The following article originally appeared on Jennifer Pahlka’s Eating Policy website and is being republished here with the author’s permission.

I read Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire when I was a teenager, I think, so it’s been many years, but I still remember its turning point vividly. It’s set in 1949 in Montana, at the Gates of the Mountains Wilderness, about an hour north of Helena. A fire is burning, and the Forest Service sends out their smokejumpers to fight it. But the fire changes direction without warning, and a group of smokejumpers working in the Mann Gulch find themselves trapped, facing certain death. Instead of running, the foreman, Wag Dodge, pulls out matches and does the unthinkable: He lights a fire.

Today we know what he was doing. The escape fire consumed the fuel around him, allowing the main fire to pass over him and a few of his colleagues. But in 1949, the families of the 13 other smokejumpers who died accused Wag of causing their deaths.…