Volume 48, Number 20 · December 20, 2001
The Conservation of Catastrophe
By William H. McNeill
Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910
by Stephen J. Pyne
Viking, 322 pp., $25.95
Jumping Fire: A Smokejumper's Memoir of Fighting Wildfire
by Murry A. Taylor
Harcourt, 459 pp., $14.00 (paper)
Fire
by Sebastian Junger
Norton, 224 pp., $24.95
The books under review will surprise anyone who listened to TV anchormen this past August deploring all the destructive forest fires then raging in the western United States, since the authors all conclude that such fires are not an unmitigated evil. Murry Taylor, a retired firefighter, is robustly ambivalent, loving the fires that tested his manhood while hating and fearing them at the same time. Stephen Pyne, a professor, and Sebastian Junger, a journalist, approaching the subject from rather different viewpoints, nonetheless agree that firefighting and fire prevention are not as straightforward as was once supposed. The ideal goal of extinguishing wildfires within twelve hours of their detection, formerly projected by the US Forest Service, if Congress would only appropriate sufficient funds, has proved to be utterly unattainable—and, they claim, is not even desirable. But what to do instead remains entirely unclear.
Review, 4391 words
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