Customer Reviews

Scorched Earth: How the Fires of Yellowstone Changed America

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Rocky Barker uncovers a lot information about US fire policy. When I got this book for X-mas I thought it might be another one of the same old song fire books. Once I started reading it I became "fired up" again about US fire policy.
Those that have worked in the wildland fire service should really enjoy reading how people in the Forest Service and conservation movement recognized early in the last century that suppression policy was a mistake that would lead to the problems we are having today.
Well written and researched. Any fire managers out there ought to buy a copy for the office.

This is one of the best books available on the history and practice of fire control in the United states. The author's personal experience in Yellowstone Park during the fires of 1988 provides a perfect background for the story of how we got to where we are today. He documents the military beginnings of control efforts that greatly influenced how fire control is done. He also documents the recent history of letting fires burn for management purposes. The important lesson here is that forest fires are unmanageable under the most extreme conditions and little can be done to stop them.

Fire management is a complex socio/political problem that suffers from policy based on mythology and poorly informed public opinion. The Yellowstone fires changed the National awareness of wildfire and subsequent efforts to improve performance of the fire services have met with mixed results. Barker's dscussion of events following 1988 provides a widow in to how the fire services have responded to the Public's heightened interest.The paramilitary nature of these services delivers strong, disciplined responses to fire threats but we still seem to suffer from the expectation that extreme fires can be controlled.

This is a good potential text for introductory courses in Forestry and Conservation. The book is well written and very informative, I liked it very much.

This is a great book that offers insights into the many turning points of U.S. wildland fire history, starting with the first efforts by the U.S. Army to fight fire in Yellowstone. The focus on Yellowstone is deceptive, as much of what Barker says is relevant for the entire western U.S.

While Stephen Pyne's books are unparalleled for their in-depth histories of fire, Barker's book is far more readable and really covers the highlights of wildland fire management. A chapter on John Wesley Powell suggests that this history could have been far different if McKinley had not been assassinated, making Roosevelt president and giving Gifford Pinchot the upper hand in fire bureaucracy. Powell's understanding of fire was far better than Pinchot's.

In more recent history, Barker's explanations of how the Yellowstone and Storm King fires changed fire management and fire suppression strategies are critical to understanding what is going on today. Barker highlights experts who question the conventional wisdom that "a century of fire suppression has made forests more vulnerable to fires." In fact, the large fires of the last few years are more the result of drought and policy changes that trade off more acres burned for increased firefighter safety.

Everyone concerned with federal land management, which more than anything else is about wildfire management, should read this book.

Yellowstone National Park is an awesome place, and Rocky Barker's "Scorched Earth: How the Fires of Yellowstone Changed America" is an awesome book. I discovered it through Facebook, where I renewed an acquaintance with Barker that dates back to the days when he was editor of the Rhinelander Daily News.

Rocky is now an environmental writer for the Idaho Statesman, and he had a first-row seat for the forest fires that burned more than a million acres in Yellowstone and environs in 1988.

But his story is also a history of Yellowstone, the world's first national park, and efforts to exploit it and preserve it. Not surprisingly, The Great Northern Railroad wanted to exploit Yellowstone and make it a Disneyland type theme park.

But Civil War general Philip Sheridan, the Indian fighter, wanted to preserve it. Sheridan was joined by the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Gifford Pinchot and many others who weren't always tugging together but helped create Yellowstone and the other national parks we have today.

The book put the history of the conservation movement into perspective for me. I promptly ordered a copy for friends who are visiting Yellowstone.

A very interesting history of U.S. Fire Policy that led up to the unforgettable fires in Yellowstone Park in the 1980's.

Rocky Barker's Scorched Earth is clear well written history of wildland fire. The work clearly stands on the shoulders of previous chroniclers of wildland fire, particularly Stephen Pyne, and ties the work of pioneers in fire ecology to today's prescribed fire programs. It does leave the question of how prescribed fire as practiced by government agencies can ever really work to lessen the urban interface danger open. Particularly since very near the end of the book (pp 235) Rocky states that Randal O' Tool found that only 7 million acres in the west have a high to medium likely hood of fires that threaten structures and of those acres only 8% are federal. This well hidden tidbit should be the core of Rocky's next book. Why should the federal government be involved in prescribed fire?

I found this book at Yellowstone National Park, but didn't have the space in the car to transport it home. I had to wait until I got home to order the book. It was well worth the wait.

A clash of cultures hit Yellowstone National Park in the summer of 1988. New National Park Service ideas on using fire as a tool, and giving natural fires great latitude to burn -- an attitude held in part even my the U.S. Forest Service and other federal outdoors agencies -- ran head-on into the general public's Smokey the Bear says put fires out attitude.

The NPS came under a lot of flak after much of Yellowstone was scorched that summer. Then, in 1989 and thereafter, much of the media spun the story of the Phoenix -- the "rebirth" of Yellowstone.

Barker says the rebirth, at least as normally written up, is a myth, one of many still attached to the fires of 1988.

The biggest myth, still held by many people in various federal outdoors agencies, is that nature in general can be isolated, in wilderness areas, in a state of "reality." The second biggest myth is that fires, no matter the size and spread, can be managed or controlled.

The burn policy at Yellowstone and other national parks, as well as in other federal land agencies has only become more and more a political football between environmentalists and "wise use" types of the West.

Barker, though his sympathies are clearly not with the old-style U.S. Forest Service, makes clear that the modern USFS shouldn't be as demonized as it is by some environmentalists.

The one regret I have with this book is that Barker sounds knowledgeable enough to be more prescriptive about a future course for fire management. Other than citing the obvious lessons from Yellowstone, such as clearing brush further away from buildings in wild and "natural" areas, he doesn't go beyond that with ideas for future generations.

"Scorched Earth" is perhaps the best book on fire and forests I've read. Its in-depth look at the early history of Yellowstone National Park and how that park shaped national fire policy is fascinating (and new to me-who would have thunk that Yale played such a big part in Western fire management?). And author Rocky Barker's first hand account of the spectacular wildfires that engulfed Yellowstone in 1988 is riveting.

"Scorched Earth" details not only the intractable nature of fire and firefighting, but also reminds me what an amazing, complex place the fire-prone forests of the American West are.

I beleive Fire on the Mountain by John MacLean did far more to make change in the fire fighting community than did Scorched Earth. I am somewhat familiar with the Yellowstone fire. I did not see the expected resolutions and perhaps suggestions to go forward with better planning et al that I expected at the beginning of the book other than the tributes paid to the ongoing studies by the various scientists and their assistants in studying the recovery. Such follow up is also ongoing at the Point Reyes National Seashore in California after the Vision fire of 13 years ago. I felt the book dealt more with the controversy of past policy. The "Ah! Ha" you'd expect wasn't there.