Outrage inspired Kennedy, a historian and former National Parks Service director, to write this clearheaded book, after a 2000 wildfire almost engulfed the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory near where he lived. What angered the eclectic author (Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause
) wasn't the fire itself but the "orgy of scapegoating and misinformation" that followed. Kennedy has one word for the current administration's push to allow lumbering in federal forests to forestall fire problems: "silly." Such refreshingly blunt talk peppers this thoughtful, curmudgeonly book, which blames a massive urban dispersion program—sold as a Cold War patriotic necessity and enabled by construction of tens of thousands of miles of interstate highways—for nudging Americans from north and east into the west and south. The result, Kennedy says, was too many people settling in recognized flame zones. The author, a self-defined Eisenhower Republican, sees many villains, from greedy land developers and loggers disrespecting the environment to the Bush administration describing a healthy forest as one about to be clear cut—a process that actually increases wildfire risk dramatically. His solution is a New Deal–style public works project, "Healthy Forests and Communities Corps"—noble idealism that is unlikely to find favor in a political era where privatization is the preferred model. B&w photos, maps. (May)
