Burn Scars
272 pages, 6 x 9
13 b&w photos
Paperback
Release Date:17 Sep 2024
ISBN:9781962645201
Burn Scars
A Documentary History of Fire Suppression, from Colonial Origins to the Resurgence of Cultural Burning
By Char Miller
Oregon State University Press
This documentary history of the complicated relationship to wildfire probes the long effort to suppress fire, which started with the Spanish invasion of California in the eighteenth century and that the US Forest Service rigorously pursued nationwide. But the suppression paradigm contained within it the seeds of its destruction: Indigenous people continued to use fire as did nonindigenous land managers. By the 1920s, the scientific evidence was beginning to reveal that fire was a critical force in regenerating grasslands and forests; by the 1930s even the USFS was testing the fire’s ecological benefits, a process that Indigenous fire manages have accelerated into the present.
An award-winning teacher and writer, Char Miller is the W. M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History at Pomona College, in Claremont, California. His most recent books include Natural Consequences: Intimate Essays for a Planet in Peril (2022), West Side Rising: How San Antonio’s 1921 Flood Devastated a City and Sparked a Latino Environmental Justice Movement (2021) Theodore Roosevelt: Naturalist in the Arena (2020); America’s Great National Forests, Wildernesses, and Grasslands (2016). A Senior Fellow at the Pinchot Institute for Conservation, he’s Corresponding Member of the Society of American Foresters, and a Fellow of the Forest History Society.
