| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.3

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Forest Fires: The Story of a War. By Patrick Blanchet. Montreal: Cantos International Publishing, 2003. 182 pp. Bibliographical references. $39.95.
The addition of "in Quebec" to the title of this book would make it more accurate. This would in no way denigrate its contribution. As pointed out by noted forest fire authority Stephen J. Pyne in the preface, Canada's only other previous book-length study of the topic comes from Alberta.	1
The span of coverage in this book is impressive. It begins with the first provincial fire laws in 1870, an attempt to prevent standing timber from being ravished by escaped campfires or the flames of land clearing and slash burning by settlers. Copies of this seminal act were posted on trees and church doors as part of what has to be one of the first prevention campaigns in North America. The ensuing political history of provincial leadership is intertwined with the ongoing struggle to balance farming and forestry and the fair sharing of fire prevention and control costs between industrial forest operators and the government. Railroads were a major challenge, too. Although a law as early as 1883 required smokestacks to be equipped with primitive spark arresters, one train in 1908 kept two fire rangers busy suppressing nineteen fires it started in a single day.	. . .

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