Serious responsibility to make sure it stays alive and that the cc is going to have to step in. Starting with the at t. Thank you we ended up agreeing on most things too. Make your mind up, i will recommend again this book and thank you professor joel mokyr. [applause] welcome to convey on book tv. Discover phoenix with a population of about 160,000 is home to Arizona State university, one of the largest public universities in the country. With the help of our Cox CommunicationsCable Partners , for the next 90 minutes we will explore areas three and culture with local authors. For two years, this country after the great fires of 1910 was traumatized and tried to take fire out of the landscape and the problem was that we put good fires and bad fires out. For the last 50 years, thats a long time in history of her engagement, we tried to put good fires back in its really tricky to because once youve taken fire out , restoring it is like trying to put an endangered species back in. We also spoke with civil war and president ial historian brooke simpson. I make the past come to life, all right . So hamilton, who lives, who dies, tells the story, im the person that tells that story and im going to try to do it as best i can, as honestly as i can, as balanced as i can but i get to do something fundamentally creative and say this is what i think happened. We begin our look at tempes literary life with author david berman. His book on arizonas evan term governor george hunt. If youre going to write a history of arizona, you just cant ignore george hunt because he was so much involved in everything that went on from 1890 to the 1930s. The populist movement, the aggressive movement, the new deal. He ushered in a lot of reforms, brought arizonas water to colorado. Hes at the center of everything. George hunt was born in a place called huntsville misery which was named after his grandfather. He was born there in 1859. He was then a part of misery that was largely southerners from the upper south and north carolina, his family came from that area and he was raised on a farm which devastated terribly by the civil war. He was raised in poverty, really and had a very tough time. Subsistence farming, he had to live on what theygrew. He had very little education. He didnt have, he had to work on a farm, he didnt have time to floor itself he was more than willing to find Something Else to do with his life and he decided he wanted to west. He wound up in new mexico and decided to go to arizona on a ferry and then he wound up in arizona writing the donkey in the town. He didnt know anyone. He went very well before starting off washing dishes and he had all made a lot of menial jobs, became quite wealthy. He was president of the bank. In the meantime he decided he wanted to get interested in politics. It was largely the people who ran the government who were republicans because they were appointed by republican president s but most of the people, the settlers, much of arizona was settled in compass areas in tucson and the southern part by southerners and to the north settled by northerners, their work that much people there but you had yankees here, southerners there but in the legislature, the democrats largely controlled the legislature. Although what was happening then was the division among democrats who had a populist movement which basically was strong among workers in mining areas. There wasnt too much of a Farm Movement as there was elsewhere but there was a movement which was wrong among minors. These were the first workers in arizona. Before the advent of corporate mining, most mining took place in individual exercises that were either the side of the mountain or you attain something through a river or were in business for yourself. All of a sudden you need capital, you need organization, you need companies and the miners became wage slaves. There was all kinds of problems in terms of minors taking pay , unjust working conditions so there wasnt much education among minors. This led to the populist movement and he was selected on a joint ticket with a populist had territorial legislature. But it was a time when he got into it when there was a lot of nationalism. Populism then later progressivism. The idea that the government had a role to play in protecting the week, protecting the people who are just becoming wage slaves. George hunt, he was a rather attractive young man. And as time went on he couldnt ride a horse and was dangerous with a horse. He was nearly over 300 pounds at one time. Five foot nine maybe. And he had a walrus mustache and he was not the handsomest of men. I dont think it had bonded him so much in speaking or appearance. He was a common guide but he did worry about what people thought of him because he grew up with sort of a class by us. People thought he was a hillbilly and a sort of a hit. And he spoke horribly, he looked terrible. He was not made for the modern age of television by any means. But he had a great talent for one on one politics. People would think that they knew him and he thought he knew them. He would go to town halls and talk to people about their children and their aspirations or lives, how things are going. And when it came to that time again, he would say how is that son of yours . Did he ever get his leg fixed . People were so impressed that he remembered all those things about them. And its almost a style of politics was so good for arizona at the time that it was just a state of small towns and mining campsyou could go in there and get to know everybody in about half an hour. And you know their families and they held up index cards and he remembered people. And this style was picked up by other politicians so successfully. Governor hunt was elected for the first time in 1911. He got elected probably before he came to the state, went in office and turned away from the political issues and Economic Issues to work on an area with a lot of interest in the prison reform. And he cleaned up the prison, they had a snake hole where they tortured people and had all kinds of terrible things there and he got rid of that. He was the believer in scientific prison administration, although people were not necessarily bad when they are born, they are turned that way and can be educated and saved and science can do thatand education can do that. So he was ready to let them get the mail they wanted, they didnt have to strike, he was inclined to treat them as human beings who needed help, not necessarily as criminals and george hunt was a progressive focused on progressive issues up until say 1920. Well, 1924. He was as you may have remembered, in 1916 they said he lost the election and the votes came in in 1916. This was toward the end of the progressive period. He didnt think he did and he refused to vacate the office. He barricaded himself in the building actually. The fellow who beat him, tom campbell couldnt get in. Hunt said im still governor, go away. And this is true, they had two people contending to be governor of arizona in the Supreme Court stepped in and said hunt, would you vacate the building. So he did that but next year, 1917 he challenged the results and finally got reversed. So he came back in office. But after that, he wasnt going to run again for governor until 1918 he got an appointment to siamfrom president wilson. That was done largely because he had threatened to run for the u. S. Senate against a democratic, conservative democrat who was close to wilson, marcus smith. And marcus smith said to wilson, do youthink we can get another job for george hunt . Make him an ambassadorship somewhere far away . And so wilson appointed him ambassador to siam where hunt went for two years, largely spending his time planning to come back and run for reelection. He didnt, he bought a lot of antiques and trinkets that he sentback to people and of course , its in the library here. He was trying to figure out who was going to vote for him, whether he was going to run or not and decided to run again in 22 he ran in 22, 24 and 26. He lost in 28 and came back in 2030 but by that time, the issues had changed. There wasnt so much progressive issues. It was an organized labor so that was the driving force. His issue was saving the Colorado River through arizona. He had this sort of proprietary interest in it. He thought the water that came through arizona, why cant we use it . He didnt think about the downstream people. He didnt think there was anything at all, he just said this is arizonaswater and theyre going to need it someday. They need to protect themselves from it, they need to grapple our water. They were trying to get it fixed at the time. So i spent a good deal of the 20s on progressive issues, trying to save arizonas water. Being routed from the Colorado River into Southern California. Which caused, there was a number of causes in the state and it was a good one. He died in 1934 and he lost in 32 and then came back, he was fighting to come back in 34 when he died area but much of the Establishment Party was thereby 30s, 32 or 34. His influence was pretty low. He was basically very relevant to the minds of contemporary progressives and he would say to be saying what Bernie Sanders is saying and a lot of progressives were saying so his ideas are not his, there are spokesmen there. We are looking at downtown tempe arizona where we are learning more about the citys literary scene. Up next, we speak with stephen pyne about his book between two fires a fire history of contemporary america. For 50 years, this country after the great fires of 1910 which in the Forest Service tried to take fire out of the landscape and the problem was we took good fires with bad fires and in the last 15 years, it was a rather a long time. We tried to put the fire that and that has been very difficult but then thats the dominant theme and its not one thats easy to communicate because what we see is news media are the bad fires. Thats the conflict. Thats whats sort of stimulates character in choices and the sort of deep, patient cultivation of good fires has been much trickier to do. We dont have a strong narrative. We have a good Health Narrative for fires as a battered, taking out hundreds of people, destroying communities in the 19th century, well into the 20th century and we have Great Stories of firefights. The crew digging in, battling or hiding out or trying to find some refuge. And often, the people that write about it, the default to a kind of war story. You follow the cartoon through the campaign from beginning to end and you learn the personality. That could be adapted to fire but its really not fundamentally what the story is about, its very hard to tell the story of how you put good fire back in. There were of course horrific, catastrophic fires in the 19 30, the 20th century. The wildlands in the northern rockies, the Forest Service got serious. We are going to have fire and medical. They decided to wait and handle it but take every fire , address every fire so they could not become lost. You could never have the potential for the kind of full scale resistance model that we will tackle a potential threat before it has a chance to do anything. And this took a lot of a lot of effort. It wasnt until the 1930s with the new deal and the civilian conservation clause that they had the wherewithal to begin tackling that country and at that point, the Forest Service jobs became known as the 10 am policy. The universal standard across the country, all environments and all settings, every fire by 10 00 the next morning. If you fail, you plan to control that the following morning and so on. The sense that we could once and for all by putting enough political resources and people into it, which we now have available, we can tackle it. And that lasted until 1860 and then you started getting real push back. So there was some institutional pushback, people didnt want the Forest Service to set policy. There were private landowners who wanted access to fire that they officially used it successfully. A Civil Society emerges. The challenge was becoming a government monopoly for the call centers, research stations in florida was instrumental in this, the nature of conservancy becomes involved and what they saw is the series of problems. Part of it was the substance monopoly and monolithic character that had evolved in the Forest Service and local institutions. Part of it was the landscape consequences. Grasslands and trouble lands were becoming overgrown with trees. Forest had used frequent fires, that is every two or three years, the Longleaf Pine in the southeast, the southwest, and environments like that were not getting those frequent fires so they were growing up. Stuff was building up. All the stuff that fell down was no longer being flushed out. The character of the forest was changing so you had continuity of fuel in the service up to the canopies so you are getting different kinds of fires resulting. These particular forests are no longer adaptable. They are adapting to a particular pattern of fire, not just fire in general. And there were areas that simply had evolved with large what are called stance replacing fires that seem to regenerate. Large chunks through the canopy and they received. This is how this is the kind of fire they need so all of these fire regimes are sort of out of whack and we need to get fire back in. Partly because if we dont, we have these unhealthy environments. We also have fuels building up to the point that they still really disastrous fires that we can no longer control so even from a fire control standpoint, Fire Protection perspective you are losing the game area the more you keep doing this. And most people cant live in urban settings of some kind of easy fire in that context. And that doesnt apply to wildlife, they are the. So everybody without a city is a problem solve. Most fires that you put out in wildlife are simply problems put off and they become worse. The catalytic era is really 1954, the first billion dollar budget. , 34 firefighters were killed including 14 south canyon fires in colorado. Why that particularly matter is the use two years before Norman Mclean had published a bestselling book, young men in fire, that gave a cultural context that it had not had before. And that proved critical, i think. That book did make the difference. You think so what, people write books, does it matter . This book really did matter. This changed how the Fire Community thought about these fatality fires, resolved that they were not going to let this happen and it took a long time again to work all the mechanics out and that is now pretty well embedded in the cultural firefighting and Fire Management now. So given the names, it used to be the division of fire control but by the early 70s they are the divisions of Fire Management. We are going to find ways to work with fire, were going to put fire back where we can. Going to watch natural fires have some room. What does that actually mean . A lot of full start, a number of failures. I think now they are working mostly in the west with the concept of some kind of managed wildfires. Though they dont have to throw everything at it. They tried to control it in its tracks which they cant do anyway for a fire of any size. They are going to contain it, theyre going to confine it, theyre going to work with it. Pulling it, pushing it there, protecting critical assets, keeping fire out of communities, detecting against the watershed, keeping it out of sequoia groves and so forth but otherwise work with these to get fire back on the ground. Part of what is unhinged i think is the fire revolution was that by the mid80s, that they thought this to be stupid geeky term was coined, it comes out of Southern California but its describing this consequences of unrestricted urban sprawl moving into areas that are naturally fire prone. And the firesthemselves, its sort of the really deeply held , even legal consequences of mainly two things that should be separated. And that first, the scrawls continue. We are decolonizing but theres been around a lot of rural landscapes and not just there. And that has restricted a lot of the maneuvering. Partly because the public doesnt want wildfire in their backyard. They dont want smoke lingering, perhaps for weeks. While these fires burn themselves out or whatever. And they have by forcing this protectorate around these areas, the really shrunk the area and the large landscape scale, the space that had been there that you could play with to tackle fires in a kind of efficient, safe and perhaps ecologically useful way. This problem had been sort of quarantine in the narrative about westerners and particularlycalifornia. And in some ways smith but the issues are really in the southeast now. And thats not a message most people are aware of or particularly indicated to. People want to move to a closet rural setting because they want what, some kind of nature . What peace, they want privacy , they want seclusion. They dont want to have to be burdened with all kinds of regulations and institutions and taxes and all the rest of it. But if they do that, unless they take active measures on their own, most of them are not going or they want to, they find they dont have any fire service to backlog and capacity is a huge issue. So there is an effort to build up volunteer Fire Departments and strengthen federal programs through the Forest Service, help build up capacity. Efforts to reintroduce controlled burning in these areas as a relatively benign way of keeping the problem under wraps. So theres now even legislation in some states that having landowners right to burn. That you follow those rules, you are fine. Florida has even changed its liability considerations to put fire in favor of burnings. Cause the alternatives are so awful. So theres a lot of movement going around. And we have a lot of experience with our cities, the 18th and 19th, early 20th centuries and we fix that primarily by political decisions. We are not going to have fires burning like this anymore. Were going to put in codes, enforce the codes, were going to build up detections and stuff. And despite all of the sort of voluntary efforts that are go