From Stephen J. Pyne's FIRE IN AMERICA
Perhaps the biggest surprise [as far as reactions to the first edition of Fire in America] was the attention readers gave to American Indian fire practices. This was a minor feature of the book. I was far more interested in the transition from and agricultural to an industrial society than in pre-Columbian practices or the transition from American Indian to European colonist. When I completed the manuscript in 1980, I made fire the text’s informing principle, not the principles of gender, ethnicity, and race that have come to dominate historical discourse in the intervening years. It was obvious that American Indians used fire widely. It was evident that the argument over whether or not they burned had entered into bitter controversies over appropriate industrial fire practices. Beyond that, I had little time to investigate.
It is possible now, however, to appreciate how extensively fire must have been applied, with what methods, and according to what system. There is little reason to doubt that pre-Columbian peoples used fire as pervasively as technologically comparable peoples elsewhere in the world. Rather, the burden of proof resides with those who would argue that American Indians, alone among the cultures of the planet, resisted the wholesale reconstruction of their landscapes by fire. The matter involves more than academic curiosity: it is increasingly evident that fire’s exclusion is as ecologically powerful as fire’s application, and to the administrators of nature reserves it is becoming daily more apparent that the removal of anthropogenic burning has had dramatic consequences for historic ecosystems. The loss of Indian burning (without a surrogate fire) has seriously jeopardized many western biotas. These themes were not primary in Fire in America. They would be in any wholesale revision.
- Stephen J. Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (University of Washington Press, 1982, 1997; ISBN 0-295-97592-X;