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The Silicon Valley of Fire

Article in Journal of Forestry · November 2016

DOI: 10.5849/jof.16-987

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Leda Nikola Kobziar

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BOOKS
THE SILICON VALLEY OF FIRE
Florida: A Fire Survey. Stephen J. Pyne. 168 p. $19.95
(paperback). University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ. 2016.
ISBN: 978-0-8165-3272-8.
A lthough the author cleverly designates the greater Tal-
lahassee area the “Silicon Valley of Fire,” after reading
Stephen Pyne’s first in his upcoming “To the Last Smoke”
series I’m convinced that the entire state of Florida deserves
the heralded innovator’s moniker. With roughly 50% of
the state forested and more than half of these forests in
private ownership, the third highest population in the
country according to the 2014 census, and great swaths of
land inundated for much of the year, Florida somehow
manages to prescribe burn upwards of 2M acres annually.
This number, and the at most 10-year average return inter-
val for Florida’s burnable acres, meets or exceeds top billing
for acres burned within a US state. The degree of wildland-
urban interface and private ownership would suggest that
the opposite outcome was more likely: would not public
outcry prevent Florida’s capacity to transform millions of
tons of biomass into smoke each year? As the author ex-
plains, the ingredients aren’t that different from those im-
pacting fire management in other states, but the resulting
baked good certainly is.
What magic happens in the oven, so to speak, is the
subject of Pyne’s latest self-proclaimed “color commen-
tary” on the history, policy, ecology, and ingenuity of fire
in Florida. Organized as a series of essays detailing the
present-day historical underpinnings, the innovators, and
the innovations particular to place, Pyne’s narrative em-
beds reflection in fact, covering vast territory yet reading
like a good story. For those unfamiliar with Pyne’s previous
works, the reader enters his writings with curiosity and
emerges somewhat surprised to have achieved a cross-dis-
ciplinary foundation in the topic, as well as an understand-
ing of where it fits into the framework of American history.
In exploring fire across multiple cultural and ecological
landscapes, the text combines examples that have relevance
to all reasons for, and consequences of, the largely accepted
role of fire in Florida’s society. As the author states, “Else-
where fire often divides. In Florida, it joins” (p. 19).
Pyne’s work lends insight into how it is that fire unifies
Floridians and not only because, bluntly, “…fire in Florida
is inescapable and in your face” (p. 16). He argues that the
southern culture of woods burning evolved because it was
necessary for survival and persisted because it was passed
from fathers to sons and daughters, burning its brand into
the “blood and soil” of Florida’s consciousness. In the first
half of the book, “Greater Tallahassee,” the Tall Timbers
Research Station, Ichauway Plantation, and Joseph W.
Jones Ecological Research Station represent the private sec-
tor with interests in ecological fire for wildlife habitat
maintenance and longleaf pine restoration. With innova-
tors like Herbert Stoddard, Ed Komarek, and later Lane
670 Journal of Forestry • November 2016
J. For. 114(6):670 – 671
http://dx.doi.org/10.5849/jof.16-987
Copyright © 2016 Society of American Foresters
Green, these private institutions were pivotal players in a
mid-century fire science revolution, hosting the first ever
fire conferences and standing up to censorship to defend
and demonstrate fire’s place in healthy forests. The reader
will marvel at the battle won by these defenders of the
flame against the likes of psychologist John Shea, who
stated that the disadvantaged social class (also known as
southerners) burned for little more than entertainment.
In “Florida’s Fire Fulcrum” Pyne continues his Talla-
hassee story with a focus on the state fire and forests man-
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agement agency, the Florida Forest Service (previously the
Florida Division of Forestry), which emerged as a “triple
threat” in that it managed all prescribed burning authori-
zations, was responsible for statewide wildfire suppression,
and by 1977 had extended its rights from state lands to
managing private lands with fire where fuels were deemed
hazardous. No other state agency had argued successfully
with state legislators to gain such authority. As Florida’s
population skyrocketed, conflict between fire and people
arose, and rather than succumb to its repercussions the
Florida Forest Service’s leading innovators drafted the
country’s first ever Prescribed Burning Act of 1990. Pyne
chronicles how the Florida Forest Service responded to
each ensuing challenge as entrepreneurs, amending laws,
professionalizing prescribed burning through certification
programs, and conducting massive public outreach cam-
paigns with its partners (e.g., One Message, Many Voices),
all to ensure citizens’ right to use fire on the landscape.
The second half of the book, “Panhandle and Penin-
sula,” focuses on the rest of Florida, where Pyne weaves
history into the fabric of the present in a series of indepen-
dent, yet mutually informative, chapters. Again, demon-
strating the diversity of fire uses and users, the author
chronicles how Mormon (and other) cattle ranchers de-
pend on fire to enhance forage and reduce shrubs, how the
US Fish and Wildlife Service needs fire for endangered
species habitat maintenance, how Eglin Air Force Base’s
“warbirds” ignite massive fires for “firebirds” (p. 80), and
how The Nature Conservancy and other landowners use
fire for all of these reasons and more. Throughout, vi-
gnettes appear as needed to support the narrative: the
emergence of the fire regime concept; burning in turpen-
tine pineries; how Ron Myers helped The Nature Conser-
vancy become a fire agency; what NASA had to say about
burning Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge; and the
impact of the Civilian Conservation Core on the Florida
Park Service’s flagship preserve, the Myakka River State
Park.
The final essay, “The Everburns” about, predictably,
the Everglades, details how the National Park Service came
to recognize, then institute, the belief that “Without fire
the system would choke on its peat” (p. 146). The “dialectic”
between fire and water as exemplified in the Everglades story
may be the most emblematically Floridian of the subjects cov-
ered in Pyne’s book.
 Although Florida: A Fire Survey would
have benefited from additional direct quotes
from sources and more images to supple-
ment the text, these are minor criticisms.
Such illustrations might have helped bring
some of the examples to light, especially for
international (or other) readers who have
never heard “beneficial fire” spoken of so un-
equivocally, nor seen a marshland bifurcated
between combustion and submersion, on
the edge of densely urban development. My
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guess is that the author would suggest that,
to bridge the gap between imagination and
reality, the reader must go and see fire in
Florida for herself or himself. After reading
this text, I’m betting that readers will be in-
spired to do just that.
When the reader (temporarily) puts
Stephen Pyne’s Florida: A Fire Survey down,
forest management practitioners, scientists,
students, and naturalists alike will be left
asking themselves, “In what ways could
Florida be viewed as a model of successful
fire management for other parts of the coun-
try, or world?” In outlining just how Flor-
ida’s fire paradigm evolved, Pyne’s book is
an invaluable source that empowers the
reader to evaluate and answer this potent
question.
Leda N. Kobziar (lkobziar@uidaho.edu), Uni-
versity of Idaho, Moscow, ID.
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Journal of Forestry • November 2016 671