The Interior West is the sixth volume in Pyne’s and the University of Arizona Press’s “To the Last Smoke” series. The book is broken into overviews of each state’s fire history followed by chapters emblematic of each state’s fire-defining characteristics. For anyone familiar with Pyne’s other, often voluminous, works, this compact book may appear thin on detail. However, its point is to trace in broad strokes the arc of cultural fire history from Indigenous peoples’ use of fire, through settlement, and finally to the backyards of exurban subdivisions. As such, and combined with other volumes in the series, The Interior West succeeds in briskly linking past to present, broaching the acute fire management dilemmas of our time instead of dwelling on mere subtext. Pyne guides us through fire regimes contorted by removal of Indigenous peoples who had
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Stephen J. Pyne has yet again crafted a thought-provoking volume that explores the history of fire within the context of broader cultural and environmental history, this time focused on the Interior West of Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. In this collection of intertwined essays, Pyne argues that, throughout much of the twentieth century, the Interior West has largely taken a back seat to other regions when it comes to fire, at least partially because it has “boasted no charismatic megafires, no mesmerizing Big Blowups [like the Northern Rockies], no monumental fire sieges, and until 1994 [South Canyon fire] no fire that commanded national attention” (3). But Pyne looks beneath the char of recent fires to reveal that the region has indeed played a significant, if oft-forgotten, role in fire geography, beginning with John Wesley Powell’s burned area mapping in his 1878 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States.
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Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018. xi + 191 pp. Paper, $14.95
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By Stephen J. Pyne
propagated fires, by post-settlement practices such as mining and grazing that modified landscapes, as well as metastasizing invasive species that, in turn, jumbled the conditions under which fires burned. In some regions, for example, exotic cheatgrass has threatened the sage-steppe habitat of the sage grouse by making it more flammable. All of this has been exacerbated by policies with little tolerance for fire and by development—especially along the front ranges of the Sierra, Wasatch, and Colorado Rockies—where culture has intermixed with fire-prone landscapes. None of this is a simple, linear storyline as some would lead us to believe. The ecological and cultural history of fire in the Interior West, as elsewhere in North America, begins in deep time. Take, for instance, the interplay between presettlement culture and fire. Early occupants of Mesa Verde likely stripped surrounding vegetation for domestic fuel, effectively corralling free-burning fire into hearths and altering the landscape in the process. Today, ironically, the preservation of cultural resources collides with ecology: the landscape might have looked very different during the occupation of the Anasazi but fires are now suppressed to protect cultural resources, often creating more damage to the landscape than the fires themselves.
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The Interior West: A Fire Survey
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While Nevada, Utah, and Colorado share many attributes relative to fire, Utah is unique. According to Pyne, early Utah was “the model for rational settlement in the West. From Utah then came the first map of forest fires to document the relationship between agricultural settlement and fire. From Utah today has come one of the most progressive state programs [CatFire] for coping with exurban settlement and fire” (88–89). Yet even though Utah’s national significance relative to fire has only smoldered for the better part of a century, Utahns are now facing larger, more challenging fires that have thrust their state into the national dialogue about fire management.
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