The Wildfire Reader: A Century of Failed Forest Policy

by George Wuerthner (Editor)

The Wildfire Reader presents, in an affordable paperback edition, the essays included in Wildfire , offering a concise overview of fire landscapes and the past century of forest policy that has affected them.

440 pages, Paperback

First published August 4, 2006

Reviews

[Judd Street · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is incredibly frustrating how prescient this book is: Despite being 18 years old, many of the insights and arguments within continue to be just as true now as they were then. Yet, somehow with fires and emergencies, we just manage to never listen or learn...

At its core, this edited book is about casting a new relationship with fire. As articulated in an early chapter, a fundamental goal is "assuring that fire has the right habitat to do the biological work required of it without damaging humanity's own habitations" (p. 19). Even more directly:

No attempt should be made to "fireproof" the forested landscape. We should allow wildfires to burn in our forests. The focus should be on reducing the possible damage caused by those fires. Homeowners should be fireproofing their homes and homesites. Forest ecosystems should not be harmed because homeowners have not taken the necessary safety measures needed where fire is common and natural occurrence." (p. 248)

Or again:

To stop making warfare on wildfire does not mean that society should stop all fire suppression. As long as there are human communities and natural resource values at risk of unwanted damage from wildland fires, there will always be a need for some suppression activities. But the very mean and definition of suppression must change on the level of a paradigm shift to reflect a new, emerging restorationist ethos, and to conform to some system of democratic citizen involvement and government accountability. Suppression should no longer be practiced as the myopic attempt to aggressively contain and control fires to the least possible size or duration. Rather, suppression should be redefined to mean reducing the unnatural severity of fires while permitting them to burn as much acreage as safely possible to meet ecological restoration objectives. (p. 280-281)

Or again:

And in some places, people are simply going to have to learn to live with flames and smoke of one sort or another if they are to dwell sustainably within fire-prone landscapes. (p. 295)

Many chapters just knock it out of the park. The trio of "Incendiary Language," "Hot News," and "Don't Get Hosed" do a great job exploring the politicization of language in wildfire.

There are parts where the reader needs to be conscious of the perspectives of particular chapter authors. While it's true that "forests cannot be fireproofed,..." (p. 147) the "...particularly not through logging" is a contentious debate in fire. I'm not going to try to settle that here, but suffice to say plenty of folks believe there's a firm, absolute answer to this one way or the other.

I also love the provocative critique of the wildfire industrial complex "gravy train" in "The Flawed Economics of Fire Suppression," though this of course offers again a partial view (even if one I see many reasons to agree with!). This financial critique comes again in "Money to Burn," which points out that the perpetual promise of reimbursement ends up being the source of many ills in fire management (p. 250), and by the admonishments of members of congress tempted to "be heroes" by spending more on fire suppression and firefighting (p. 259). It also comes up in calling the "fire-industrial complex... a "racket" in almost every sense of the word" for its total futility in suppression (p. 332).

There really are just so many quotable moments in this. I love the beautifully clear articulation of "Weather starts fires. Weather puts them out. What we do in between, we call "firefighting" - which is mostly a flamboyant sideshow to convince the public that the government is doing something, even if that something is misguided, in addition to funding the fire-industrial complex." (p. 328)

Look, it's just a great book. It has a bunch of the challenging points that we should have spent the last 18 years grappling with, rather than waking up with amnesia and wondering 'how fire got so bad.' And, it's just plain fun, such as its "Glossary of Euphemisms and Spin." Yes, it's a political advocacy tome, and yes, it's best for readers with some familiarity with fire to enable sparring with its claims, but it's a usefully provocative book, and many people would do much better to engage seriously with these questions.

[Edd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting anthology with lots of information. It gets a little dry (no pun intended) and repetititive (pun intended).