Jacob Soboroff

What I will say, though, is in the face of these types of cuts, this story has given me profound hope that there are ways to deal with this.

Those workers on the street corner in Morgantown, West Virginia that were protesting the cuts to NIOSH.

The day laborers who, in the face of raids at Home Depots throughout Southern California, are still showing up at protests of their own to push back and continue to work on the recovery.

The scientists like Holly Bender, who goes up with imaging spectrometry technology to map fires from the sky in order to better fight them from the ground.

All these people I've come into contact with as I reported this book and you read their stories.

About what firefighting could and should look like going forward.

And so I think that there's a push pull because of the politics, but it is the people always that seem to rise up.

And that, as I said, have given me really extraordinary hope in a really, you know, it can only be described as an awful situation.

That not only is this the fire of the future, but that it teaches us a lot about our planet and

about my city that I love so much.

And it made me think a lot about what community means to all of us, what it means to be in community, what it means to support each other, what it means to go through a trauma of this nature, what it means to report on other people's traumas, and what it means when politics intervenes in something that is so deeply, deeply personal.

And the book is dedicated to my fellow Angelenos, not just to one person, but to the millions of people that live in Los Angeles County, because in some way, the millions of us all experience this together.

And I hope that people around the country and around the world will pick up this book and experience it with us as well, because this is not some far-fetched Hollywood story.

This is coming to a community near you, probably your own.

You don't have to live in the mountains.

You don't have to live down by the coast.

This can happen anywhere.

And there are lessons in the book for all of us about how to treat each other better and how to better recover, hopefully, together.

Shamita, thank you as always.

What was lost is incalculable.