Gratitude for Wildfire Firefighters Who Walk Into the Fire We Are All Running From

There is a particular kind of courage that only shows up as a direction. Everyone else is running away from the flames. One group of people is walking toward them, on purpose, into forests and homes that everyone else has already fled, because someone still needs to be inside them when the fire arrives. They do it risking everything they have, often for a wage that barely reflects the size of what they are actually risking.

This is not an abstract tribute. It is describing this exact summer. Wildfires are again burning across Spain, Italy and France, and the people fighting them are doing so inside a system many of their own unions describe as already at breaking point, months before this season's worst weeks have likely even arrived.

The gap between the risk and the wage