With the publication of Stephen J. Pyne‘s The Interior West; A Fire Survey, the number of volumes in his astonishingly comprehensive To the Last Smoke series from the University of Arizona Press is raised to six. The series, combined with his 2015 book Between Two Fires; A Fire History of Contemporary America, his Smokechasing from 2003, and roughly two dozen other works on the subject, certainly must make him if not THE most prolific author on the subject of wildland fires then at least a very close second.
Focusing attention on the history and dynamics of fires in this to often overlooked region, Dr. Pyne presents a summary of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century fire history in the Interior West, and then move on to explain “how this important region inspired U.S. studies of landscape fire,” “why the region disappeared from national fire management discussions,” and “how the expansion of invasive species and loss of native species has affected the region’s fire ecology.”
As one who was not particularly interested in the subject of wildland fires prior to reading Dr. Pyne’s work, I am brimming with anticipation to discover what he has written in this most recent volume – as I’m confident his other regular readers are as well.
