Suppression And Eradication Forest Health Protection

Widely recognized as the best treatment of the technical issues concerning forest health and forest protection available, the original edition of this comprehensive text was the first to treat fire, wind, insects, and diseases as well as their interactions holistically. The latest edition extends the thrust of the successful first edition, bringing updated,. detailed, and reliable coverage by the same team of authors with decades of experience and expertise in the fields of forest pathology, fire ecology, and forest entomology. Their effective, integrative approach continues to focus on the fundamental issues related to forest protection, including ecology, forest health, and ecosystem management. Useful examples from the United States, Canada, and other countries illustrate principles and problems essential to understanding these issues. --

Most journalists and academics attribute the rise of wildfires in the western United States to the USDA Forest Service's successful fire-elimination policies of the twentieth century. However, in Fire Management in the American West, Mark Hudson argues that although a century of suppression did indeed increase the hazard of wildfire, the responsibility does not lie with the USFS alone. The roots are found in the Forest Service's relationships with other, more powerful elements of society--the timber industry in particular. Drawing on correspondence both between and within the Forest Service and the major timber industry associations, newspaper articles, articles from industry outlets, and policy documents from the late 1800s through the present, Hudson shows how the US forest industry, under the constraint of profitability, pushed the USFS away from private industry regulation and toward fire exclusion, eventually changing national forest policy into little more than fire policy. More recently, the USFS has attempted to move beyond the policy of complete fire suppression. Interviews with public land managers in the Pacific Northwest shed light on the sources of the agency's struggles as it attempts to change the way we understand and relate to fire in the West. Fire Management in the American West will be of great interest to environmentalists, sociologists, fire managers, scientists, and academics and students in environmental history and forestry.