Wildfire prevention

Washington Department of Natural Resources. 2008. Recommendations from the Forest Fire Prevention Protection Work Group. Group convened by DNR. Notable quote: “The Forest Fire Prevention and Protection Work Group recommends that the Legislature fund and direct DNR to … increase the use of biomass and prescribed fire to reduce forest fire hazards.” [emphasis added].

Presettlement Fire

Anderson, M. Kat. 2000. Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources, University of California Press. This book is based on interviews with Native people who recall what their grandparents told them. Indians were active stewards of the land.

Boyd, Robert. Ed. 1999. Indians, Fire, and the Land in the Pacific Northwest, Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, Oregon. Notable quote: “went into the Methow Valley [north-central Washington] with a van load of [Methow Indian] elders, some of whom had not been there for fifty years. When we had gone through about half the valley, a woman started to cry. I thought it was because she was homesick, but, after a time, she sobbed, When my people lived here, we took good care of all this land. We burned it over every fall to make it like a park. Now its a jungle. Every Methow I talked to after that confirmed the regular program of burning.” The introduction to this book can be read online:
http://oregonstate.edu/dept/press/i-j/IndiansFireIntro.html

Mann, Charles C. 2005. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Knopf Press. This book describes an Indian civilization you never learned about in school. They planned and radically engineered the landscape of the western hemisphere in many ways including widespread burning.

Stewart, Omer C.; Henry T. Lewis; Kat Anderson; M. Kat Anderson. 2002. Forgotten Fires: Native Americans and the Transient Wilderness, University of Oklahoma Press. 352 pp. First Sentence: FIRES WARMED HEARTHS, heightened the palatability of meats and vegetables, aided nighttime fishing, hollowed out tree trunks for making dugout canoes, felled mighty oaks for earth lodge construction, and kept predators at bay.

Turner, Nancy. A Time to Burn: Traditional Use of Fire to Enhance Resource Production by Aboriginal Peoples in British Columbia. From the book, “Indians, Fire, and the Land in the Pacific Northwest” Robert Boyd, editor. Notable quote: “Controlled landscape burning required a detailed and in-depth knowledge of natural systems, especially the ecological characteristics of vegetation and the successional nature of plant communities, as well as of various goegraphical and climatic features of the landscape. This knowledge, acquired through centuries and generations of careful observation and experimentation, seldom has been acknowledged by non-Native people. In fact, foresters and rangers often have regarded aboriginal landscape burning as nothing more than ‘carelessness’.”

Henry T. Lewis (undated) Patterns Of Indian Burning In California:Ecology And Ethnohistory. Notable quote in the title bar: “There seems little question that Indians across the United States used fire as a land-management tool… The California Indians probably molded the Sierra landscape with fire for more than 3,000 years [V.R. Johnston, 'The Ecology of Fire 1970a:81, 85].”

This website has a number of other references to native burning as well.

Prescribed Fire

Michelle Metivier, Director. 2007. Fighting Fire with Fire. CBS Documentary, “The Nature of Things.” This provocative film raises questions about conventional methods of fighting fire, and whether decades of suppressing fire have simply made matters worse. Order on DVD or cassette. The cost for the film is $250.
http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/ffwf.html

Pyne, Stephen. 2008. Spark and Sprawl: A World Tour: http://www.public.asu.edu/~spyne/SPARK2.pdf. In this essay, Stephen Pyne describes the origin of the term “wildland-urban interface” and how managers needs to redirect priorities to include wildland fire as well as urban fire. Notable quote: “wildland-urban interface is a dumb term for a dumb problem.”

Pyne, Stephen. 2008. Collections of published and unpublished essays listed at Arizone State University: http://www.public.asu.edu/%7Espyne/Comments.htm

University of Florida. Wildland Fire Education Handbook.
http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/FR083

Forest Management

Demyan, D. and others. 2006.  Sinlahekin Wildlife Area Fuel Reduction and Fire Regime Restoration Plan. Produced under contract to Washington Department of Wildlife.

Puettmann, Coates, Messier. 2008. A Critique of Silviculture, Managing for Complexity, Island Press. This book explains the systemic problems with silviculture and the differences between ecologists and foresters. It gives context to help frame how silviculture needs to change.