RUNNING OUT OF TIME

Auchterlonie and Lehman offer an overview of forest fire management on United States public forest land.

The authors begin their nonfiction debut starkly: “The Earth is on fire.” Wildfires, they report, raged on every continent in 2020 and destroyed nearly 1 billion acres, 10 million in the U.S. alone, an area the size of Maryland and Delaware combined. And the severity of the problem is only increasing: Since 1970, the annual average temperature in the U.S. has risen by nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit; earlier snowmelt leads to drier forests, which result in more and worse fires. These fires have an enormous impact on wildland-urban interface areas, destroying thousands of homes and forcing thousands of people to evacuate. “Wildfires impact over half the landmass of the United States,” Auchterlonie and Lehman write. In a series of concise, well-documented, and superbly illustrated chapters (graphs, charts, and full-color photos run throughout the book), they describe the history of the government’s responses to such dangers and propose possible improvements to those measures. The authors bullet point many of their key statistics and walk readers through their sources, governmental and otherwise, the goal being always to inform, never to entertain: Readers will need to be significantly invested in the topic of wildfire prevention and control before they dive into what is essentially a protracted white paper on the subject. But Auchterlonie and Lehman are clearly not writing primarily with a general readership in mind; this text, with its prodigious facts and figures all carefully and colorfully laid out, is obviously intended for specialists, frontline responders, and, especially, policymakers who could improve laws and regulations regarding everything from forestry to response protocols. This should be required reading for every incoming U.S. secretary of the interior.

A fact-heavy specialist’s guide to improving wildfire policies in a rapidly warming world.