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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.
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| 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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Scorched Earth begins in 1870 with the "chance frontier meeting" between former Union General Philip Sheridan and a mountain man, which Barker argues had "a profound effect on the future of public land management and, later, the environmental movement" (p. 13). Seeking to elevate Sheridan into the elite ranks of conservation's "who's who," Barker posits that the general best known for his ruthless "winter campaigning" against Plains Indians was also among the first to envision a "Greater Yellowstone" that anticipated late-twentieth-century ecosystem management philosophies. It is too great a stretch. As Barker himself admits, Sheridan and his fellow army officers saw "patrolling the park as a natural extension of [their] duties in the American Indian wars" (p. 60). Nevertheless, Barker effectively demonstrates that Sheridan's military mindset did forge a fundamental federal response to fire in the forests: fire was the enemy. And in 1886, the war began as the First Cavalry, armed with shovels and buckets, rode into battle near Mammoth Hot Springs. Their success, Barker suggests, inspired future foresters like Gifford Pinchot to believe that they could control nature through scientific management. |
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By the early twentieth century, "fire control" had become primarily the federal government's responsibility, and U.S. Forest Service firefighters comprised its vanguard troops. Yet, as Barker shows, this war was far from cost-effective, and critics like Robert Marshall and Aldo Leopold challenged the folly of full fire suppression. But for decades, scientists proved no match for Smokey Bear, an icon Barker calls "an anthropomorphized version of the Forest Service" (p. 157). However, as the environmental movement gained momentum during the 1960s, the restorative role of fire re-emerged, clearing the way for a limited natural fire policy at Yellowstone that would, as Barker states, "restore ignition to nature" (p. 168). But no one predicted the summer of 1988. Fed by a devastating combination of weather, fuel, and wind, the Yellowstone infernos scorched more than a million acres and indelibly burned their way into the American psyche. The legacy of that holocaust, Barker concludes, is decidedly mixed: "in the wake of the Yellowstone fires the pendulum had shifted back to a preference for suppression" (p. 231), and "now firefighting and presuppression funds and money for prescribed burning and thinning are driving the Forest Service's budget the same way the subsidized road and logging programs did in the 1980s" (p. 235). |
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Barker's journalistic background makes him a fine storyteller, and his first-hand reporting of that fateful summer is both insightful and compelling. Overall, Scorched Earth is a fair and effective synthetic examination of the importance of fire and Yellowstone in the nation's conservation movement. |
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Sara Dant Ewert is associate professor of History at Weber State University. Her current research focuses on the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act and the role of Idaho Senator Frank Church in the wilderness movement. |
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