Take the Yale Climate Connections audience survey today.
Stay in the know about climate impacts and solutions. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter.
By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time.
Yale Climate Connections
Some TikTok stars spend their days perfecting dance moves or comedy sketches to share in their next video.
But TikTokker Kelsey Sims spends her time scanning the New Mexico horizon for distant plumes of smoke.
The climate is changing, and our journalists are here to help you make sense of it. Sign up for our weekly email newsletter and never miss a story.
She works for the Forest Service as a fire lookout. She lives in a small tower in the wilderness.
“I pretty much spend almost all of my time upstairs with my dog and my binoculars looking for fires,” Sims says.
And she shares videos about her work on a TikTok account with more than 170,000 followers.
A lot of her videos are funny and light-hearted takes on life in a 14-by-14 foot room with no running water — for example, a tour of her outhouse.
But she also uses her platform to educate people about the growing danger of wildfire. Conditions are getting hotter and drier.
“Our fire seasons are becoming longer and more intense,” she says. “And so fire lookouts are becoming more and more important because fires could pop off any time and be more destructive than before.”
So she provides a rare glimpse into life on the front lines of wildfire prevention — and some cute videos of her dog, too.
Read: Wildfires and climate change: What’s the connection?
Reporting credit: Sarah Kennedy/ChavoBart Digital Media
