To the Last Smoke – serie

The coastal sage and shrublands of California burn. The mountain-encrusting chaparral burns. The conifer forests of the Sierra Nevada, Cascades, and Trinity Alps burn. The rain-shadowed deserts after watering by El Niño cloudbursts and the thick forests of the rumpled Coast Range—all burn according to local rhythms of wetting and drying. Fire season, so the saying goes, lasts 13 months. In this collection of essays on the region, Stephen J. Pyne colorfully explores the ways the region has approached fire management and what sets it apart from other parts of the country. Pyne writes that what makes California's fire scene unique is how its dramatically distinctive biomes have been yoked to a common system, ultimately committed to suppression, and how its fires burn with a character and on a scale commensurate with the state's size and political power. California has not only a ferocity of flame but a cultural intensity that few places can match. California's fires are instantly and hugely broadcast. They shape national institutions, and they have repeatedly defined the discourse of fire's history. No other place has so sculpted the American way of fire. California is part of the multivolume series describing the nation's fire scene region by region. The volumes in To the Last Smoke also cover Florida, the Northern Rockies, the Great Plains, the Southwest, and several other critical fire regions. The series serves as an important punctuation point to Pyne's fifty-year career with wildland fire—both as a firefighter and a fire scholar. These unique surveys of regional pyrogeography are Pyne's way of ""keeping with it to the end,"" encompassing the directive from his rookie season to stay with every fire ""to the last smoke.

Its fires help give to the Interior West a peculiar character, fundamental both to its natural and human histories. While a general aridity unites the region, defined here as the states of Nevada, Utah, and western Colorado, its fires illuminate the ways its various parts show  profoundly different landscapes, biotas, and human settlement experiences.In this book, fire historian Stephen J. Pyne explains the relevance of the region to the national fire scene. The Interior West offered the first scientific inquiry into landscape fire in the United States, including a map of Utah burns published in 1878 as part of John Wesley Powell’s arid lands report. Then its significance faded and by the 20th century, the region had become the hole in the national donut of fire management. Pyne discusses the region’s more recent return to prominence due to fires along its front ranges; to invasive species, both exotics like cheatgrass and unleashed natives like mountain pine beetle; and to its fatality fires, notably at South Canyon in 1994.The Interior West shows the variety of fire issues in the region and their significance to the country overall through thoughtful framing and lively essays.

Fire is special. Even among the ancient elements, fire is different because it alone is a reaction. It synthesizes its surroundings; it takes its character from its context. It varies by place, by culture, and by time. It has no single expression. There is no single way to understand it. The latest book in the To the Last Smoke series, Here and There explores how singular moments create prisms by which to understand fire. In this collection of essays, historian and renowned fire expert Stephen J. Pyne offers his reflections on national and global wildland fire management, explains how fire policy has changed within the United States and how it differs from other countries, muses on the next wave of fire research, explains the history of one of the most famous fire paintings of all time, and distills the long saga of fire on Earth and its role in underwriting an Anthropocene that might equally be called a Pyrocene. Presented through a mixture of journalism, history, and literary imagination, Here and There moves the discussion of fire beyond the usual formations of science and policy within a national narrative to one of thoughtful interpretation, analysis, and commentary. Centered on the unique complexities of fire management in a global world, Here and There offers a punctuation point to our understanding of wildfire.