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Book Review
| Fire: A Brief History. By Stephen J. Pyne. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001. xvii + 204 pp. Illustrations, maps, charts, bibliography, index. $18.95, paper.)Forests under Fire: A Century of Ecosystem Mismanagement in the Southwest. Edited by Christopher J. Huggard and Arthur R. Gómez. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001. xxxiv + 307 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, index. $40.00.)
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Stephen Pyne's book is more than a history of forest fires. It is a global history of human involvement with the element of fire. Only two hundred pages, it is nevertheless a magnum opus, spanning the history of fire from its origin to the high-tech fire powering the information revolution and the world market economy. |
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Fire, Pyne begins, has a palaeontology. In coal beds, remains of primal forests older than the first hominids, evidence exists of prevalent fire; from 2 to 13 percent of coal is fossil charcoal. The ecosystems of the deep past were formed by fire regimes operating without human help. |
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The thread of Pyne's narrative deals with humans as manipulators of fire in all times and everywhere possible. Aboriginal hunters and burgeoning farmers used fire to "unhinge" ecosystems and decimate competitors. In the wake of fires brought by settlers, the fauna of hitherto isolated continents lost habitats. But the landscape resulting from repeated burning was a mosaic resistant to firestorms. It represented an adjustment of inhabitants to environment through customary use of fire. When colonizers, often Europeans, ended native fire regimes, the mosaic gave way to overgrown cover vulnerable to disaster. |
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This is a history of fire in all its forms. Pyne includes cities, where the built environment served as fuel, as in London in 1666 and San Francisco in 1906. His chapters on fire technology run from charcoal in metallurgy to gunpowder, the steam engine, and fossil fuels in the twentieth century. Not missing a beat, he includes cookery, the fiery philosophy of Heraclitus, and the Kyoto Protocol, all in proper context, and concludes with a look at fire in the new millennium. |
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Pyne's style is the essence of scholarly accessibility. Only rarely does he let familiarity presume too much, as in referring to the forests of Banff under fire exclusion as "common green gunk" (p. 62). The book's conciseness and reliability recommends it to teachers of world and environmental history courses as a supplementary text. |
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Forests under Fire is a metaphorical
title, a fact belied by the spectacular crown fire inflaming the
dust jacket. One article in this collection is a study of fire suppression
by John Herron; elsewhere wildfire receives incidental mention.
The editors, Christopher Huggard and Arthur Gómez, have assembled
essays exemplifying forest management in the twentieth-century Southwest.
The book is timely, since the landscape reveals the bankruptcy of
past and continuing policies.
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Gómez's history of lumbering on Apache reservations is the first chapter. Inter-agency rivalry between the Forest Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs and maneuvering of private and tribal timber companies are explicated. The last sentence: "Today, it is the Apache tribe—not the federal government— that ultimately must manage the vast but no longer limitless forest resources," has been rendered poignant by the firestorms that swept the Mogollon Rim after the book appeared (p. 37). |
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