Author Archives: admin
Back to fire’s future: analogues for the history to come
America’s modern fire history now extends over a century. From the Weeks Act of 1911 to the National Cohesive Strategy is long enough to identify some trends, yet brief enough to prune all but a handful of useful theses and … Continue reading
Words on fire from a scholar on fire
Words matter. They matter in themselves, because their use reflects choice and imparts information. They matter because they contain analogies and metaphors, and because they carry narratives, which is to say, they express collectively, if chosen widely and arranged well, … Continue reading
The American Fire Community’s Euro moment
The sentiment is increasingly voiced that, amid global change, particularly a slow upheaval in the global climate, we face a no-analogue future. It’s a beguiling notion, and one especially appealing to those alarmed by this past fire season and animated … Continue reading
Fire by parallax – the Flathead Reservation
§ In 1842 Father Pierre-Jean DeSmet traveled by invitation to the Coeur d’Alene tribe to begin missionizing. Later that year he was joined by another Jesuit priest, Father Nicolas Point, and a lay brother, Charles Huet. Originally from Belgium (as … Continue reading
The paradoxes of wilderness fire
Prologue: from suppressed to celebrated When the Hayden Survey probed into Yellowstone in 1872, they found their cross-country passage blocked by jack-strawed lodgepole pine left by fires. Extensive burns marred the scenery and made travel onerous. The expedition’s artist, Thomas … Continue reading
The embers will find a way
The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled. – Plutarch Begin with the fundamentals, which is where a fire science that wants to think of itself as applied physics likes to begin. The … Continue reading
The Northern Rockies between two fires
The Northern Rockies are an oddity: a small place politically but full of big fires with large political consequences. The region is big and distinctive enough to define a physiographic province, but too small, too sparsely inhabited, and too split … Continue reading
Interlude: Young men, old men, and fire
“You picture the mountainside as sides of an amphitheater crowded with admirers, among whom always is your father, who fought fires in his time…” – Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire From Bill Bell to Bud Moore “[Bud Moore] and … Continue reading
The other Big Burn: reflections on fire in Glacier National Park
Glacier appears like a patch of prelapsarian nature still fresh from the Pleistocene. Everything about the place screams monumental, a vast sculpture garden from Nature’s Romantic age. Its fundamentals seem far removed from human meddling. Snow, ice, streams, lakes; water … Continue reading
The second Big Blowup: the Great Fires of 1988
Everyone agreed at the time that the fires of 1988 were a monumental event, not only for the Northern Rockies but for the nation; and that judgment has persisted. For years afterward the big burns were the pivot of conferences, … Continue reading
