Land on Fire: The New Reality of Wildfire in the West

by Gary Ferguson

Overview

“This comprehensive book offers a fascinating overview of how those fires are fought, and some conversation-starters for how we might reimagine our relationship with the woods.” —Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
 
Wildfire season is burning longer and hotter, affecting more and more people, especially in the west. Land on Fire explores the fascinating science behind this phenomenon and the ongoing research to find a solution. This gripping narrative details how years of fire suppression and chronic drought have combined to make the situation so dire. Award-winning nature writer Gary Ferguson brings to life the extraordinary efforts of those responsible for fighting wildfires, and deftly explains how nature reacts in the aftermath of flames. Dramatic photographs reveal the terror and beauty of fire, as well as the staggering effect it has on the landscape.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781604697001
Publisher:	Timber Press, Incorporated
Publication date:	06/21/2017
Pages:	212
Sales rank:	610,582
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Gary Ferguson has written many books on nature and science including Hawks Rest, the first nonfiction work to win both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award for Nonfiction, Decade of the Wolf, The Great Divide, and The Carry Home. His articles have appeared in Vanity Fair, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications. His lectures on wilderness are a culmination of 30 years researching—and experiencing—the marriage of wild lands, history, myth, and narrative psychology. Visit him at wildwords.net.

Read an Excerpt

Prologue
Across my thirty-five years of writing about the natural and cultural history of the American West—logging nearly a quarter million miles of highway and some 30,000 miles of trail along the way—wildfire has been a common companion. I’ve seen its handiwork all around my longtime home in southern Montana; how it’s driven new generations of aspen and lodgepole forests in the Beartooth Mountains; and farther to the south, in the outback of Yellowstone, the way it’s cleaned and pruned the Douglas-fir and Engelmann spruce forests. Flames at my back have sent me scurrying like a startled mouse out of the lonely folds of Hells Canyon, while big burns have eaten beyond recognition some of the landscapes I roamed in my youth: slices of the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, the Weminuche Wilderness of Colorado, the southern uplands of Utah.

When I first came to the West as a young man in the late 1970s, wildfire was still seen largely as a destructive force, which of course at times it can still seem today. But across the decades I’ve also come to know it as a powerful agent of healing, a mighty wand that wipes the land free of disease and insects and fallen timber to create a stage for healthy, altogether magnificent new flushes of life. By returning essential nutrients to the soil, fire allows a flush of grasses that can provide especially nutritious graze for elk and bison, not to mention food for dozens of species of groundforaging birds. At the same time, small mammals who feed on the seeds of those grasses tend to increase in number after a burn, in turn providing food for hawks, owls, coyotes, and the like.

Lately, though, I’ve also been witness to this land changing, increasingly being wrung dry by severe episodes of drought. And as a consequence, wildfire is establishing itself as a far bigger, much more forceful presence than ever before. In many recent years my neighbors and I have choked on smoke from burning forests, have turned our heads up to the August sky looking for rain until our necks hurt, and on several occasions have packed up a few precious belongings and evacuated our homes, hearts in our throats, in the face of advancing flames. Despite the hubris humans have so often brought to our relationships with the natural world (in the case of wildfire, once believing we could all but eliminate it), fire has proven awfully good at dealing blows to swagger.

What will we do as tens of thousands of acres of conifers, stressed by drought, succumb to infestations of beetles and disease, creating fuel loads that sooner or later will feed massive infernos? How do we control the invasive grasses and shrubs flaring across western landscapes, not only diminishing grazing values but also serving as flash fuses for the rapid spread of wildfire? With annual costs of fire suppression already in the billions, how do we fund not only future firefighting but also the prescription burning and forest-thinning operations needed to reduce the risk of major conflagrations? And even if we do find money for things like prescribed burns, will communities allow them, given growing concerns about air pollution as well as the possibility (though small) that such burns can now and then get out of control? And finally, how will the astonishing webs of life that are now strung across these great landscapes—encompassing salamanders and grizzlies, pikas and pinyons—be changed by the conditions that today allow wildfire such a heavy hand?

Like it or not, today seventy -five million people find themselves living in the western United States in a time of fire. And fire—like other big forces of nature—doesn’t suffer fools. It has no patience for our stubborn refusals to acknowledge the realities of our time. If we expect to minimize loss and suffering in the decades to come, we need to start making some serious changes to get along better with wildfire, not to mention living in ways that minimize the climate shifts that are making fire an ever more dangerous force. 
Maybe the first step is simply to ask questions. To learn—from the men and women whose lives turn around wildfire, as well as from the land itself. To educate ourselves toward some deeper understanding of how to live intelligently, even gracefully, in what has clearly become a land of flames.
 

Table of Contents

Prologue 6

Living: Fire Not your grandparents' landscape 12

Kindling: The era of suppression meets the age of drought 40

Combustion: From spark to flame to firestorm 64

Fighting Fire: Heroic effort and tragic loss 94

Aftermath: Nature in the wake of the burn 130

Risk Reduction: The art and science of prevention and treatment 153

Future Fire 176

A Final Word 191

Source notes 193

Further reading 200

Acknowledgments 201

Photo and illustration credits 202

Index 206

Editorial Reviews

The massive fire seasons of recent years make it clear we need to think hard about the future of our forests. This compact but comprehensive book offers some conversation starters for how we might reimagine our relationship with the woods.” —Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

“For readers seeking a nuanced understanding of America's increasingly extreme wildfire problem, this is a superb overview. It’s just the sort of book I wish someone had handed me when I became a fire lookout fifteen years ago. I learned much from it. You will too.”  —Philip Connors, author of Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout

“Land on Fire provides a complete view of what it is like to deal with the extreme nature of wildfires out of control, and what the future may bring.” —Bob Fry, Type 2 Incident Commander, Northern Rockies 
 
“Ferguson provides an incisive rendering of fire ecology, the social impacts of wildfire, and an inside view of the state-of-the-art science and technology behind today’s heroic firefighting efforts.” —Dr. Cristina Eisenberg, chief scientist at Earthwatch Institute and author of The Carnivore Way: Coexisting with and Conserving North America’s Predators

“A stark portrait.” —NYBG’s Plant Talk

“A terrific book that all designers—but particularly those who live in the West—should study as we re-imagine our relationship with forests and western landscapes.” —Garden Design Online​

“An introduction to wildland fire, geared toward aspiring firefighters or those with an interest in broad coverage of the subject.” —Choice

“Land on Fire invites us to expand our own awareness about the lessons we, individually and culturally, could learn from the many functions of fire.” —Cultivating Place

“Ferguson explores the ways in which fire affects our land, our economy and the ecosystem, and highlights the efforts to prevent and fight wildfires.” —California Bountiful

“Comprehensive. . . . highly readable.” —The Denver Post

“A profusely illustrated. . . fact-filled. . . eloquent account [that] does precisely what it sets out to do.” —The Oregonian

“Written in accessible, elegant language, Land of Fire feels almost like a series of engaging lectures on the science of fire, the history of fire suppression and the mechanics of wildland firefighting, interwoven with a detailed scenario of how a hypothetical fire in southern Colorado would play out.” —Daily Camera

 

From the Publisher