Burning Questions: America's Fight with Nature's Fire
Editorial Reviews
Review
“A timely contribution focusing on past and present national wildland fire management policies....Carle offers a perceptive and informative discussion of this compelling ecological and natural resource management issue. The book provides an excellent background for understanding the continuing fire suppression versus prescribed burning dialogue and why current wildland fire issues are drawing national attention. Recommended for all readership levels and especially for scientists, resource managers, ecologists, and environmentalists.”–
“[D]ispelling the popular belief that the policy of preventing all fires on public lands was uniformly agreed upon and practiced, Burning Questions resurrects voices and correspondence from participants throughout the twentieth century we have not widely heard before who often engaged in bitter debate. They saw fire not as an enemy to be vanquished, but a necessary part of forest ecology. Their heretical beliefs and scientific studies--along with the equally adamant convictions of forest managers who believed that fire and forest reproduction were incompatible and that prescribed fire was impractical, caused more damage than it prevented, and just plain "wrong"--provide fascinating insight into the shaping of our country's still-evolving wild-land fire management policy.”–
“This book is recommended for anyone who wants to understand (at a deeper level than the dramatic but often misleading headline stories and television video footage ) the role of fire in our public lands and how fire policy came to its current state.”–
“The heavy use of primary sources makes this work an invaluable window into a controversy which, although kept chiefly within the forest-related sciences, nonetheless had a widespread if little recognized impact on American culture and its approach to the use and management of woodland resources. Valuable for all college and university collection supporting course work in forestry, wildlife biology, botany, agricultural sciences, and population geography.”–
“This timely book chronicles the controversies of the last 100 years surrounding fire suppression and the debates over prescribed burning. The impacts of the effective public relations campaign of Smokey Bear begun in 1944 and the historic fires of Yellowstone and the Oakland Hills are detailed. An historical account of the prescribed burning in Calaveras Big Trees State Park pioneered in 1970 is particularly interesting.”–
“Drawing into question the standard practices of fire suppression and revising the possibility of prescribed burning, this book recounts 100 years of fire-fighting controversy. It traces the debate from its late nineteenth century origins to the disasters of 2000 and 2001.”–
Book Description
Fire suppression caused a surfeit of natural fuels in our forests, cumulating in the increasingly severe, uncontrollable fires of recent years: the fires in Yellowstone, the Oakland Hills fires, Los Alamos, and the summers of 2000 and 2001. Carle explores 100 years of controversy over prescribed burning--using fire as a tool--and fire suppression, using the voices of early advocates and today's proponents to examine the strategy of controlled burning.
Burning Questions: America's Fight with Nature's Fire
Burning Questions: America's Fight with Nature's Fire,David Carle,Praeger Trade,0275973719,American,Current Affairs,Environmental Science,Forest ecology,Forest fires,History,Life Sciences - Ecology - Forest Ecology,Nature,Nature / Field Guide Books,Politics/International Relations,Prescribed burning,Prevention and control,Trees & Forests - General,United States,20th century,Conservation of wildlife & habitats,Current Events / American,Forestry & silviculture: practice & techniques,Management of land & natural resources,Science / Environmental Science,USA
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