Burn Scars: A Documentary History of Fire Suppression, from Colonial Origins to the Resurgence of Cultural Burning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
"The first documentary history of wildfire management in the United States, Burn Scars probes the long efforts to suppress fire, beginning with the Spanish invasion of California in the eighteenth century and continuing through the US Forest Service's relentless nationwide campaign in the twentieth century. The Forest Service argued that suppression was critical for good forest management, especially but not exclusively in the American West. In recent years, suppression has come under increasing scrutiny as a contributing factor to our current era of megafires. In Burn Scars, historian Char Miller assembles a collection of primary sources focused on debates over "light burning" (as prescribed or controlled burning was called). These historic documents show that not only was fire suppression controversial, but that it was also driven by explicitly racist and colonial beliefs. Yet the suppression paradigm contained within it the seeds of its destruction: Indigenous people continued to use fire as did non-Indigenous land managers. By the 1920s, scientific evidence was beginning to reveal that fire was essential for regenerating grasslands and forests; by the 1930s even the Forest Service was testing fire's ecological benefits. Burn Scars focuses on the burning debates of the early twentieth century, but Miller also provides evidence of a powerful counternarrative emerging from southern non-Indigenous foresters who used fire to revive longleaf pine ecosystems. The volume begins and ends with contributions from Indigenous practitioners discussing the long history and resurgent practice of cultural burning as part of traditional land management"--
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".