock, she says. And something shifted for her too.
Anasuya: “Other wildfires would catch and you’d smell the smoke on the air, and immediately my whole body would tense. I would go into this feeling of alarm. I would immediately have to stop everything I was doing and find out — where is that fire? How fast is it moving? What is it doingg? Do I need to pack? Do I need to evacuate?”
The feelings that Anasuya and her community felt following the fire have a name – or rather, several names, depending on the exact experience. Post-traumatic stress disorder, to begin with. eco anxiety, climate anxiety, solastalgia — the emotional distress of watching a beloved landscape change beyond recognition.
Susan Clayton: “The evidence is stronger than I think many people realize that climate change does threaten mental health, in particular because of these responses to extreme weather events, you know, floods and storms and wildfires. And then the indirect impacts of climate change, for example, on displacement and economic impacts of climate change. All of these are sources of stress that can also threaten mental health.”
Susan Clayton is a professor of psychology and environmental studies at the College of Wooster, Ohio. She also was lead author of the first chapter of an IPCC report about the mental health impact of climate change. The bottom line: climate change and its impacts — among them more frequent and violent wildfires — are worsening mental health for people all around the world. Whether you’re worried about climate change from what you hear in the media, or live through fires, floods or storms yourself.
The question is: how do you deal with that fear? Anasuya’s answer was to pick up the torch herself.
Anasuya: “Maybe 30 people were there, many of them experienced firefighters. Many volunteers who were simply homeowners like myself with no experience. They handed me a drip torch and said, okay, you can light this fire on this line. And it was a thrill.”
A drip torch is a handheld metal canister filled with a mix of gasoline and diesel. It has a wick at the end of a curved spout. When you tip it, droplets of burning fuel fall onto the ground and ignite. And that was Anasuya’s job.
Anasuya: “I dropped dabs of fire into the dry ground, which lit in a very controlled way. We had water tenders there. We had control lines built. Nothing bad happened. In fact, it was beautiful to watch how fire can clear excess fuel in a safe way, in a beautiful way, like a ballet. It was graceful. That changed me.”
She has since participated in 30 such prescribed burns, including one on her own property. There’s a photo from that day showing Anasuya in her work clothes and yellow gloves, with high flames behind her. She’s smiling calmly, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
And yes, you heard that right: prescribed burns, like a prescription for medicine. And it somehow is. For Anasuya, as we heard, because she has overcome her fear, to an extent that she even stopped a wildfire herself. But prescribed burns, also called “good” or “beneficial fires”, are also medicine for the land itself.
Len Nielson: “California and the West Coast is really good at growing vegetation. That vegetation grows up, dies, and becomes a fuel load on the landscape. The West Coast is suffering from a lot of fuel loading over the last 150 years of suppression activities across the West Coast. We’ve gotten really good at suppressing fires.”
That’s Len Nielson. He is the staff chief of prescribed fire and environmental protection at CAL FIRE — California’s state department of forestry and fire protection.
The 150 years he refers to are the decades since Euro-American settlers arrived in California in large numbers and imposed a very different approach to the land.
They did so on the homelands of Indigenous peoples including the Maidu, Yana and Karuk, who had long used cultural burning to manage vegetation, reduce fuels and shape ecosystems.
Settlers largely viewed those practices as primitive and dangerous, and suppressed them.
The result was a landscape where vegetation accumulated for generations, creating the heavy fuel loads that now help drive catastrophic fires.
Nielson: “Now there’s more fuel. So, the fires are hotter and they’re faster and they’re more destructive.”
And climate change is adding another layer to that problem, with higher temperatures and longer droughts increasing fire risk. So one part of the response is surprisingly simple: put some fire back into the landscape – deliberately, and under controlled conditions.
Nielson: “We need to have more prescribed fires in order to get rid of that fuel loading. If we get one million people to do one acre, and we do that every year, then we can really turn the page and turn the corner on this fire hazard fuel hazard that we have in California. And so that’s a big ask. And so we’re not going to get there tomorrow. This situation that we’re in in California took 150 years. We’re not going to be out of this in ten years, 20 years, maybe even 30 years.”
Len is talking about roughly one million acres of prescribed fire per year. That’s bigger than the state of Rhode Island and a huge increase from where California is now. From 2024 to 2025, just over 63,000 acres were treated with prescribed fire. One way California is trying to close that gap is by getting landowners and local volunteers involved.
They’re organizing into Prescribed Burn Associations – community groups that can carry out burns on private land when conditions are safe, with CAL FIRE support and oversight where required.
There’s also a financial obstacle. People may understand that prescribed fire can reduce wildfire risk – but they can still be afraid of what happens if their controlled burn gets out of control.
In 2023, California opened a $20-million liability claims fund intended to give participants some protection.
Nielson: “Because it gives them that little bit of assurance that if something does go wrong, that, you know, they’re not going to be held personally liable and lose their home.”
It looks like it’s working. From July 2025 to June 2026, CAL FIRE approved 189 prescribed burns covered by the fund, but no claims were made.
After 25 years on the job, Len still joins burns himself.
Nielson: “I’ve been doing this for a long time, and every time I go out to a prescribed fire, I get the energy from that fire to keep me going, keep me working because it is hard work. And you and you know, it’s, it’s a lot. Um, but it is satisfying. And you get that energy from the fire to keep going and continue.”
That sounds very much like what Anasuya said about the thrill of fire. She joined the local Prescribed Burn Association in Butte County — one of now more than 130 across the United States. She went out on burns again and again. About thirty times in total. She got her Firefighter Type Two certification — the most basic wildland firefighting qualification. To earn it, you have to carry 20 kilos for five kilometers in 45 minutes. That’s the equivalent of carrying a child on your back that long.
Anasuya: “I’m 65 — and I’ve done it the last three years. So I work at it, and I can do it.”
Anasuya who once froze at the smell of smoke was now learning to carry fire.
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And that raises a more unusual question:
Could fire itself become part of healing from fire?
A 15-mile-drive from Anasuya’s ranchette down into the Sacramento Valley lies the city of Chico. The California State University has a campus here and on that campus, an ecotherapy program. Blake Ellis is the program manager and has held forest walks with wildfire survivors since the big 2018 wildfire, the “Camp Fire”.
It’s home to California State University, and to an ecotherapy program that has been working with survivors of the devastating 2018 Camp Fire. One of the people running it is Blake Ellis.
Ellis: “When people revisited these landscapes initially, it brought up a lot of really traumatic memories and a lot of grief. The smell of smoke, the sound of wind through the trees that was pervasive in their life and impacting their daily functioning in pretty profound ways. Yet when I took them back to these landscapes and helped them connect to their senses, helped them slow down through this practice, those triggers weren’t triggering them anymore.
One survivor, um, during our sharing circle. You know, the, we, it got passed to her. It was her time to share. And what she shared was, today is the first time since the campfire that I’ve been able to feel the wind on my face and have it be pleasurable instead of triggering. And she said, I can’t tell you how amazing that feels.
I have this quote memorized. It’s literally written like on my office, because anytime I need the reminder of why I’m doing the work that I do, I read this quote.”
One day, she went to a prescribed fire training to run a mental health session.
Ellis: “And I got bit by the fire bug, as they say.”
Blake became “obsessed” with prescribed fire. The more she learned about it, the more she felt her own fear of fire to lessen, she recalls. The fear coming from all those stories of terrible loss and grief she had heard from wildfire survivors. An idea started to form: What, if intentional, controlled burning could help them as well? Blake called it: pyrotherapy. And she started wondering whether that could work for the people she was treating, too. Her idea was to bring wildfire survivors into a carefully controlled encounter with fire.
She calls it pyrotherapy.
A pyrotherapy session begins with grounding and breathwork. Then comes cultural education, including the history and practice of Indigenous burning in California. After that, participants learn about fire itself: how it behaves, how to use protective equipment, how to build a safe burn pile – and how to burn it. Some participants can then take a drip torch and light a small patch of land, no larger than about 20 by 20 feet.
Then they step back. And watch.
Then comes cultural education, delivered by a co-organizer and member of the Maidu: the story of indigenous burning in California, why fire belongs here, how it’s part of nature. A bonfire is lit. A small one, just enough to warm yourself. Next up, more practical knowledge: fire behavior basics, how to use protective equipment, how to build a safe pile from old wood, and then, how to burn it down safely. Participants can also take a drip torch, drop fire on a small plot of land, not bigger than 20 by 20 feet. They then step back, and watch.
Ellis: “We gather around maybe the microcast area that we’ve just burned or our small warming fire, really focusing our senses on the sensory input of the fire that we’re next to.
My favorite prompt that I’ve found is ‘please share a positive memory or experience that you’ve had with fire.’ And even a group of wildfire survivors are able to recall a time in their life where they had this positive experience, whether that be a bonfire on Halloween, telling ghost stories to cooking over a stove with their grandmother, to firefighters there being able to share about like a night burn that they did and how the fire lit up the hillside and how beautiful it was.
People often lay down, which blows my mind — because they show up with anxiety, apprehension, fear, trauma. And by the time we’re at my section, I’ve got like twenty wildfire survivors comfortable enough to lay down and close their eyes, next to a small warming fire. They certainly wouldn’t have done that at the start of the event. And some people might have tears and feel this kind of sense of release. They’ve been running for so long from this kind of fear that they’ve been holding to. And it’s really amazing to witness like such a transformation within a short amount of time.”
It sounds remarkable. But it’s important to be clear about what this is – and what it isn’t. Ellis is a trained mental-health provider and is present at every session. But pyrotherapy is still a pilot project. Since 2024, there have been just over a handful, all grant-funded, with between 20 and 30 participants each. There are no published clinical outcomes yet. The evidence is still being built.
So why might it help at all? We’ll be looking into that right back after this short break.
PROMO
Blake Ellis, as a trained mental health provider, is present at every such session. But “pyrotherapy” is still a pilot project — six sessions since 2024, all grant-funded, each capped at 20 to 30 participants.27 There are no published clinical outcomes. The evidence base, as Blake Ellis herself acknowledges, is still being built.
So why might something like pyrotherapy help? One possibility is a familiar psychological technique: instead of avoiding what scares you, you encounter it gradually, in a situation where you are safe and in control.
Clayton: “There is a well-established clinical technique of systematic desensitization, where you expose yourself to the thing that you’re afraid of. You keep seeing it and your nervous system eventually says, ‘hey, nothing’s happening’, you know, and it stops responding at the same level.”
That’s Susan Clayton again, the professor of psychology and environmental studies at the College of Wooster, Ohio.
Clayton: “Learning more about how fire works gives you a feeling of cognitive control. Many of us don’t really know very much about fire. The way fires burn can be very surprising — the way they can jump long distances. So learning a little bit more about how fire moves and what you can do to prevent it gives you that greater understanding, which makes you feel more in control.”
So, learning how something works can, in the best case, reduce the terror of it — even for something as terrifying as wildfires. That’s the individual take to it. But what about the mental health impact of climate change on many individuals — on societies, or parts of them? Susan Clayton has looked at it for the first-ever detailed chapter in an IPCC report, the one published in 2022. And what she found there is bigger, and more uneven, than any single therapy session can fix.
Clayton: “There’s already clear evidence of mental health impacts of climate change. And I suspect that will only get worse. The most straightforward group of people that are affected are people who are experiencing the effects of climate change. One is the impacts of heat on mental health. We have evidence that heat waves are associated with psychiatric hospitalizations and with suicides.”
And you don’t need to have lived through a heat wave, a wildfire or flood to be affected.
Clayton: “You can be anxious and concerned and afraid because of what you know about it, because of what you hear about in the media. And those tend to be younger people, who are more worried about how their future will be affected.”
That fear of what’s coming — even from a distance — is what a team at Lund University in Sweden set out to measure. They pulled together two hundred separate studies and found something striking: more and more people, especially in wealthier, Western countries, are developing not just anxiety about the warming climate — but something closer to a fear, even a dislike, of nature itself. Exposure to wildfires is one of several cited drivers of that fear.
And here’s the part that should worry conservationists as much as therapists: that fear doesn’t just sit quietly in people’s heads. According to the researchers, it’s actively weakening public support for protecting the environment. The more nature feels dangerous, the less people want to protect it. And yet — Susan is careful here — anxiety is not always the enemy.
Clayton: “If you are very, very anxious, that can have a paralysing effect where you just feel hopeless. ‘There’s nothing I can do. Why even bother? If you feel some anxiety, that can be a motivating force — this deserves my attention, I need to make behavioral changes.”
Which is, in a way, the same insight Anasuya stumbled into with a garden hose and a drip torch. Too much fear, and you freeze. Some fear, channeled into action, and you’re capable of almost anything.
From everything we have heard so far, this kind of individual resilience, or agency, is key to living with climate and weather extremes. But Susan emphasises this is no substitute for political action.
Clayton: “We’ve seen forces that have tried to emphasize individual responsibility for coping with climate change. Like ‘We all just have to recycle more, stop driving’ — as opposed to: no, we need to pressure governments and corporations to develop policies to mitigate climate change. We hear lots of people talking about their feelings of anger and frustration and betrayal — moral distress associated with the fact that governments are failing to do enough about it. That perception, that society is essentially failing to respond appropriately, can be part of the source of climate anxiety and stress.”
But then, isn’t therapy, and isn’t prescribed burning, a mere distraction from what really needs to be done? The ongoing failure of governments and economies to limit global warming? Susan and Blake both say: no.
Clayton: “We really need to recognize it as a societal problem — not just climate change in general, but climate-change-related mental health problems.”
Ellis: “I think for me, this is more informed by decolonial theory and relational theory and therapy that recognizes that what actually promotes mental health and wellness and well-being are relationships. And that includes our relationship to nature.”
For Blake Ellis, that relationship with nature is part of the point. And in Butte County, there is a very practical side to it. A warming climate is increasing the pressure on the landscape. Years of fire suppression have left more fuel on the ground. Prescribed burning can’t stop catastrophic wildfire. But it can reduce some of the fuel available to it.
Nielson: “We’re still going to have catastrophic fire in California, but can we prevent damages to communities and homes and people? That’s our goal.”
So maybe that’s what living with fire really means. It’s not about eliminating the danger.
It’s not about not pretending you aren’t afraid. But learning what you can do – and accepting what you can’t control.
And for Anasuya, that lesson was about to be tested again.
In 2024, the Park Fire tore through Butte County. It became one of the largest wildfires in California’s recorded history.
Anasuya: “From when it started to when it came towards my house was two days of very closely monitoring it. I couldn’t concentrate on other things. The sky turned dark again, just like it had for the Camp Fire. The smoke blotted out the sun, even though it was early in the afternoon.”
She eventually evactuated again. The firefighters held the fire at the highway, with flames, 30 meters high.
Anasuya’s ranchette survived — again. It now sits between two enormous burn scars — and in the middle is a ridge that hasn’t burned in a hundred years, and it’s loaded with fuel. Over the years, she’s done what she can to prepare for the next fire. No wooden fences attached to the home. Trees and brush cleared from the property. And prescribed burns to reduce the fuel around her.
Anasuya: “So many things have been done collectively by our community to mitigate the losses if a fire comes through. But I always approach the fire season with a little tension. You know, if I do prescribe burns on my little five acres. but the acreage around me is not taken care of, it feels like a drop in the bucket, but you have to start somewhere. So we just keep bravely forging forward. And more and more I see the acceptance and understanding of the value of prescribed burns. So I feel like we’re heading in the right direction.”
And yet, even for someone who has learned to live with fire, there are limits to what preparation can do.
When Anasuya moved here more than twenty years ago, she says, her fire insurance cost around seven hundred dollars a year.
Today, it costs around seven thousand.
Anasuya: “When your income doesn’t increase, it just comes out of all your disposable income. So that is really the hardest part, honestly, is the economics of it.”
For years, the challenge here was learning how to live with wildfire. Now, for many people, it’s how to pay for it.
Anasuya: “And so that may be a reason at some point, as I age, I may decide not to put so much money into living in a place, as beautiful as it is, that requires so much insurance.”
For now, Anasuya is staying.
And like many people in Butte County, she’ll head into the next fire season with preparation, caution, and a little tension.
