What The Hell America!

While Mikaela Balkind was working on her degree at the University of Washington in 2018, she was looking for a way to bridge her two interests in natural resource management and climate science. So when she came across a friend’s Instagram post about a women in a wildland firefighting bootcamp, she thought to herself, “Wow, this is perfect.”

Over two weekends in Vale, Oregon, she learned skills like how to dig a fireline and use different tools and equipment during a fire deployment, all part of training she would need for a red card, the main certification a wildland firefighter needs to work. 

But the bootcamp offered something else, too — a less intimidating entry point into the male-dominated field where approximately 13 percent of firefighters are women. 

“It’s just sometimes easier to take that first step when you feel like you’re supported by your peers,” she said. “I think it just gave me a little bit of reassurance.”

Part of what made the training special for Balkind were the nightly fireside chats with women who made firefighting their career, which gave her the confidence to apply for jobs in the field. After the bootcamp she began working on seasonal firefighting crews and is now pursuing a masters in Montana studying wildland fire science.

“I can largely attribute the last five or six years of my life to going to one of those bootcamps and opening myself up to this field that I become obsessed with and passionate about,” she said.

The same training that changed the trajectory of Balkind’s life has now been cancelled as part of a government-wide effort to rid agencies of programs that focused on diversity, equity and inclusion under the Trump administration. Descriptions of the trainings on the U.S. Forest Service website have been taken down. And though announcements about the bootcamps are still up on the websites for the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service, they now have this language at the top: “Any previously issued diversity, equity, inclusion or gender-related guidance on this webpage should be considered rescinded.” And, the U.S. Forest Service Women in Wildland Fire Advisory Council, which was launched last year to help women in the field convene and find policy solutions for things like parental leave and child care, no longer has support from the Forest Service, said Riva Duncan, vice president of the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Fire. 

“Inside the federal government, all of that is gone,” Duncan said. “It’s all been scrapped.” 

The effort to dismantle any DEI work is hard to understand for Duncan, who fought wildland fires for 32 years. “It’s just unfathomable why anybody would think diversity, inclusion and equity are bad things,” she said. “It’s going to probably set things back and hurt the recruitment and retention of women into this profession.”

Agency spokesperson Wade Muehlhof wrote in an email response that while the training is currently paused, “there are opportunities for both men and women to complete required wildland firefighter training.” 

Muehlhof noted that these bootcamps are not a prerequisite for becoming a wildland firefighter. However, they’ve been a way to try and level the playing field for women who historically have faced obstacles in the industry, said Abigail Varney, a wildland fire fellow at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, who published a report last year detailing how the wildland fire service could make the workforce more diverse. 

“Programs like the bootcamp or other things designed for women or other underrepresented groups in fire are not because of an issue of competence or a need for additional training, it is because we are often given fewer opportunities to practice skills and build our competence,” she said.  

Justification provided to end these diversity in the workforce programs is usually that they aren’t based on merit and instead give an unfair advantage to certain groups, Varney said. But in reality, “these efforts are actually attempting to correct what has started out and continues to not be a fair playing field. What actually prevents the system to be truly based on merit is discrimination, it’s harassment, it’s bias, it’s unequal protection.”

Varney, who has also worked as a wildland firefighter, said bringing more representation isn’t just the right thing to do but it creates a better wildland firefighting workforce at a time when the climate crisis is leading to more destructive fire seasons. “We really can’t afford to not be utilizing the entirety of the workforce that’s interested and excited about being a part of the solution,” she said. “We need innovative approaches, and diverse perspectives are really a crucial part of that.”

A more representative workforce also makes it easier to communicate and earn trust from communities that are caught up in fires, Varney said. “Having diverse people within agencies operating on the fire line, acting as agency administrators, acting as liaisons with the community, being able to accurately reflect their concerns, their needs, their desires, is essential in order to build a better relationship with fire and to more effectively do our job,” she said. 

And, in the field, women still have to meet the same physical standards that men do including passing the infamous pack test, which requires firefighters to carry 45 pounds for three miles in less than 45 minutes. 

But what the training offers is something men already have — a built in network and camaraderie. They provide a space to talk about things like how to handle a period when deployed for weeks at a time, or something “as simple as changing your sports bra in the morning when we’re all cowboy camping out in the field, and you don’t have that privacy,” Balkind said.

They also form a sense of community for participants to fall back on when more serious issues like assault or discrimination come up out in the field. It’s actually part of the reason why last year, Balkind decided to convene her own bootcamp. She had previously experienced sexual harassment while working on a seasonal crew where she was the only woman. 

“I didn’t have another female to go to, to talk to about this. I had to talk to my head supervisor, and it was like, this is not the support that I need,” she said.  

In the years after, she noticed that when she was on crews that had more women, the dynamics were different, and it reminded her of the importance of her bootcamp in Oregon. So she set to work to organize a bootcamp in Montana. Last fall, 18 women convened from all over the country for the four-day training held by the university’s FireCenter. 

Balkind said it went so well that the Forest Service had actually reached out about assisting with the bootcamps in the future. Now, that proposition feels unlikely.