To the Last Smoke – serie

It’s a place of big skies and big fires, big burns like those of 1910 and 1988 that riveted national attention. Conflagrations like those of 1934 and 2007 that reformed national policy. Blowups like that in Mann Gulch that shaped the literature of American fire. Big fires mostly hidden in the backcountry like the Fitz Creek and Howler fires that inspired the practice of managed wildfires. Until the fire revolution of the 1960s, no region so shaped the American way of fire.The Northern Rockies remain one of three major hearths for America’s fire culture. They hold a major fire laboratory, an equipment development center, an aerial fire depot, and a social engagement with fire—even a literature. Missoula is to fire in the big backcountry what Tallahassee is to prescribed burning and what Southern California is to urban-wildland hybrids. On its margins, Boise hosts the National Interagency Fire Center. In this structured collection of essays on the region, Stephen J. Pyne explores what makes The Northern Rockies distinctive and what sets it apart from other regions of the country. Surprisingly, perhaps, the story is equally one of big bureaucracies and of generations that encounter the region’s majestic landscapes through flame.

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.