Fire in Paradise: THe Yellowstone Fires and the Politics of Environmentalism.

• Author: Adler, Jonathan H.

ON AUGUST 20, 1988--A DAY THAT came to be known as "Black Saturday"--about 160,000 acres were consumed by fires in the greater Yellowstone Park area. A dozen or so fires in the area had been burning for a little over a month, and already a half million acres in and around Yellowstone had gone up in flames. Before the fires would be extinguished, they would burn nearly a half-million more, at a total cost of about $120 million. Nationwide, 1988 saw the burning of nearly 6 million acres, the most since 1924.

While only a fraction of the total, the Yellowstone fires received national attention and sparked a heated debate on the management of public lands. Far from a freak accident of nature, the massive fires of 1988 were largely the result of a deliberate National Park Service policy, a policy designed to let forests burn.

The awesome sweep of the Yellowstone fires and the policies that produced them are the subjects of Micah Morrison's Fire In Paradise: The Yellowstone Fires and the Politics of Environmentalism. More narrative than wonkish analysis, Fire In Paradise tells the story of the fires as seen by those who were in charge of their control. After covering the fires for The American Spectator, Morrison spent the next four years conducting research and interviewing the park rangers, government officials, and nearby residents whose lives the fires touched. In the resulting book, he provides a rich and detailed account of the Park Service's attempt to reckon with wildfire. At times, the fire advanced with human acquiescence; at others, concerted human effort was impotent in the face of nature's awesome force.

When the first several fires were identified in mid-July, the official policy at Yellowstone was to do nothing. Fires would produce "no ecological downsides," according to one Park Service official. As Morrison points out, this policy grew out of the desire to impose "natural regulation" on Yellowstone Park. This means that, as much as possible--i.e., until people or specific properties were directly threatened--Yellowstone was to be left alone. As one official noted, this policy "was simply another logical step to return the park's ecology...to its original state." A local environmental activist put it more succinctly: "Save a forest; let it burn."

Where suppression efforts would be allowed, fire-control officials were still responsible for living lightly on the land. This meant that some of the most effective fire-suppression...