Burning Bush. Stephen J. Pyne

      Eucalypt History

      WILLIAM CRONON

      ONE OF MY REGULAR PRACTICES when teaching seminars in environmental history is to ask students to keep a weekly journal of thoughts that occur to them as they reflect on how our assignments and class discussions connect to their daily lives and to what they read in the newspaper. Each week, seminar members turn in their journal entries, and each week I reply with marginal commentaries that become a kind of ongoing conversation between the students and me. One of the most remarkable such entries I ever received arrived shortly after a series of wildfires had swept through the Berkeley Hills in the city of Oakland, California, devastating many dozens of houses. Such wildfires are of course a “natural” feature of the California landscape, the inevitable consequence of people choosing to build flammable structures on fire-prone hillsides in a climate given to frequent periods of drought.

      But the journal entry my student turned in as her class assignment offered an explanation for the recent tragedy in Oakland that was at once less obvious and more arresting. The real culprit, she argued, was Frederick Law Olmsted. With tongue planted only halfway in cheek, she offered the thesis—less implausible than it may first appear—that the fires could be blamed on America’s greatest landscape architect, the man who designed Central Park and who helped promote a suburban vision in which the ideal domestic residence was situated in a semi-urban, semi-rural landscape where families could shelter themselves from a workaday world in cottage-like houses surrounded by grass, gardens, and leafy trees. However attractive this suburban vision might be as a residential environment in the eastern cities where Olmsted first articulated it, my student said, it could hardly be less suited to the arid West. In a place like Oakland, the greenery with which Olmsted believed his suburban dwellers should surround themselves became a potentially lethal firetrap. When the weather turned dry, this pastoral green space would become parched, turn yellow, and finally burst into flame. To live in an Olmstedian suburb in California, she declared, was to live in a tinderbox.

      What does this classroom jeu d’esprit have to do with Burning Bush, Stephen J. Pyne’s masterful account of Australian fire history? Simply this: as my student herself noted, when Californians sought to realize Olmsted’s suburban ideal on the arid hillsides of Oakland and elsewhere, they could not simply plant elms or maples or even oaks, the broad spreading shade trees that are such obligatory features of eastern suburbs. Instead, they had to seek out species better suited to the Mediterranean climate of the West Coast, and in the service of that project they cast their nets very widely indeed. Among the species they eventually brought back was a strange group of trees with narrow leaves, pale bark, resinous sap, and a haunting, pungent odor emitted especially after a rainfall or heavy dew. These were the eucalyptuses, imported across the Pacific Ocean from Australia. Although in no way native to North America, they were adopted with such enthusiasm that they rapidly became one of the most popular plantings in the emerging cities of California. In many communities, they are now the dominant tree of the suburban forest. Fast growing and remarkably well suited to California’s climate and soil, the eucalyptuses were very nearly the ideal instrument for realizing the American suburban dream. They had only one minor flaw: few tree species on the planet are better adapted to fire, and few are more prone to burning. If my student was right that Frederick Law Olmsted could be held accountable for the Oakland fires, then so too could the eucalyptuses, for together they had colonized the hillsides of California in the name of Australian fire ecology.

      It is no accident that Burning Bush was the book Stephen Pyne chose to write as he was seeking an appropriate sequel to his magisterial Fire in America, which surveyed the history of wildland fire in the United States. Pyne’s prize-winning account of American fire history had not earned him a tenure-track job in a college or university, and so he found himself considering other careers when the chance to spend three months in Antarctica presented itself. The result of that sojourn was a book called The Ice, a meditation on the planet’s southernmost continent which—from Pyne’s admittedly pyrocentric viewpoint—is also one of the few nearly fireless places, oceans aside, on the face of the earth. Pondering the meaning of a landscape without fire led Pyne to begin conceiving of a multi-volume study called Cycle of Fire which would trace fire’s role on all continents and throughout all human history. As this magnum opus took shape in his mind, and as he tried to imagine what it would be like to translate his U.S.-based fire experience to other countries, Australia, the other great continent of the far south, was the obvious next place to turn. Burning Bush is the happy result.

      Most American readers are familiar with the unusual marsupial fauna which is such a distinctive feature of Australian ecosystems. The cute kangaroos and koalas with their pouch-dwelling young are such familiar favorites in our zoos that we are apt to forget the extent to which Australia’s flora is also pretty unusual. Both the plants and the animals are striking byproducts of the continent’s long-ago separation from the other land masses of the earth, producing the elaborately radiating evolutionary pathways that eventually made Australia’s ecosystems among the most peculiar on the planet. When Pangaea broke in two more than 200 million years ago, one of its fragments, Gondwana, evolved into the southern continents and continental islands: South America, Africa, Madagascar, New Guinea, Tasmania, and India (which catapulted north into a collision with Asia). The other fragment, Laurasia, became North America, Greenland, and Eurasia. Isolated from the collective evolutionary drama of the other continents by thousands of miles of sea-water and by an extreme southern location, Australia and its plants and animals went their own way for many millions of years. As Pyne explains, the eucalyptus in particular evolved to take advantage of dry, nutrient-poor soils, and in the process acquired an array of armament that also made it unusually adept at navigating the challenge of frequent fires. As the tree became more and more abundant in the Australian landscape, so too did fire—and other species were forced to adjust themselves to more frequent burning or gradually decline in numbers.

      Into this eucalyptus landscape eventually came human beings, the ancestors of today’s Aborigines, and with them they brought another source of ignition: the firesticks that served as their tool for bringing flame to new locations as they moved from site to site. Fire became both a means of survival and an almost religious symbol of a way of life, so intimately woven into aboriginal culture that the two became inseparable. Aborigines and eucalyptuses in effect worked together to make Australia one of the premier firescapes of the planet. When European explorers and settlers finally arrived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it took some time for them to appreciate the peculiar fire ecology in which they suddenly found themselves. Not until later would their efforts to contain the threat of fire enjoy even temporary success, and even today the burning bush remains a perennial challenge on the vast island continent. This is the story Stephen Pyne tells in these pages.

      Burning Bush is among the most satisfying volumes in the Cycle of Fire series. Tight in focus, well bounded in its geographical frame, and following a clear narrative trajectory from aboriginal times to the present, it offers a wealth