WHEN FORESTS BURN

Scorching case studies of the United States’ mismanagement of its natural resources.

Marrin has plenty to say about how passenger pigeons were driven to extinction and bison nearly so. But he reserves his choicest language for recording how huge swaths of North American forest were left vulnerable to massive, uncontrollable firestorms, first by loggers who swept in, ignoring the management practices of Indigenous populations, and then by racist preservationists and conservationists, led by John Muir and Gifford Pinchot, who misguidedly decided that all forest fires were bad. In chapters with titles such as “Peshtigo: The Night Hell Yawned,” the author describes the horrific results of those practices and policies in vivid detail: “Fire had transformed some of the dead into tiny heaps of gray ash; others, still recognizable as human, lost fingers, ears, and arms when burial parties touched their remains.” Along with saluting the work of modern wildland firefighters, Marrin covers eye-opening topics ranging from how the U.S. military studied natural firestorms in order to create artificial ones in enemy cities in World War II to the toxic environmental effects of modern fire-retardant chemicals dropped on forests. The book closes with ominous evidence that climate change is bringing increasingly less controllable conflagrations. Though spare and dark, the photos add memorable contemporary and historical images of fires and their aftermaths, as well as of a diverse range of firefighters.

Vivid, wide angled, and all too timely.