The Race to Survive: Smokejumpers in the Modern Attention Economy 

When I heard two smokejumpers had appeared on a network TV series—Ethan Greenberg and Tyrie Merrill on Peacock’s Race to Survive—I admit I felt a little torn. On the one hand, I believe the Forest Service needs to do a much better job of communicating with the American people, and so any enterprise that raises awareness about our mission is likely to be a good thing. On the other hand, land-management agencies and TV executives often have conflicting objectives. The first group prioritizes the health of ecosystems. The second prioritizes money. The first studies and monitors wildlands across decades. The second produces sensationalized products almost singularly designed to keep us tuned in for another round of advertisements. If, a century from now, it turns out that we failed at the slow, boring work of keeping America’s trees alive, historians will likely point to our appetite for endless stimulation as one of the central reasons why. 

I’d experienced this kind of internal conflict before. Two years ago, some of my coworkers decided to make an Instagram page for our smokejumper base. They thought it would be a good tool for advertising job announcements, sharing information on the latest happenings, and generating awareness about the community services we provide. They wrote up a proposal and brought it to our base manager, who gave the go-ahead. The page now has about 1,000 followers, a link to our rookie-outreach page, and a handful of posts documenting some of our suppression operations.  

I didn’t speak up against starting the page, but privately, I felt slightly uncomfortable. In 2017, I experienced a mental health crisis that was profoundly exacerbated by my relationship to social media. I ended up deleting my Instagram and Facebook accounts altogether, as I felt they were fracturing my ability to concentrate: unless I was engaged in some form of digital distraction, just waiting in line at the supermarket or sitting on a park bench made me anxious. 

I currently spend my off-seasons teaching college freshmen, and I see my old inability to endure boredom magnified tenfold. Whenever I walk into a lecture hall, each student’s head is tilted at the same 30-degree angle, everyone’s thumb rhythmically swiping up an image-filled timeline. Their comments in class often revolve around whatever happens to be trending on Twitter or the latest controversy dominating TikTok.

The power of social media over our information landscape have grown so dominant that for something to hold the public’s interest, it must be delivered in the form of entertaining spectacle.  

For those of us who work for the federal government, this poses a serious challenge. In an ideal world, the government would be all but invisible, a high-functioning bureaucracy quietly humming in the deep background of its citizens’ lives, building trains, administering schools, and serving as a bulwark against disaster. Thoughtful experts would helm various departments and agencies and make decisions based on the well-being of average Americans. Anyone who decided to go digging into the IRS or the Defense Department or the Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management would find nothing but monotony—reams of documents outlining good-faith, technocratic discussions about how best to serve their constituents. Every four years, the public would listen to a slate of ideas from congenial but philosophically distinct candidates, vote for the party that seemed likeliest to further national flourishing, then return to their lives as private citizens, only thinking of the government with a vague appreciation—if they thought of the government at all. 

This vision is so far removed from our present reality that just writing it feels absurd. The last 25 years have been defined by the American government’s mishandling of catastrophe: 9/11, the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina, the subprime mortgage crisis, the opioid epidemic. Meanwhile, confronted with the problem of generating enough content to fill the 24-hour news cycle, news outlets now cover politics like an endless episode of reality TV, framing senators and cabinet members as heroes and (mostly) villains within the interminable drama of governance. It is extremely difficult for civil servants to draft reasonable legislation and reach necessary compromises if they are also battling to be the most popular cast member on what may as well be The Real World: Capitol Hill. In a 2020 Harper’s essay titled “Vicious Cycles,” author Greg Jackson asks:

“Is it a problem that our mental representation of the world is the product of a for-profit entertainment industry? Yes. Our government…cannot be dully competent if what we demand of it is that it isn’t boring.” 

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Problematic or not, however, this is the reality we now face. In November, I flew to Arizona for an annual staff ride centered around the Dude and Yarnell fires. In attendance were high-ranking members of the agency, including the former director and several assistant deputies. One topic dominated all their lectures: the urgent need to cultivate a positive relationship between wildland firefighting agencies and the American people. At a moment when every federal program is at risk of having its budget slashed, the federal land management agencies must generate a broad base of support if we hope to survive. 

But talking to the public can be risky, and many of us are reluctant to engage with the media. How many of us have hidden in the saw shack when a local anchor came to film a practice jump? Or politely declined the opportunity to appear on some podcast or be interviewed online? Our worry is not without warrant: stories abound of firefighters who have found themselves in hot water after speaking carelessly to the press. In their competition for clicks, today’s journalists know few stories generate buzz like a government employee making a fool of himself, and who wants to take that chance?  

Our concern goes deeper than a simple, pragmatic concern about bad press, however. We all feel a certain sense of protectiveness regarding the smokejumper image and rightly bristle if someone seems to be using it to advance their own interest or tarnishing it with braggadocio. The easiest way to avoid inviting the ire of our community is by eschewing the spotlight altogether. 

But whether we like it or not, smokejumpers are some of the best ambassadors, and our agency’s ability to protect America’s land will depend on how compelling of a narrative we present to the American people. It will depend on how adept we become at controlling and expanding our public presence. Within this context, smokejumpers have a certain responsibility: the inherent drama of our work lends itself much more naturally to the modern media environment than, say, a trails or timber crew.  

Right now, my agency’s media strategy is a clunky hodgepodge: websites that look as though they were designed in the early aughts, an Instagram page that has about 1/18th as many followers as the National Park Service’s page, the same canned quotes from Public Information Officers appearing again and again in low-distribution newspapers. Even as the crisis of mega-fires has moved to the center of national discourse, they have done little to leverage their position as a core agency charged with responding to this ongoing catastrophe. We have yet to present our own version of what fire and land management should look like in the 21st century. So instead of receiving the funds needed to ensure that our national forests are as healthy as possible, the agency announced last September that it cut 2,400 jobs. That was nearly ten percent of our workforce.

Clearly, business as usual is not working. 

The first step toward securing the resources necessary to keep the West from resembling a pile of matchsticks in 2050 will be a multilateral, dynamic PR campaign. Especially in an era when the police and military have become freighted with polarizing political baggage, firefighters are one of the few remaining archetypes who can fulfill America’s appetite for everyday heroes, and despite it feeling potentially cringe-worthy, we should lean into that image—not in self-aggrandizing attempts to inflate our own egos, but in a calculated, collective effort to generate as much goodwill as possible among both voters and those who control the purse strings. 

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As it turns out, Ethan Greenberg and Tyrie Merrill’s appearance on season two of Race to Survive is an excellent model for how to shape public sentiment in our modern attention economy. Race to Survive is a cross between Survivor and The Amazing Race: nine teams of two engage in various competitions across New Zealand, with one pair getting eliminated each episode. They spend 39 days navigating the backcountry, foraging for food, and demonstrating proficiency in a whole host of adventure sports like rafting, abseiling, and canyoneering. Spliced in between footage of the contestants groaning with hunger and bushwhacking through thick brush are personal interviews designed to generate pathos with the audience.  

From the beginning, it’s clear that Ethan and Tyrie are going to be the stars. The other teams comprise ultra-marathoners, river guides, mountaineers, and weekend warriors whose relationship to the wilderness is solely recreational. Even for an audience unfamiliar with smokejumpers, the few seconds of firefighting footage we see are enough to indicate the advantage Ethan and Tyrie have over everyone else. As Ethan says a few minutes into the first episode, “We’re gonna win this race because we have a unique ability to work together in tough situations.” 

Over the next nine episodes, Team Smokejumper places in the top three of nearly every race, before (spoiler alert) eventually winning the $500,000 grand prize. While the other contestants bicker and moan about the unforgiving nature of the terrain, Ethan and Tyrie are constantly encouraging one another, whooping with excitement at each new challenge, and reveling in the opportunity to test their mettle. They embody the good-natured grit required of every smokejumper, demonstrate resourcefulness, and, most importantly, come across as eminently likable. They are funny, charming, and vulnerable. In fact, some of the most compelling moments of the entire show are when Ethan chokes up while talking about the death of his father and how this tragedy continues to motivate him today. Their natural charisma, coupled with their frank discussions about how little wildland firefighters get paid and the hardship of spending so much time away from their families, did more to humanize the current crisis facing the Forest Service than any agency-outreach campaign yet. 

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From the opening credits, Race to Survive oozes melodrama. In the first episode, a faceless narrator announces that this is the “most harrowing adventure race ever conceived” and “the toughest competition ever imagined.” The other contestants are constantly overacting, hamming up campy micro-dramas and silly feuds with all the subtlety of a middle-school musical. (One team, a recently divorced couple, became so annoying so quickly that I started fast-forwarding every time either of their faces appeared on my screen.) Everyone involved was risking embarrassment, including Ethan and Tyrie. While they were by far the most charismatic of the nine teams, I’m sure they endured some good-natured ribbing back at West Yellowstone: on an early episode, they misread their compass, and nearly lost one of the races; they repeatedly came in second to a pair of smarmy raft guides from Jackson Hole; and there were some cheesy one-liners here and there about digging hotline and humping chainsaws. 

But risking embarrassment is an inherent part of entering the public eye, and Ethan and Tyrie emerge relatively unscathed. Their stiffest competition, on the other hand—the aforementioned Wyoming raft guides—ended up getting disqualified for cheating. In his final interview, one of the cheaters appears in a “Jackson Hole Whitewater” hat, and as he tries to justify why he broke a race rule, I couldn’t help but think about how bad it would have looked if Ethan or Tyrie had been the one who’d cut corners and then been forced to give an awkward apology wearing a hat from their jump base. In fact, I felt a tug of anxiety watching the entire series, just waiting for Ethan or Tyrie to slip up and say something that might reflect poorly on the smokejumper program. 

Instead, Ethan and Tyrie did us all very proud.

Yes, they emerged victorious, but they also accomplished something much more important: they gave viewers real and sympathetic faces to associate with wildland firefighters.

The next time one of these viewers reads a headline about more massive budget cuts to the Forest Service, they won’t imagine some anonymous governmental entity. They will instead remember these two Westies talking about how hard it’s become to make ends meet as a wildland firefighter. And who knows? Perhaps some of them will pick up a phone and call their local representative.  

Ethan and Tyrie’s appearance on Race to Survive won’t suddenly catalyze an apathetic public into caring about their national forests and the people who protect them, but their success is certainly a start. Upon finishing the final episode, I found myself thinking about how we can no longer afford to view the media—traditional or social—as something to be avoided, and should instead embrace any opportunity to get our message out to the American people. 

In the closing minutes of the show, after winning the final competition, Tyrie tells the camera: “We represent more than just ourselves. We represent a community of hardworking men and women who put their lives on the line and aren’t paid enough. They still show up every single day to that fireline, and they do the best job they can. We represent that…We showed how tough a wildland firefighter can be.” The camera pulls out to reveal Ethan sitting a few feet away. He grabs Tyrie’s shoulder and says,

“F*** yeah, brother. That pumped me up.” 

It was great television. And despite my lingering misgivings about where our country’s insatiable appetite for entertainment might lead us, I couldn’t help but agree with Ethan.