Most journalists and academics attribute the rise of wildfires
in the western United States to the USDA Forest
Service's successful fire-elimination policies of
the twentieth century. However, in Fire Management in the
American West, Mark Hudson argues that although a century of
suppression did indeed increase the hazard of wildfire, the
responsibility does not lie with the USFS alone. The roots are
found in the Forest Service's relationships with
other, more powerful elements of society--the timber industry in
particular.
Drawing on correspondence both between and within the Forest
Service and the major timber industry associations, newspaper
articles, articles from industry outlets, and policy documents from
the late 1800s through the present, Hudson shows how the US forest
industry, under the constraint of profitability, pushed the USFS
away from private industry regulation and toward fire exclusion,
eventually changing national forest policy into little more than
fire policy.
More recently, the USFS has attempted to move beyond the policy
of complete fire suppression. Interviews with public land managers
in the Pacific Northwest shed light on the sources of the
agency's struggles as it attempts to change the
way we understand and relate to fire in the West.
Fire Management in the American West will be of great
interest to environmentalists, sociologists, fire managers,
scientists, and academics and students in environmental history and
forestry.
