Blazing Heritage

This volume explores how the National Parks shaped United States' federal fire management policies. Starting in 1886, the military arrived in Yellowstone National Park to guard the area and fight fires. Unlike the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, created in 1916, never had the resources to fight wildfires, and an uneasy contention between the two existed for decades. College-educated scientists emerged in the postwar years with ecological studies and conceived the not-so-new notion of fire as a management tool. Since fire was a natural part of the ecosystem, prescribed burning and "let burn" responses were implemented-with varying degrees of success. The author recounts different scenarios, including the 1988 Yellowstone fires that caused immense debate among scientists and politicians and the "Armageddon" in 2000, when a prescribed fire burned out of control near Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico.