If you’ve been enjoying the many volumes of Stephen J. Pyne’s “To The Last Smoke” series and ever found yourself thinking, “Gee, I’d really like to recommend this entire collection to some friends but I don’t know if they’d be willing to read so many books” then your friends are now in luck.
As I began my early morning walk down the hill into town, just as I was putting on my sunglasses to face the rising sun that always greets me this time of year, I realized that they weren’t needed – the smoke from the many forest and rangeland fires burning across the Pacific Northwest had reached our little corner of Oregon, turning the Sun’s disk from its usual blazing yellow into a muted dark red.
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.
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.