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Reviewed by:
  • America’s Fires: A Historical Context for Policy and Practice
  • Philip Scarpino (bio)
America’s Fires: A Historical Context for Policy and Practice. By Stephen J. Pyne. Durham, N.C, Forest History Society, 2009. Pp. 94. $9.95.

The Forest History Society (FHS) teamed with Stephen J. Pyne to publish America’s Fires: A Historical Context for Policy and Practice, a revision of a volume in the FHS’s Issues series written by Pyne and first published in 1997. FHS intends its Issues series to make history useful, with the author of each volume charged to “examine an issue and synthesize its substantial literature, while keeping the general reader in mind” (p. iv).

Stephen Pyne is uniquely qualified by experience and publications to author this volume. He spent a number of years fighting fire for the National Park Service (NPS) with the North Rim Longshots based in Grand Canyon National Park. Reflecting on that experience in Fire on the Rim: A Firefighter’s Season at the Grand Canyon (1989), Pyne observes that “for a true Longshot it is burned into memory” (p. 157). The experience of firefighting was, indeed, burned into Stephen Pyne’s memory, as he became the world’s leading scholar of the history of wildfire. His publication record includes

Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (1982), as well as volumes on fire in Australia, Canada, Europe, and elsewhere—a feat that must have required at least as much energy and commitment as digging fire lines in the hot sun on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.

America’s Fires offers a short, sharp, and focused overview of the history of wildfire and wildfire policy in the United States, ranging from “Aboriginal Fire” to “Possible Futures.” Pyne explains the impact of the massive, western fires of 1910 on the “psyche” and the fire-suppression policies of a young, evolving Forest Service embedded in the Progressive reform crusade. He concludes that “out of the ashes of the Great Fires emerged, almost fully realized, the American way of fire protection.” Chapters 3 and 4 address a sixty-year campaign spearheaded by the Forest Service in which fire would be “prevented where possible and fought where necessary” (p. 30). Chapters 5 and 6 address the unintended consequences of that policy and a dramatic shift in attitudes and policies toward the role of wildfire beginning in the 1960s and accelerating through the balance of the twentieth century. Pyne covers a revolution among federal agencies in the late 1970s; the impact of the Yellowstone fires of 1998 and devastating fire seasons of 1994 and 2000; the influence of ecologists and environmentalists; and a policy reorientation toward suppressing “bad” fires and allowing “good” ones to burn. For a variety of historically constructed reasons, restoring fire to the American forest landscape, including exurban zones around many cities, has proven to be a challenging venture.

This volume does many things very well. It offers a masterful overview of the shifting attitudes and practices and policies toward wildfire in [End Page 646] America’s forests. America’s Fires makes history useful, clearly and concisely explaining the history of wildfire and wildfire policy in America, and in the last several pages providing analysis of potential future relationships between Americans and wildfire. America’s Fires does not offer the depth of analysis of Pyne’s other volumes. Some readers will wish for citations instead of a list of “Selected Reading.” Even so, what this volume sets out to do, it does extremely well. It is good history written to be used, which should be read by busy individuals who craft and implement wildfire management and control policies. American’s Fires should also work effectively in a variety of college classes in forestry, urban and land-use planning, environmental studies, and American history.

Philip Scarpino

Philip Scarpino, professor of history at IUPUI, specializes in public and environmental history. His most recent publication is “Addressing Cross-Border Pollution of the Great Lakes after World War II: The Canada Ontario Agreement and the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement” in Michael Behiels and Reginald Stuart, eds., Transnationalism: Canada-United States History into the 21st Century...

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