Wildfire
A Century of Failed Forest Policy
live with wildfire is ultimately our wisest public policy.
With more than 150 dramatic photographs, Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy covers the topic of wildfire from ecological, economic, and social/political perspectives
while also documenting how past forest policies
have hindered natural processes, creating a tinderbox of problems that we are faced with today.
More than 25 leading thinkers in the field of fire ecology provide in-depth analyses, critiques, and compelling solutions for how we live with fire in our society. Using examples such as the epic Yellowstone fires of 1988, the ever-present southern California fires, and the
Northwest's Biscuit Fire of 2002, the book examines the ecology of these landscapes and the policies and practices that affected them and continue to affect them, such as fire suppression, prescribed burns, salvage logging, and land-use planning. Overall, the book aims to promote the restoration of fire to the landscape and to encourage its natural behavior so it can resume its role as
a major ecological process.
Reader advisory: This hefty, beautifully illustrated book — about as wide as a 25-year-old Doug fir stump — is likely to piss off the following: timber companies, loggers, Forest Service firefighters, the Oregon Board of Forestry, OSU College of Forestry administrators, herbicide companies, Columbia Helicopters and everyone else invested in the Old Forestry view that people should "manage" nature's wild forces in order to serve humanity's material needs.
In that line of thinking, wildfire is bad; it steals valuable timber that could have been logged and converted into useful things like paper and houses. Thus the development of a "fire-military-industrial" complex linking the Forest Service to industry and siphoning billions of tax dollars to fight fires on public lands.
Today, ecologists recognize that fire suppression does incalculable damage to forests that have evolved with wildfire, hijacking their natural processes and helping turn them, slowly but surely, into tree farms. Which, not incidentally, is convenient for timber companies hankering to log in public forests, and for land grant universities such as OSU that get a cut of the timber revenue.
In Wildfire, a project of the Foundation for Deep Ecology, more than 25 fire ecology experts — including Eugene's Timothy Ingalsbee — propose that wildfires are good, and that people's attempts to control them ultimately backfire. "While this book is about fire policy and fire ecology, it is also a discussion of a much larger philosophical debate over the ultimate role and influence humans should have on natural landscapes," editor George Wuerthner states in the introduction.
EW was privy to an email string between Big Timber allies reacting to this book. "Makes a feller retch," former OSU forestry professor Mike Newton wrote. "These guys have money," replied Bob Zybach of Oregon Websites and Watersheds, a timber think tank of sorts. "I plan to finger and smudge a copy in the bookstore, and then not buy it," added Lebanon tree farmer Mike Dubrasich, who administers the right-wing forestry blog SOSForests.com.
You may purchase this title at fine bookstores across the United States. Outside the USA, see our international sales information.
