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To the Last Smoke #1
Florida: A Fire Survey
In Florida, fire season is plural, and it is most often a verb. Something can always burn. Fires burn longleaf, slash, and sand pine. They burn wiregrass, sawgrass, and palmetto. The lush growth, the dry winters, the widely cast sparks—Florida is built to burn.
In this important new collection of essays on the region, Stephen J. Pyne colorfully explores the ways the region has approached fire management. Florida has long resisted national models of fire suppression in favor of prescribed burning, for which it has ideal environmental conditions and a robust culture. Out of this heritage the fire community has created institutions to match. The Tallahassee region became the ignition point for the national fire revolution of the 1960s. Today, it remains the Silicon Valley of prescription burning. How and why this happened is the topic of a fire reconnaissance that begins in the panhandle and follows Floridian fire south to the Everglades.
Florida is the first book in a multivolume series describing the nation’s fire scene region by region. The volumes in To the Last Smoke will also cover California, 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.”
In this important new collection of essays on the region, Stephen J. Pyne colorfully explores the ways the region has approached fire management. Florida has long resisted national models of fire suppression in favor of prescribed burning, for which it has ideal environmental conditions and a robust culture. Out of this heritage the fire community has created institutions to match. The Tallahassee region became the ignition point for the national fire revolution of the 1960s. Today, it remains the Silicon Valley of prescription burning. How and why this happened is the topic of a fire reconnaissance that begins in the panhandle and follows Floridian fire south to the Everglades.
Florida is the first book in a multivolume series describing the nation’s fire scene region by region. The volumes in To the Last Smoke will also cover California, 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.”
184 pages, Paperback
Published March 31, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 11, 2021
Stephen Pyne is, without a doubt, America's preeminent fire historian. With dozens of books on wildfire domestically and abroad, he's also probably the most prolific author - at least by words and pages - on the flames that shape our world.
Yet, this book stands out from the rest of his oeuvre. The format is /highly/ effective, using short essays to zoom in on particular actors, places, institutions, and historical moments in Florida's fire story. Pyne is a historian's historian, and his works are characterized by incredible detail and literary flair. This more concise, episodic format makes the writing all the more accessible; providing a style that naturally draws out characters and compelling moments.
What results is both an engaging book and a valuable resource. By focusing in on specific moments, people, and places, Pyne provides a highly valuable text to historians and fire folks alike. The essays do a nice job of capturing manageable stories (some of the predictable Floridian ones, like Tall Timbers or The Nature Conservancy, as well as perhaps less expected ones, like fire + NASA's launch facilities).
These stories work best, at least in this volume, when they're narrowly focused. The chapters on Tall Timbers and John Shea's infamous essay, for example, provide a clear scope that puts the character and story first. In telling these constrained vignettes, Pyne is highly effective in making linkages and connections to broader themes. Moreover, the essays become doubly valuable, documenting case studies of intrinsic value to the historical record, but also situating and contextualizing them in the broader themes and patterns. By contrast, some of the chapters that I found slightly less compelling were those that strayed from the narrow story and became more thematic and literary. For example, I found the chapter entitled "Regime Change: St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge" less accessible for deploying the case as a foil rather than a story. The writing was more conceptual and the conclusions more challenging to pin down as the story floated away from the case.
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The core question motivating the book is "why has Florida been such an outlier on the national fire scene, in its willingness and practice of extensive prescribed fire?" At times, such as in the Tall Timbers and Nature Conservancy chapters, it felt as though Pyne was advancing a very clear argument: Florida chooses to burn (a) because Florida will burn, regardless, so choosing to burn is better than having that choice made for you; and (b) because regular fire is infused in its ethos, its culture, and the heritage of its land-managing people, communities, and institutions.
Interestingly, the prologue and the epilogue bookend the book with a slightly different analysis. Here, the invisibility of Florida's fire is foregrounded; the fact that fire does /not/ have the presence and visibility of elsewhere across the United States. Smoke, Pyne points out in the prologue, tends to dissipate quite rapidly compared to more inland landscapes (though, he also highlights smoke as a challenge of fire management in Florida in the epilogue). Likewise, the highly manicured environments of the coast - the Space Coast, Disney, beaches - tend to be just removed enough as to not encounter fire in the same ways as other more classic 'interface' communities.
It leaves one wondering to what degree fire is in the culture vs. invisible and unrecognized. Of course, this is an impossible question, given how heterogenous a state is. But, perhaps that's the key lesson to take away from the book: it's in the proverbial lifeblood of those who see it, and it's peripheral and infrequent enough for the rest that it's allowed more leeway than in California or Colorado. The notion that better policy and practice can result from engagement by those invested and aware, and disengagement from the rest, doesn't seem that farfetched at all.
---
I'll invariably have more thoughts about this book as I go forward through the rest of the "A Fire Survey" series sequentially. For now, though, I have to say that I'm impressed: the format and style brings out the best in Pyne's writing. And, it pays it forward in both an engaging and deeply valuable tour of important actors and places in Floridian fire. My only disappointment was his decision not to include a chapter on fire at Disney!
Yet, this book stands out from the rest of his oeuvre. The format is /highly/ effective, using short essays to zoom in on particular actors, places, institutions, and historical moments in Florida's fire story. Pyne is a historian's historian, and his works are characterized by incredible detail and literary flair. This more concise, episodic format makes the writing all the more accessible; providing a style that naturally draws out characters and compelling moments.
What results is both an engaging book and a valuable resource. By focusing in on specific moments, people, and places, Pyne provides a highly valuable text to historians and fire folks alike. The essays do a nice job of capturing manageable stories (some of the predictable Floridian ones, like Tall Timbers or The Nature Conservancy, as well as perhaps less expected ones, like fire + NASA's launch facilities).
These stories work best, at least in this volume, when they're narrowly focused. The chapters on Tall Timbers and John Shea's infamous essay, for example, provide a clear scope that puts the character and story first. In telling these constrained vignettes, Pyne is highly effective in making linkages and connections to broader themes. Moreover, the essays become doubly valuable, documenting case studies of intrinsic value to the historical record, but also situating and contextualizing them in the broader themes and patterns. By contrast, some of the chapters that I found slightly less compelling were those that strayed from the narrow story and became more thematic and literary. For example, I found the chapter entitled "Regime Change: St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge" less accessible for deploying the case as a foil rather than a story. The writing was more conceptual and the conclusions more challenging to pin down as the story floated away from the case.
---
The core question motivating the book is "why has Florida been such an outlier on the national fire scene, in its willingness and practice of extensive prescribed fire?" At times, such as in the Tall Timbers and Nature Conservancy chapters, it felt as though Pyne was advancing a very clear argument: Florida chooses to burn (a) because Florida will burn, regardless, so choosing to burn is better than having that choice made for you; and (b) because regular fire is infused in its ethos, its culture, and the heritage of its land-managing people, communities, and institutions.
Interestingly, the prologue and the epilogue bookend the book with a slightly different analysis. Here, the invisibility of Florida's fire is foregrounded; the fact that fire does /not/ have the presence and visibility of elsewhere across the United States. Smoke, Pyne points out in the prologue, tends to dissipate quite rapidly compared to more inland landscapes (though, he also highlights smoke as a challenge of fire management in Florida in the epilogue). Likewise, the highly manicured environments of the coast - the Space Coast, Disney, beaches - tend to be just removed enough as to not encounter fire in the same ways as other more classic 'interface' communities.
It leaves one wondering to what degree fire is in the culture vs. invisible and unrecognized. Of course, this is an impossible question, given how heterogenous a state is. But, perhaps that's the key lesson to take away from the book: it's in the proverbial lifeblood of those who see it, and it's peripheral and infrequent enough for the rest that it's allowed more leeway than in California or Colorado. The notion that better policy and practice can result from engagement by those invested and aware, and disengagement from the rest, doesn't seem that farfetched at all.
---
I'll invariably have more thoughts about this book as I go forward through the rest of the "A Fire Survey" series sequentially. For now, though, I have to say that I'm impressed: the format and style brings out the best in Pyne's writing. And, it pays it forward in both an engaging and deeply valuable tour of important actors and places in Floridian fire. My only disappointment was his decision not to include a chapter on fire at Disney!
March 14, 2019
The book is a good overview of the history and current state of prescribed fire in Florida. The author, however, is way too far up his own ass and his almost nonstop barrage of forced similes, awkward analogies and pretentious doubletalk nearly undermines his efforts.
March 17, 2025
Pyne is THE expert on fire — and this excellent review of Florida’s respectful use of prescribed fire to protect species and save life and property is engrossing.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews