Communities and Ecosystems

by Keith Keller (Author)

These spine-tingling accounts of nature's awesome destructive powers take readers behind the fire lines of BC's most fabled blazes. Keith Keller vividly chronicles the advent of firefighting innovations from bulldozers to airborne Rapattack crews - and nature's persistent indifference to that arsenal.

Wildfire Wars also reveals how firefighting brings out the best and worst in the rough-and-ready lot who tackle this job. Keller tells of political infighting and clashing egos among Forest Ministry brass, and of booze, drugs and arson on the fireline. But he also finds heroes at every link in the chain of command, from fire bosses who must make quick life-and-death decisions on little more than instinct to ordinary firefighters who risk their lives to save lumber, livestock and each other. Some are larger-than-life characters, such as Percy Minnabarriett, a Native crew foreman and rodeo rider in the Ashcroft fire district whose leg was crushed by a bulldozer. "They'd managed to keep him in hospital at Kamloops for a year or so, but after he got out he repeatedly frustrated his doctor by cutting his hip-length cast to below the knee so he could get back to riding horses. Finally the doctor sealed him in steel rods, but they only lasted until Minnabarriet had [his wife] Marie pick him up a new blade for his hacksaw."

by Joseph L Arnold (Author)

"It is a rare surprise to find a doctoral dissertation that turns out this good. Arnold somehow manages to explain the significance of many of the New Deal's alphabet soup agencies while focusing his story on the main players' characters and motivations. Rexford Tugwell's insouciant megalomania are perfectly on display here, as is a nation's fascinated horror about his (the RA's), "Soviet Communes in America." FDR's interest in the program is traced back to his city planning uncle Frederick Delano, who would wax philosophic to a young FDR on the need for comprehensive regional plans. Even Dean Acheson makes an improbable appearance here as a land syndicate lawyer suing to stop a public housing program in the New Jersey countryside. But as is appropriate with a story about a social experiment, Arnold also examines the effects of the experiment on the test subjects. He finds that the early inhabitants of these new towns founded a variety of institutions that spontaneously mirrored many the New Dealers were trying to form from on high. There were credit and shopping cooperatives, non-profit hospitals, community newspapers. Most failed quickly, but a few survive to this day (Greenbelts co-op grocery is still there, check it out)." by Frank Stein