About this book
Fire is an essential part of California's ecology. Humans have been using it to shape the California landscape for thousands of years. But today many Californians' relationship to fire is one of fear. Obi Kaufmann, author of the best-selling The California Field Atlas, now asks: How do we live with fire? What makes fire essential to a healthy and biodiverse Golden State, and how do we benefit from its teachings? With the same solution-minded ethic as his much-admired The State of Water: Understanding California's Most Precious Resource, Kaufmann presents fire as a force of regeneration rather than apocalypse. He considers the long history of ecological burns, the varied ways fire behaves across the state, and the lessons we can learn from California's largest fires of recent decades. Packed with Kaufmann's signature watercolour maps and paintings, The State of Fire confronts one of California's most pressing social and ecological challenges. From this maelstrom, Kaufmann emerges to share a deepened love for the natural world – and a refreshingly hopeful vision of California's future.
Contents
Introduction
- Searching for Nature in the Anthropocene: Spring in Whiskeytown
- Map-Carr Fire and Whiskeytown National Recreation Area
- Map-California Counties
- Map-National Forests in California
- Map-California's Major Watersheds
Part One: Fire History
- Endemic/Indigenous Pyrosymbiosis: The evolution of fire in California
- Pyrodiversity and Biodiversity: Resiliency and postfire ecological response
- A Tragedy of Misconceptions: When the wilderness is not wild
- Cultural Fire on the Land: Traditional ecological knowledge
- Colonial Conflagration: Genocide and ecocide
- The Coming of Modern Megafire: Why and how now is different
- The Century of Reset and Reckoning: California fire in the twenty-first century
- Map-North Coast and Klamath Regions
- Map-Bay Area and Sonoma-Berryessa Regions
- Map-Central Coast Region
- Map-Santa Barbara Coast and Mountain Region
- Map-South Coast Region with Transverse and Peninsula Ranges
- Map-California's Southeastern Deserts
- Map-Southern Sierra Nevada
- Map-Northern Sierra Nevada
- Map-Northeast Region and Cascade Ranges
Part Two: Fire Ecology
- Cascading Patterns and Emergence: The (new) ecology of fire
- Succession and conversion: Fire's ecological energy release
- Patterns of vulnerability and resilience: Bioregional Fire Ecology
- -North Coast and North Coast Ranges Bioregion
- -Klamath Mountain Bioregion
- -Southern Cascades Bioregion
- -Northeastern Plateaus Bioregion
- -Sierra Nevada Bioregion
- -Central Valley Bioregion
- -South Coast Bioregion
- -Southern Eastern Deserts Bioregion
- Abundance and variation: How fire affects animals
- Dependency and enhancement: How fire affects plants
Part Three: Fire Principles
- World on Fire: California climate breakdown by the numbers
- Fire Is the Hunter: Human culpability, fire threat, and fire design
- A Policy of Prescription: Opportunities and challenges in normalizing wildland fire
- Repair, Restore, and Reciprocate: A vision of California in the balance
- Between Tradition and Innovation: A better story for fire
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
About the Author
Customer Reviews
Biography
Obi Kaufmann is the author of The California Field Atlas (2017, #1 San Francisco Chronicle Best Seller), The State of Water: Understanding California’s Most Precious Natural Resource (2019), and The Forests of California: A California Field Atlas (2020), The Coasts of California (2022), and The Deserts of California (2023) all published by Heyday. When he is not backpacking, you can find the painter-poet at home in the East Bay, posting trail paintings on Instagram.
