arizona

The Interior West; A Fire Survey

March 3, 2018

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.

No Species Is an Island

September 29, 2017

“No man is an island entire of itself; every man / is a piece of the continent, a part of the main” So wrote John Donne in his oft-quoted Meditation XVII. Theodore Fleming, we can assume has, at least at some point in the past, likely read Donne’s famous meditation, and perhaps was even thinking about it as he examined the discoveries he made in his study of cactus pollination and pollinators near Sonora, Mexico.

The Great Plains; A Fire Survey

June 12, 2017

A social media message from the Oregon Department of Forestry about the coïncidence of the expected eclipse-viewing tourist deluge with the peak of the state’s wildfire season got me thinking about just how wildfires effect both ecosystems as well as economies. However a wildfire in central Oregon is not the same type of event as, say, a wildfire in Nebraska, or in southern California, for that matter.

After the Wildfire

December 7, 2016

Wildfires are peculiar phenomena in the American west. The bane of logging companies, they are also a necessity for the life cycle of many ecosystems. And despite how much damage they may do, in many instances they seem to be forgotten far more quickly than would seem reasonable.