From prehistory to the present-day conservation movement, Pyne explores the efforts of successive American cultures to master wildfire and to use it to shape the landscape.

Although ecosystems, humans, and fire have coexisted for millennia, changes in geology, ecology, hydrology, and climate as well as sociocultural, regulatory, and economic factors have converged to make wildland fire management exceptionally challenging for U.S. federal, state, and local authorities. Given the mounting, unsustainable costs and difficulty translating existing wildland fire science into policy, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine organized a 1-day workshop to focus on how a century of wildland fire research can contribute to improving wildland fire management. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

“A concise, well-written history of U.S. working-class struggle and radicalism” from the author of Women and Socialism: Class, Race, and Capital (Solidarity). Smith explores how the connection between the U.S. labor movement and the Democratic Party, with its extensive corporate ties, has repeatedly held back working-class struggles. And she closely examines the role of the labor movement in the 2004 presidential election, tracing the shrinking electoral influence of organized labor and the failure of labor-management cooperation, “business unionism,” and reliance on the Democrats to deliver any real gains. “Sharon Smith brings that history to life once again, blasting through the myths of the working class that Trump-era narratives cling to in order to connect us once again to the possibility of building broad solidarity.” —Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won’t Love You Back “A veteran worker-intellectual brilliantly addresses the crisis of the labor movement, skewering those who believe that renewal can come from the top down, and encouraging those who are fighting to rebuild it from the bottom up.” —Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums

Michael Adams, president of Environics polling, argues that Canada and the United States are diverging: Americans are growing more socially conservative and deferential toward authority figures, whereas Canadians are becoming more tolerant, open to risk, and questioning of governing institutions.

Stephen Pyne has been described as having a consciousness "composed of equal parts historian, ecologist, philosopher, critic, poet, and sociologist." At this time in history when many people are trying to understand their true relationship with the natural environment, this book offers a remarkable contribution--breathtaking in the scope of its research and exhilarating to read. Pyne takes the reader on a journey through time, exploring the terrain of Europe and the uses and abuses of its lands as well as, through migration and conquest, many parts of the rest of the world. Whether he is discussing the Mediterranean region, Russia, Scandinavia, the British Isles, central Europe, or colonized islands; whether he is considering the impact of agriculture, forestry, or Enlightenment thinking, the author brings an unmatched insight to his subject. Vestal Fire takes its title from Vesta, Roman goddess of the hearth and keeper of the sacred fire on Mount Olympus. But the book's title also suggests the strengths and limitations of Europe's peculiar conception of fire, and through fire, of its relationship to nature. Between the untamed fire of the wilderness and the tended fire of the hearth lies a never-ending dialectic in which human beings struggle to control natural forces and processes that in fact can sometimes be directed but never wholly dominated or contained.

California and other wildfire-prone western states have experienced a substantial increase in the number and intensity of wildfires in recent years. Wildlands and climate experts expect these trends to continue and quite likely to worsen in coming years. Wildfires and other disasters can be particularly devastating for vulnerable communities. Members of these communities tend to experience worse health outcomes from disasters, have fewer resources for responding and rebuilding, and receive less assistance from state, local, and federal agencies. Because burning wood releases particulate matter and other toxicants, the health effects of wildfires extend well beyond burns. In addition, deposition of toxicants in soil and water can result in chronic as well as acute exposures. On June 4-5, 2019, four different entities within the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine held a workshop titled Implications of the California Wildfires for Health, Communities, and Preparedness at the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing at the University of California, Davis. The workshop explored the population health, environmental health, emergency preparedness, and health equity consequences of increasingly strong and numerous wildfires, particularly in California. This publication is a summary of the presentations and discussion of the workshop.

Regional Silviculture of the United States, 2nd Edition John W. Barrett This is the only regional silviculture text now on the market. It assesses the significant biological, physical, and economic qualities of forest regions in the continental U.S., and their effect on silviculture practices. The first chapter provides an overview of the forests of the U.S. and introduces the topic of social and institutional constraints on silviculture. Subsequent chapters each deal with a specific forest region, are written by a person intimately acquainted with the locality, and follow a regular outline to provide cohesion and facilitate regional comparisons. 1980 551 pp. Forest Ecology, 3rd Edition Stephen H. Spurr and Burton V. Barnes The growing interest and literature in this field created a need for a fresh updating of this classic text. It remains a comprehensive yet highly readable account of real world forests, including ecological aspects of successful forest management. Broad coverage embraces genetics and variation, environmental factors, site, community relations, ecosystem studies, glacial forest history, post-settlement history, compostition and succession. 1980 687 pp. Wildlife Biology, 2nd Edition Raymond F. Dasmann This updated and revised edition of the standard introductory text brings together the principles of ecology and population biology and the practice of wildlife conservation and management. It presents basic information on the value and present status of wild animal life, including a history of human relationships with and attitudes toward wildlife. Examines wildlife within the context of ecosystems, indicating why single-species approaches to conservation and management often fail. 1981 212 pp.

“Not since Angela Davis’s 2003 book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, has a scholar so persuasively challenged our conventional understanding of the criminal legal system.” —Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr., Washington Post From one of our top historians, a groundbreaking story of policing and “riots” that shatters our understanding of the post–civil rights era. What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into a massive nationwide movement. Millions of mostly young people defiantly flooded into the nation’s streets, demanding an end to police brutality and to the broader, systemic repression of Black people and other people of color. To many observers, the protests appeared to be without precedent in their scale and persistence. Yet, as the acclaimed historian Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in America on Fire, the events of 2020 had clear precursors—and any attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past. Even in the aftermath of Donald Trump, many Americans consider the decades since the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s as a story of progress toward greater inclusiveness and equality. Hinton’s sweeping narrative uncovers an altogether different history, taking us on a troubling journey from Detroit in 1967 and Miami in 1980 to Los Angeles in 1992 and beyond to chart the persistence of structural racism and one of its primary consequences, the so-called urban riot. Hinton offers a critical corrective: the word riot was nothing less than a racist trope applied to events that can only be properly understood as rebellions—explosions of collective resistance to an unequal and violent order. As she suggests, if rebellion and the conditions that precipitated it never disappeared, the optimistic story of a post–Jim Crow United States no longer holds. Black rebellion, America on Fire powerfully illustrates, was born in response to poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in reaction to police violence. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson launched the “War on Crime,” sending militarized police forces into impoverished Black neighborhoods. Facing increasing surveillance and brutality, residents threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at officers, plundered local businesses, and vandalized exploitative institutions. Hinton draws on exclusive sources to uncover a previously hidden geography of violence in smaller American cities, from York, Pennsylvania, to Cairo, Illinois, to Stockton, California. The central lesson from these eruptions—that police violence invariably leads to community violence—continues to escape policymakers, who respond by further criminalizing entire groups instead of addressing underlying socioeconomic causes. The results are the hugely expanded policing and prison regimes that shape the lives of so many Americans today. Presenting a new framework for understanding our nation’s enduring strife, America on Fire is also a warning: rebellions will surely continue unless police are no longer called on to manage the consequences of dismal conditions beyond their control, and until an oppressive system is finally remade on the principles of justice and equality.

National Book Award–winner Timothy Egan turns his historian's eye to the largest-ever forest fire in America and offers an epic, cautionary tale for our time. On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno that jumped from treetop to ridge as it raged, destroying towns and timber in the blink of an eye. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten thousand men to fight the fires, but no living person had seen anything like those flames, and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them. Egan recreates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the implacable fire with unstoppable dramatic force, and the larger story of outsized president Teddy Roosevelt and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, that follows is equally resonant. Pioneering the notion of conservation, Roosevelt and Pinchot did nothing less than create the idea of public land as our national treasure, owned by every citizen. Even as TR's national forests were smoldering they were saved: The heroism shown by his rangers turned public opinion permanently in favor of the forests, though it changed the mission of the forest service in ways we can still witness today. This e-book includes a sample chapter of SHORT NIGHTS OF THE SHADOW CATCHER.

Describes the 1911 fire that destroyed the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York's Greenwich Village, the deaths of 146 workers in the fire, and the implications of the catastrophe for twentieth-century politics and labor relations.