Blazing Heritage: A History of Wildland Fire in the National Parks

by Hal K. Rothman

Overview

National parks played a unique role in the development of wildfire management on American public lands. With a different mission and powerful meaning to the public, the national parks were a psychic battleground for the contests between fire suppression and its use as a management tool. Blazing Heritage tells how the national parks shaped federal fire management.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190208066
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/12/2007
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

University of Nevada-Las Vegas

Table of Contents

Introduction: The National Parks and Fire     3
Fighting Fire on Horseback: The Military in the National Parks, 1872-1916     11
The Development of a Fire Management Structure     33
A Decade of Transformation: The New Deal and Fire Policy     53
Ecology and the Limits of Suppression in the Postwar Era     75
Allowing Fire in the National Park System     101
Managing Fire     129
Yellowstone and the Politics of Disaster     157
The Hazard of New Fortunes: Outlet, Cerro Grande, and the Twenty-First Century     191
Notes     207
Bibliography     241
Index     263

Editorial Reviews

Rothman (history, Univ. of Las Vegas; Encyclopedia of American National Parks) offers a detailed chronicle of the changing role of fire and its management. The chronology begins in 1886, with the military arriving in Yellowstone National Park to guard the area and fight fires. Unlike the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, created in 1916, never had the resources to fight wildland fires, and an uneasy contention between the two existed for decades. College-educated scientists emerged in the postwar years with ecological studies and conceived the not-so-new notion of fire as a management tool. Since fire was a natural part of the ecosystem, prescribed burning and "let burn" responses were implemented-with varying degrees of success. Rothman recounts different scenarios, including the 1988 Yellowstone fires that caused immense debate among scientists and politicians and the "Armageddon" in 2000, when a prescribed fire burned out of control near Los Alamos National Laboratory, NM. Considering the aggregate of books about fire, this volume's importance is its concentration on national park lands. A weighty addition to the shelf of environmental history books.
—Patricia Ann Owens

Library Journal

"Considering the aggregate of books about fire, this volume's importance is its concentration on national park lands. A weighty addition to the shelf of environmental history books."—Library Journal

From the Publisher