Cover of original edition | |
| Author | Stephen J. Pyne |
|---|---|
| Country | Canada |
| Language | English |
| Series | "Nature, history, society" |
| Subject | Forest fires in Canada |
| Publisher | UBC Press |
Publication date | 2007 |
| Pages | 549 |
| ISBN | 9780774813914 |
| OCLC | 145429214 |
Awful Splendour: A Fire History of Canada is a 2007 non-fiction book by American environmental historian Stephen J. Pyne. It examines the natural, social and political history of forest fires in Canada.
Stephen J. Pyne is a professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, specializing in environmental history, the history of exploration, and the history of fire.
Author Pyne has a long relationship with forest fires; the Arizona State University professor was a wildland firefighter on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon for fifteen years, as well as a member of the United Nations Wildfire Advisory Group. [1] The book is part of a series on forest fires by Pyne. [2] In his Circle of Fire series, he has covered forest fires in the U.S., Australia and on a global scale. The Canadian Forest Service encouraged Pyne to tackle the topic of Canadian forest fires. The phrase "awful splendour" was taken from a quote from early Canadian naturalist Henry Youle Hind, referring to the destructive beauty of prairie fires. [1]
Arizona State University is a public metropolitan research university on five campuses across the Phoenix metropolitan area, and four regional learning centers throughout Arizona.
The Grand Canyon is a steep-sided canyon carved by the Colorado River in Arizona, United States. The Grand Canyon is 277 miles (446 km) long, up to 18 miles (29 km) wide and attains a depth of over a mile.
The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization that was tasked to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international co-operation and be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations. The headquarters of the UN is in Manhattan, New York City, and is subject to extraterritoriality. Further main offices are situated in Geneva, Nairobi, and Vienna. The organization is financed by assessed and voluntary contributions from its member states. Its objectives include maintaining international peace and security, protecting human rights, delivering humanitarian aid, promoting sustainable development and upholding international law. The UN is the largest, most familiar, most internationally represented and most powerful intergovernmental organization in the world. In 24 October 1945, at the end of World War II, the organization was established with the aim of preventing future wars. At its founding, the UN had 51 member states; there are now 193. The UN is the successor of the ineffective League of Nations.
The book is divided into three sections, titled "Torch", "Axe", and "Engine", roughly corresponding to the pre-contact, exploration, and industrial periods of Canadian history. [2] In its frequent mentions of American experiences with fire, the book engages in some comparative history. [2] Pyne defines several geographical "rings" of fire in Canada, including the boreal forests, the coastal forests of the Pacific and Atlantic, the mountain forests of British Columbia and Alberta, and the mixed wood forests of the Prairies, Ontario, and Quebec. [3]
Comparative history is the comparison of different societies which existed during the same time period or shared similar cultural conditions.
Canadian Literature noted that the book "filled a gaping hole" in Canadian scholarly writing on forest fires, and credited Pyne for accessing "grey literature" in hard to find locations. Reviewer David Brownstein called the book a "marvellously encyclopedic synthesis of a vast secondary literature on a complex topic." [2] Reviewed in BC Studies, Philip Van Huizen praised the "elegant and evocative" writing of the author, as well as his use of narrative. The reviewer critiqued some of Pyne's organisational choices; by looking at fire management province-by-province, the third section of the book has some redundancies and can be "a chore to read (at least in places)." In all, Van Huizen called the work a "formidable and impressive book". [1]
Grey literature are materials and research produced by organizations outside of the traditional commercial or academic publishing and distribution channels. Common grey literature publication types include reports, working papers, government documents, white papers and evaluations. Organizations that produce grey literature include government departments and agencies, civil society or non-governmental organisations, academic centres and departments, and private companies and consultants.
Canadian literature is literature originating from Canada. Canadian writers have produced a variety of genres. Influences on Canadian writers are broad, both geographically and historically.
Scientific literature comprises scholarly publications that report original empirical and theoretical work in the natural and social sciences, and within an academic field, often abbreviated as the literature. Academic publishing is the process of contributing the results of one's research into the literature, which often requires a peer-review process. Original scientific research published for the first time in scientific journals is called the primary literature. Patents and technical reports, for minor research results and engineering and design work, can also be considered primary literature. Secondary sources include review articles and books. Tertiary sources might include encyclopedias and similar works intended for broad public consumption.
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Keith Maillard is a Canadian-American novelist, poet, and professor of creative writing at the University of British Columbia. He moved to Canada in 1970 and became a Canadian citizen in 1976.
Chinchaga is a river in north-western Alberta. It is a tributary of the Hay River. Through the Hay River, its waters are carried to the Arctic Ocean via Great Slave Lake and Mackenzie River. The name Chinchaga is First Nations, and means "Big Wood River". Much of the Chinchaga watershed burned in 1950 during the Chinchaga fire.
Chinchaga Wildland Park is a protected 800 km2 (310 sq mi) tract of land in the 5,000 km2 (1,900 sq mi) of the greater Chinchaga wilderness area in a disjunct outlier of the Foothills Natural Region of Alberta, in a remote area of northwest Alberta, Canada, about 140 kilometres (87 mi) west of Manning. It was designated as a Wildlife Park in December 1999. The greater Chinchaga area was identified in 1995 as an Environmentally Significant Area. It was designated by the Alberta Government as a protected area in 2000, under the "Special Places" program. "Elevations in the Park range from 650 m adjacent to the Chinchaga River to 915 m at the height of land atop Halverson Ridge."
Canadian Literature is a quarterly journal of criticism and review, founded in 1959 and published by the University of British Columbia. The journal publishes articles which discuss and inform about the academic aspects of the Canadian literary field, and also a range of creative material from Canadian and international scholars, writers, and poets. Each issue contains a variety of articles and an extensive book reviews section. Rather than focusing on a single theoretical approach, Canadian Literature contains articles on all subjects relating to writers and writing in Canada. Each issue contains both English and French content from a range of contributors and has been described as "critically eclectic".

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The Chinchaga fire, also known as the Wisp fire, Chinchaga River fire and Fire 19, was a forest fire that burned in northern British Columbia and Alberta in the summer and early fall of 1950. With a final size of between 1,400,000 hectares and 1,700,000 hectares, it is the single largest recorded fire in North American history. The fire was allowed to burn freely, a result of local forest management policy and the lack of settlements in the region. The Chinchaga fire produced large amounts of smoke, creating the "1950 Great Smoke Pall", observed across eastern North America and Europe. As the existence of the massive fire was not well-publicized, and the smoke was mostly in the upper atmosphere and could not be smelled, there was much speculation about the atmospheric haze and its provenance. The Chinchaga firestorm's "historic smoke pall" caused "observations of blue suns and moons in the United States and Europe." It was the biggest firestorm documented in North America created the world's largest smoke layer in the atmosphere."

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