FIRE ESCAPE

Insights into how plants and animals control, survive, and recover from wildfires.

Thanks to climate change and the U.S. Forest Service’s shortsighted Smokey the Bear campaign, massively devastating wildfires are becoming ever more common—but, as Stremer astutely explains, nature itself has mechanisms in place for mitigating the damage and even benefiting from fire. So, along with describing how fires actually help lodgepole pines and certain beetles reproduce, she notes how some trees are protected by their bark and naturally prune lower-hanging branches to make it harder for ground fires to reach the canopy; she also notes how both goats and beavers serve to make woodlands generally less flammable. The author surveys ways in which wild fauna respond to fires, how livestock and zoo animals are evacuated, and, in a chapter headed by a trigger warning, how badly injured creatures are (when possible) rescued and treated. After retracing the natural stages of post-fire regrowth, she closes with general accounts of how controlled burns are managed and of wilderness firefighters in training and action; she caps it all off with bountiful source notes, citations, and resource lists. Crisp, drama-heightening photos of smoky or burned-out woodlands and of heavily equipped firefighters (racially ambiguous due to angle or distance) are interspersed with Garland’s handsome painted images of flora and fauna.

Must-reading on a hot topic.