The author has provided a fascinating history of fire, its impact on the planet and its life forms. Fire is a greatly under estimated phenomena. It has an enormous impact on the environment and the development of everything that lives in that environment. Its impact is at least an equal to water, ice, plate tectonics, weather patterns and atmosphere – Highly Recommended.
NAME: Burning Planet, The Story of Fire Through Time FILE: R2683 AUTHOR: Andrew C Scott PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press BINDING: hard back PAGES: 231 PRICE: £20.00 GENRE: Non Fiction SUBJECT: Fire, combustion, causes of ignition, spread, propagation, natural causes, climate relationships, arson, historical record ISBN: 978-0-19-873484-0 IMAGE: B2683.jpg BUYNOW: http://tinyurl.com/yavb47p LINKS: DESCRIPTION: The author has provided a fascinating history of fire, its impact on the planet and its life forms. Fire is a greatly under estimated phenomena. It has an enormous impact on the environment and the development of everything that lives in that environment. Its impact is at least an equal to water, ice, plate tectonics, weather patterns and atmosphere – Highly Recommended. The thoughtful and carefully researched text is supported by illustrations through the body of the book. These illustrations are drawings and photographs that add to the text. It is always a pleasure to read a book where the author is master of his or her subject. In this case the author has made some important discoveries and is able to present a history of fire and its significance in a namer that will satisfy academics and professionals, but is also a very readable volume for those who know little about the subject before reading this book. History is an important and absorbing group of topics. Without history we will be disabled in forecasting the future and explaining the present. However, it has its limitations. Much of history is an oral base that may have been written down later, sometimes much later. In the process it is subject to distortions and errors, but it also suffers from the data sample from which it is drawn. Archaeology has come to fill in the gaps, challenging some established assumptions and this book is based on a form of archaeology. The author has studied fossils as part of his development of theory. This vulnerability of this form of collecting proof of history is in the size of the sample. In looking at a history of some 400,000 years, the sample at any point in that history is small. As land masses have been created and destroyed, much potentially significant data is lost. That leaves us with probabilities to extend the scope of what data is available. Wildfire is one of the engines of life and evolution. Even today, many wildfires are caused naturally. It shapes the planet in significant ways, as significant as water, ice and tectonic plates. We tend to think of fire as destructive, but it is a part of natural cycles, animals evolve in response to fire and fire lays the foundations of rebirth. The author has presented the history and the methods of extracting historic data, together with its impact on predictions for the future. He has considered the causes of fire and the consequences, together with the challenges for controlling fire. It is an absorbing and rewarding study.