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Book Review: Fury of the Beast
What’s It Like to Be Up Close & Personal with a Wildland Fire? Read this Book and Find Out.
Fury of the Beast is a really fun and important read. The author, Dave Scott, is a career wildland firefighter who has has lived to see the drastic changes in fire behavior brought about by climate change. We’re now seeing these extreme fire behaviors throughout the world, including the devastating fires in southern and eastern Australia in the summer of 2019–2020 that torched millions of hectares; and this summer’s fires across southern Europe and the United Kingdom.
Closer to home, my state of New Mexico lost an unfathomable number of forest acres to wildland fires this year — leading to the closure of four out of five our national forests to recreation and camping, for an entire season, until summer rains came in June. “As of 24 June 2022, 899,453 acres (363,996 ha) had burned across the state.” Like I said, unfathomable.
In comparison, the historic fires in Yellowstone Park, in 1988, destroyed nearly 800,000 acres in Wyoming and Montana, before autumn snows put out the last embers. The Yellowstone fires made national headlines and were front-page news, for months. Three decades later, as National Geographic points out in the article below, these “mega-fires” are now commonplace.
