I couldn’t help but find it particularly ironic that the day after the first rains my home state of Oregon had seen for months finally arrived, providing much-needed help to the valiant fire fighters working around the clock trying to extinguish the massive forest fires raging throughout the state, that a copy of Edward Struzik’s new Firestorm: How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future arrived on my desk from Island Press.

Struzik, an author with a bibliography of scientific and environmental writing spanning decades – including the remarkable 2015 book Future Arctic; Field Notes from a World on the Edge, also from Island Press – is exceptionally adept at taking up such ecologically complex topics as this, his present one. I think we may have justifiably high expectations for the levels of both useful information and penetrating analysis this most recent of his books will contain.