Book Review

In May 2000, a "controlled burn" proved to be anything but, as a fire set by National Park Service personnel at Bandelier National Monument nearly devastated Los Alamos. By the time 1,100 fire fighters managed to get the blaze under control, 18,000 people had been evacuated, 405 families had lost their homes, and nearly 48,000 acres had been charred. The fire burned over 9,000 acres of the Los Alamos National Laboratories site, coming within a mile of the main nuclear facilities and radioactive waste storage units.	1
Not surprisingly, a political frenzy resulted, with blame quickly focusing on the National Park Service. Park Service personnel defended themselves by arguing that they had just been trying to correct the unfortunate ecological results of decades of forest change. Fire suppression, combined with grazing, road building, logging, and urbanization, had led to drastic changes in forest structure and function across the southwest. Controlled burns, the Park Service claimed, would restore the health of the forest, reducing the risk of catastrophic fire.	2
Just the opposite resulted: catastrophic fire, severe erosion, potentially contaminated runoff, and a lethal political fallout were the outcomes of the Bandelier prescribed burn. These disasters came about not because the Park Service had gotten the science wrong, as many politicians claimed, but rather because Park Service personnel had failed to comprehend the complicated social context within which their scientific decisions were taking place. In other words, they overlooked the political, cultural, and social framework that made Los Alamos a lousy place to play with fire.	3
Forests Under Fire: A Century of Ecosystem Management describes that larger context, tracing the historical transformations that stymied the Park Service in May 2000. While Hal Rothman's claim in the epilogue that the region's shift in use and meaning of forests is "a transformation as radical as the Industrial Revolution itself" (p. 287) is surely exaggerated, he's correct that recreational use is replacing extractive use of the forest on public lands. In the most provocative and fascinating essay in the collection, "The Vallecitos Federal Sustained-Yield Unit: The (All Too) Human Dimension of Forest Management in Northern New Mexico, 1945–1998," Suzanne S. Forrest does a wonderful job exploring the social and cultural costs of this transformation. Forrest's essay reveals the ways that history complicates present management decisions, and gives readers a sense of what's at stake in community forestry.	4
The volume's strength is in delineating the social context of forestry. Essays such as Gómez's "Industry and Indian Self-Determination: Northern Arizona's Apache Lumbering Empire, 1870–1970," Smith's "A Social History of McPhee: Colorado's Largest Lumber Town," Huggard's "America's First Wilderness Area: Aldo Leopold, the Forest Service, and the Gila of New Mexico, 1924–1980, Herron's "Where There's Smoke": Wildfire Policy and Suppression in the American Southwest," and Hirt's "Biopolitics: A Case Study of Political Influence on Forest Management Decisions, Coronado National Forest, Arizona, 1980s–1990s" explore social interactions between foresters, loggers, ranchers, and environmentalists, and between Anglos, Hispanics, and Indians. The volume is not nearly as strong on the ecological questions at stake. For example, the book is subtitled "A Century of Ecosystem Mismanagement in the Southwest," but none of the essays makes a strong case that ecosystem mismanagement occurred; rather, the authors simply repeat claims by critics that mismanagement happened, without subjecting those claims to any critical analysis. Nevertheless, this volume provides a valuable overview of social perspectives on the southwestern forests.	5
Nancy Langston is associate professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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