The wildfires that spread across Southern California in the fall of 2003 were devastating in their scale-twenty-two deaths, thousands of homes destroyed and many more threatened, hundreds of thousands of acres burned. What had gone wrong? And why, after years of discussion of fire policy, are some of America's most spectacular conflagrations arising now, and often not in a remote wilderness but close to large settlements? That is the opening to a brilliant discussion of the politics of fire by one of the country's most knowledgeable writers on the subject, Stephen J. Pyne. Once a fire fighter himself (for fifteen seasons, on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon) and now a professor at Arizona State University, Pyne gives us for the first time a book-length discussion of fire policy, of how we have come to this pass, and where we might go from here. Tending Fire provides a remarkably broad, sometimes startling context for understanding fire. Pyne traces the "ancient alliance" between fire and humanity, delves into the role of European expansion and the creation of fire-prone public lands, and then explores the effects wrought by changing policies of "letting burn" and suppression. How, the author asks, can we better protect ourselves against the fires we don't want, and better promote those we do? Pyne calls for important reforms in wildfire management and makes a convincing plea for a more imaginative conception of fire, though always grounded in a vivid sense of fire's reality. "Amid the shouting and roar, a central fact remains," he writes. "Fire isn't listening. It doesn't feel our pain. It doesn't care-really, really doesn't care. It understands a language of wind, drought, woods, grass, brush, and terrain, and it will ignore anything stated otherwise." Rich in insight, wide-ranging in its subject, and clear-eyed in its proposals, Tending Fire is for anyone fascinated by fire, fire policy, or human culture. Each summer, Americans view fire with a split screen. Even as wildfires rip through landscapes and ravage communities, other areas suffer ecologically from the absence of flame altogether. We have too much of the wrong fire and not enough of the right. How should we cope? The place to begin is with context, argues Stephen J. Pyne, one of the countrys most knowledgeable wirters on fire. Understand context, and you control fire. In Tending Fire, Pyne outlines the essential contexts for Americas wildland fires in remarkably fresh, sometimes startling ways. Full of fascinating and insightful proposals, Tending Fire offers an incisive examination of fire that explores the ancient alliance between fire and humanity. Pyne recounts the history of ideas about fire during European expansion and the creation of fire-prone public lands, examines the effects caused by policies like letting burn, suppressing, prescribing burns, or changing the landscape itself, and provides a long-overdue analysis of the current politics of fire. This past decade has witnessed an extraordinary outburst of public interest in fire. But often missing from the dialogue is a rich understanding of the options that exist for dealing with fire while still recognizing its ecological importance. As no one else has, Pyne meets this need with creative, clear-eyed, and thought-provoking ideas about the reasons weve come to this pass and the directions we might take in the future. Calling for not only important reforms in wildlife fire management, but also a more biological theory of fire, Pyne offers readers a critical new approach to tending fire. - Dust jacket.