Overview
A dangerous combination of weather, flame, and human activity, wildfires are a menace that threatens lives, destroys property, and torches immense areas. Whole towns may vanish in the flames. Dozens of lives can be lost in minutes. The most destructive wildfires, like historic hurricanes and earthquakes, scar both the land and human memory for generations.
Despite advances in firefighting and science, wildfires have intensified in recent years. The reasons are many. Fire-prevention policies have had the ironic result of creating hotter, bigger events. Human settlements continue to encroach on fire-prone wilderness. Shifts in weather related to climate change lead to drought and temperature extremes that turn forests and grasslands into tinderboxes.
Extreme Threats: Wildfires looks at the wildfire phenomenon in both history and today's world-the science and the mythology, the causes and possible solutions, and the ways human beings seek to survive, understand, and even profit from these extraordinary disasters.
Synopsis
A dangerous combination of weather, flame, and human activity, wildfires are a menace that threatens lives, destroys property, and torches immense areas. Whole towns may vanish in the flames. Dozens of lives can be lost in minutes. The most destructive wildfires, like historic hurricanes and earthquakes, scar both the land and human memory for generations.
Despite advances in firefighting and science, wildfires have intensified in recent years. The reasons are many. Fire-prevention policies have had the ironic result of creating hotter, bigger events. Human settlements continue to encroach on fire-prone wilderness. Shifts in weather related to climate change lead to drought and temperature extremes that turn forests and grasslands into tinderboxes.
Extreme Threats: Wildfires looks at the wildfire phenomenon in both history and today's world-the science and the mythology, the causes and possible solutions, and the ways human beings seek to survive, understand, and even profit from these extraordinary disasters.
Children's Literature
Just pick up the newspaper or look at news on TV or the Internet and chances are that you will read about a wildfire somewhere in the world. The role of fire in human development cannot be underestimated. Man has long recognized fire's power to destroy as well as create. The focus in this book is wildfires "a fire that takes place in an undeveloped wild area." Wildfires have occurred in nature for 400 million years. It is only recently that people consider them national disasters, because they have built in areas which are conducive to burning. Cunningham relates accounts of wildfires that did incredible damage and describes how a number of forces combined to create a raging inferno including a fire whirl. The summer of 1871 was a particularly bad time in the West and Upper Midwestern United States with fierce fires destroying property and killing thousands of people. Another year of great fires occurred in 1910 when more than 85 people died and 3 million acres burned. When added to other fires that summer more than 20 million acres burned. After these events, the U.S. Forest Service adopted a zero-tolerance approach—keep fires under control. There were critics of this policy since natural fires were not burning off vegetation and the fires that did occur were more destructive. Today there are factors beyond policy—slash and burn farming in the Amazon, weather changes and decreases in precipitation—that contribute to wildfires. Cunningham addresses the harm to people and the environment and is pretty clear that he believes that climate change is a significant factor. The book ends with his recommended actions, a timeline of major fires, source notes, glossary, bibliography, web sites, index, and picture credits. Reviewer: Marilyn Courtot