| Book Review | Environmental History, 12.2

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 12.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Scorched Earth: How the Fires of Yellowstone Changed America. By Rocky Barker. Washington, DC: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2005. 277 pp. Includes illustrations, notes, and index. Cloth $24.95.

Rocky Barker's engaging and lively Scorched Earth: How the Fires of Yellowstone Changed America effectively chronicles evolving American attitudes about conservation and fire, and brings to the fore a rich cast of characters responsible for significant shifts in federal policy and management. But the book's title is deceptive. This is not an in-depth account of the 1988 Yellowstone conflagration that riveted Americans to their televisions and made fire management the topic of water cooler debates. Instead, Barker's sweeping narrative builds upon the scholarship of Stephen Pyne, utilizing brief biographies and the nation's first national park as an occasional illustrative case study to probe and examine the "clashes of values over the control of nature" (p. 8). As such, the book falls short of illuminating "how the fires of Yellowstone changed America," but it ably demonstrates that fire and ecosystem management are "mostly about managing people and our willingness to accept change" (p. 237).

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