From a fire policy of prevention at all costs to today's restored burning, Between Two Fires is America's history channeled through the story of wildland fire management. Stephen J. Pyne tells of a fire revolution that began in the 1960s as a reaction to simple suppression and single-agency hegemony, and then matured into more enlightened programs of fire management. It describes the counterrevolution of the 1980s that stalled the movement, the revival of reform after 1994, and the fire scene that has evolved since then. Pyne is uniquely qualified to tell America’s fire story. The author of more than a score of books, he has told fire’s history in the United States, Australia, Canada, Europe, and the Earth overall. In his earlier life, he spent fifteen seasons with the North Rim Longshots at Grand Canyon National Park. In Between Two Fires, Pyne recounts how, after the Great Fires of 1910, a policy of fire suppression spread from America’s founding corps of foresters into a national policy that manifested itself as a costly all-out war on fire. After fifty years of attempted fire suppression, a revolution in thinking led to a more pluralistic strategy for fire’s restoration. The revolution succeeded in displacing suppression as a sole strategy, but it has failed to fully integrate fire and land management and has fallen short of its goals. Today, the nation’s backcountry and increasingly its exurban fringe are threatened by larger and more damaging burns, fire agencies are scrambling for funds, firefighters continue to die, and the country seems unable to come to grips with the fundamentals behind a rising tide of megafires. Pyne has once again constructed a history of record that will shape our next century of fire management. Between Two Fires is a story of ideas, institutions, and fires. It’s America’s story told through the nation’s flames.  

Product Description: Pyne traces the impact of fire in Australia, from its influence on vegetation to its use by Aborigines and European settlers.�Mr. Pyne, showing what a historian deeply schooled in environmental science can contribute to our awareness of nature and culture, has produced a provocative work that is a major contribution to the literature of environmental studies...read more

Product Description: In most cities today, fire has been reduced to a sporadic and isolated threat. But throughout history the constant risk of fire has left a deep and lasting imprint on almost every dimension of urban society. This volume, the first truly global study of urban conflagration, shows how fire has shaped cities throughout the modern world, from Europe to the imperial colonies, major trade entrepôts, and non-European capitals, right up to such present-day megacities as Lagos and Jakarta...read more

Product Description: It has become commonplace these days to speak of “unpacking” texts. Voice and Vision is a book about packing that prose in the first place. While history is scholarship, it is also art—that is, literature. And while it has no need to emulate fiction, slump into memoir, or become self-referential text, its composition does need to be conscious and informed...read more

Fire is a defining element in Canadian land and life. With few exceptions, Canada’s forests and prairies have evolved with fire. Its peoples have exploited fire and sought to protect themselves from its excesses, and since Confederation, the country has devised various institutions to connect fire and society. Awful Splendour narrates the history of this grand saga.The story has three parts. "Torch" sketches the historical geography of fire from the retreat of the ice sheets to the advent of agriculture, with human control limited to ignition. "Axe" focuses on the era of European colonizatioin and describes what happens when people create new fuels through cutting. "Engine" traces the impact of industrialization. This section tells the story of institutions and events, province by province, and for the federal government, era by era, through the early 1980s. An Epilogue summarizes recent developments.Fire remains a vital presence in the boreal environment. How Canadians have chosen to relate to it says a great deal about their national character. The book will interest geographers, historians, and members of the fire community.

Describes the disastrous 1910 season, as wildfires swept across the Pacific Northwest, claiming lives, towns, and mining camps, and illustrates how American bureaucracies, politics, developments, and ideas collide with nature.

As Stephen Pyne reveals in his biography, few other scientists can match Grove Karl Gilbert’s range of talents. A premier explorer of the American West who made major contributions to the cascade of new discoveries about the earth, Gilbert described two novel forms of mountain building, invented the concept of the graded stream, inaugurated modern theories of lunar origin, helped found the science of geomorphology, and added to the canon of conservation literature.    Gilbert knew most of geology's grand figures--including John Wesley Powell, Clarence Dutton,  and Clarence King--and Pyne's chronicle of the imperturbable, quietly unconventional Gilbert is couterpointed with sketches of these prominent scientists. The man who wrote that "happiness is sitting under a tent with walls uplifted, just after a brief shower,", created answers to the larger questions of the earth in ways that have become classics of his science.

Product Description: "Painting, architecture, politics, even gardening and golf—all have their critics and commentators," observes Stephen Pyne. "Fire does not." Aside from news reports on fire disasters, most writing about fire appears in government reports and scientific papers—and in journalism that has more in common with the sports page than the editorial page...read more

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Product Description: From The Ice:"It appears out of the fog and low clouds, like a white comet in the twilight.To enter Greater Antarctica is to be drawn into a maelstrom of ice. Ice is the beginning of Antarctica and ice is its end. As one moves from perimeter to interior, the proportion of ice relentlessly increases...read more

An acclaimed environmental writer and firefighter in the Grand Canyon for fifteen years presents an informed, brief geological, political, cultural, and economic history of the canyon, complete with photographs, maps, and charts. Reprint.