In his still-growing “To the Last Smoke” series, Stephen J. Pyne has ranged across North America with volumes dedicated to the history, dynamics, and management of wild land fires from California to Florida, and from the Northern Rockies to the Southwest and places in between. For any interested in learning more about how fires behave and affect these various regions, it is difficult to imagine more authoritative works to which one can turn.
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.