Brian Sholis reviews journalist Timothy Egan’s book The Big Burn, about a massive three-million-acre forest fire that raged in August 1910, challenging Teddy Roosevelt’s newly-created Forestry Service. Sholis writes,

Political obstacles left the rangers poorly paid and underequipped, and they were no match for conditions in the summer of 1910. Extremely dry weather, regular lightning storms, and the sparks thrown off by trains rushing along newly constructed tracks ignited thousands of little blazes. On the evening of August 20, a strong wind called a palouser descended from the mountains and unified the smoldering patches into a firestorm of hurricane force: “What had been nearly three thousand small fires throughout a three-state region of the northern Rockies had grown to a single large burn.”

Amazon’s book listing includes photos and an author interview; Michael Williams of A Continuous Lean just posted some classic shots of the Forestry Service as well.

Word watch: “urban prairie.” Meaning when “vast tracts of formerly urbanized land return to nature.” Is this what should happen in Detroit? Some architects think so: “The American Institute of Architects produced a study that called for Detroit to shrink back to its urban core and a selection of urban villages, surrounded by greenbelts and banked land” (via NYTimes Ideas Blog).

This relates to something I’ve been pondering lately, which is admittedly not a new question, but basically the gist is: how will we know when we’ve overdeveloped the earth? Are we capable of that observation? Have too many of us built too much, used too much, interfered too much, taken too much? It seems like the tragedy of the commons might suggest one answer: we won’t know and won’t care. If we compare this predicament to what’s happened on Wall Street over the past year, there’s a similar human fault at work in both cases: greed. And to fix it, you’ve got to build an assumption of greed into the system. Quoting Warren Buffett: “The fact that people will be full of greed, fear, or folly is predictable. The sequence is not predictable.”

But, if I were to take a slightly more optimistic tack on this as we exit The Decade from Hell, I’d say building greed into the system is precisely where the opportunity lies for the next quantum leap in human understanding. And what’s great about that is that these sorts of leaps tend to happen precisely when we invent new ways to describe what we see. Paintings were flat, then algebra, then—boom!—Giotto. “Bad air” caused pandemics, then better maps, then—boom!—Dr. John Snow. We now have the most powerful tools for observing collective human action ever created. Let’s start using them to figure out how much is enough.

The brilliant Dan Barber, chef and co-owner of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, wrote an Op Ed for NYT Sunday about the dangers of buying mass-produced, foreign seeds and starter plants from big box retailers and the like. The result has been an unusually severe outbreak of late blight, which can kill an entire tomato or potato crop in a matter of days. Barber goes on,

There’s another lesson here for the home gardener. When you start a garden, no matter how small, you become part of an agricultural network that binds you to other farmers and gardeners. Airborne late blight spores are a perfect illustration of agriculture’s web-like connections. The tomato plant on the windowsill, the backyard garden and the industrial tomato farm are, to be a bit reductive about it, one very large farm.