Review: Bring Your Own Brigade Is a Sweeping Look at a Global Fire Crisis

Lucy Walker’s sweeping Bring Your Own Brigade, an absorbing study of California’s 2018 wildfires, consistently goes in illuminating and surprising directions. The narrative, as announced by its opening sequence, is split primarily between two November 2018 blazes: the Camp Fire in Butte County in the northern part of the state and the Woolsey Fire that engulfed the hills above Malibu. But there are detours along the way, such as Walker interrupting the documentary’s opening for a quick tour of wildfires around the world. She includes familiar footage of a koala’s rescue from a burning forest, indicating that the film will reach far beyond what she and her camera crew could experience firsthand.

The introductory 30-minute account of the Camp and Woolsey fires brings to mind a TV documentary, only faster-paced and less sanitized. Handheld camera footage, some from cellphones, is astutely interwoven with talking-head interviews and audio-only material. Most disturbing are snippets of 911 calls from people who are about to burn to death. These victims are among 85 who perished during the Camp Fire. When this cinematic assault ends, Walker commences her investigation into the causes of the fires, centering herself in fascinating ways. The filmmaker isn’t an intrusive presence, but she wisely chose not to pretend to be detached or omniscient. Bring Your Own Brigade is largely the story of her self-education in wildfire issues, a search for answers that are neither easy nor definitive.

The quest sends Walker into the past to learn how California, never hospitable to large-scale human inhabitation, became a popular destination after gold was discovered in 1848. Just a few years later, the director reveals, pioneering landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead proposed that structures in California wildfire zones should be limited to simple cabins. The advice was ignored at the time, and has been ever since—even when rebuilding charred homes.

As narrated by Walker, this essayistic documentary speculates about how European colonizers disregarded native wisdom about using controlled burns to prevent larger conflagrations because the newcomers came from a part of the world that didn’t have natural fire seasons. This indifference to the lessons of experience continues in Malibu, whose wealthy denizens have replaced dry brush with combustible non-native plants, and Paradise, whose blue-collar residents vigorously protest proposed regulations designed to make the next fire less deadly.

Their concerns are personal freedom—Paradise’s citizens tend to be outspoken right-wing libertarians—and cost: Fire-resistant houses are more expensive to build and maintain. Money is less of an issue for coast and canyon dwellers in Los Angeles County, where Kim Kardashian, seen in archival footage, infuriatingly brags about hiring private firefighters to save her house. That self-centered strategy is the source of Bring Your Own Brigade’s title.

Global warming, which many Paradise dwellers deny is happening or contributing to the fires, seems certain to incinerate much of California. Yet Walker homes in on possible solutions that might at least postpone the final reckoning, from building-code reforms to the elimination of “fire suppression” campaigns whose effect is simply to stockpile fuel for the next massive blaze. She also learns something that has not been widely reported: More than one of the fires that scorched Paradise began in nearby tree farms. Ironically, these highly flammable tracts were originally cultivated for wood by the Diamond Match Company.

Walker interviews plenty of individuals throughout Bring Your Own Brigade, most of whom aren’t even identified by name. Police officers and firefighters are easy to recognize, and Walker spends enough time with her central figure, Paradise patriarch Brad Weldon, for his character to emerge. The interviews are revealing, moving, and maddening, sometimes all at once, but more information would be helpful about such commentators as authors Pico Iyer and Mike Davis; the latter’s remarks might be received more attentively by viewers who know he wrote a book titled Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster.

Prescriptions like Davis’s are logical and necessary but have no effect in Paradise, where Walker filmed a town council meeting that’s a lesson in American political paralysis. Bring Your Own Brigade’s unstated conclusion is that more acres—and animals and people—will burn before Californians concede that wildfire’s whims are more powerful than their own.