The Fire That Save America

At a time when the terms "sustainability" and "green" are becoming a national religion, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner Timothy Egan in his new book The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America, examines their origins. Egan chronicles the story of the devastating forest fire that made Teddy Roosevelt's vision of conservation real in the American mind and that cemented his legacy as the President who saved our wild places. It is also the story of a blaze still unmatched in the annals of American wildfires, the Big Burn lasted three days in August 1910 and decimated three million acres of forest in Washington, Montana, and Idaho.  At the time, no living person had ever seen anything like those flames, and nether the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them.  My conversation with Timothy Egan: