America’s Fires: A Historical Context for Policy and Practice

America does not have a fire problem. It has many fire problems. The policy of fire exclusion through most of the 20th century seemed successful at first but eventually lead to larger, more intense, and damaging fires. By the mid-1970s federal agencies pulled back from the fire suppression model and embraced a mix of fire practices, including forms of prescribed burning and let-burn policies.

The 1988 fires in Yellowstone National Park carried fire issues to the public, advertising the ecological significance of free-burning fire and the dilemmas of trying to manage it. In America’s Fires, Stephen Pyne, the world’s leading fire historian, reviews the historical context of our fire issues and policies. The resulting analysis shows why it is imperative that the nation review its policies toward wildland fires and find ways to live with them more intelligently.

This revised edition was published with support from David L. Luke III, The National Forest Foundation, the U.S. Forest Service, MeadWestvaco Corporation, and the Lynn W. Day Endowment for Forest History Publications.

Stephen J. Pyne is a professor in the Human Dimensions Faculty, School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, a past president of the American Society for Environmental History, and the recipient of numerous fellowships and honors, including the Robert Kirsch Award for body-of-work contribution to American letters.

He has written a score of books, of which a dozen deal with fire on Earth. Among them are fire histories of the United States (Fire in America), Australia (Burning Bush), Canada Awful Splendor), Europe including Russia (Vestal Fire), and Earth overall (World Fire; Fire: A Brief History). Others include two editions of Introduction to Wildland Fire and two current-affairs studies, one for the U.S. (Tending Fire) and one for Australia (The Still-Burning Bush)

His interest in fire grew out of 18 seasons with the National Park Service, of which 15 were spent with the North Rim Longshots, the subject of his book, Fire on the Rim. He is presently contributing his part to the exurban fire problem with a cabin bordering the Apache National Forest. He confesses to having started and stopped a fire on every continent.