Fire, Native Peoples, and the Natural Landscape - Vale, Thomas R.

Clean, tight, unmarked; absolute minimal wear; appears unread; For most of the 19th and 20th centuries the dominant conception of pre-Columbian landscapes in North America was of a pristine, untrammeled wilderness. In recent decades revisionist environmental historians deconstructed this picture: wilderness was only a romantic delusion; long before the Europeans arrived North America was already a completely humanized landscape, and fire was the chief tool of this transformation. Vale provides a much needed balancing of the pendulum toward the center. Drawing largely from quantitative biophysical and peleoecological evidence, these eminent biogeographers and landscape ecologists show that the natural and cultural histories of fire in the western United States were much more complex and interesting than the simplistic dominance of one or the other.
Near Fine
Soft cover
Island Press
2002
Washington, D.C.