Can, as balanced as i can, i get to do something fundamentally creative and say this is what i think happened. We begin our look with author david berman and his book arizonas seventerm governor george hunt. If youre going to write a history for arizona and you want to tell it, you cant ignore george hunt because he was so much involved in everything that went on from 1890 to the 1930s and the new deal. A lot of reforms and the right to the water from the Colorado River. He was at the center of everything. George hunt was born in a place called huntsville, missouri, named after his grandfather. And he was in a part of missouri that was settled largely by the upper south. Tennessee and north carolina. His family came from that area. And he was raised on a farm which was devastated terribly by the civil war and raised in poverty, really, and had a tough time subsistence farming. They had to live on what they grew. Had little education. And more than willing to do with his life and decided to head west. He wound up in new mexico. Came quite wealthy, president of the bank and in the meantime, to get interested in politics, largely the people who ran the government were the republicans because they were appointed by a republican president but the settlers were democrats much of arizona was settled in populous areas in tucson and the southern part by southerners. The fourth was settled by northerners. You had yankees here, southerners there but in the legislature, democrats largely controlled the legislature. The division among democrats, the most populist movement, and the most strong moment of minors. And and in business for yourself, the miners became wage slaves, and minor safety page, there was an agitation, and this led to the populist movement. There was a time he into it, and and detecting the people becoming wage slaves, at attractive young man. He gained a lot of weight, couldnt ride a horse, 300 pounds at one time, not 5 foot 9 and had a walrus mustache and the handsomest of men, a common guide. He did worry about what he thought of them. And on the hill, he spoke horribly, looked terrible. He was not made for the modern age of television by any means. He had a great talent for one on one politics. People would think they knew him, he thought he knew them. He would go talk to people about their children, their aspirations, their lives and he would write this down and when he came to the town again, how is that son of yours . Is he working . People are so impressed that he remembered these things. It was so good, at the time of the state of small towns and mining camps, you could get to know them in half an hour. With the help of index cards, remember people and that style by other politicians is so effective. Governor hunt, elected for the first time in 1911 shortly before we became a state, once in office and political issues, work on and area he took a lot of interest in and that was prison reform. Had a snake hole where they would torture people and have terrible things and got rid of that. He was a believer in scientific prison administration, people not necessarily bad when they are born. They are educated and science can to that. Education can do that. He let them get the mail they wanted. He was trying to treat them as human beings who needed help, not necessarily george hunt was a progressive, focused on progressive issues until 1920, 1924. He was in 1916 they said he lost the election. The votes came in in 1916, the end of the progressive period. He didnt think he did. He refused to vacate the office of governor, barricaded himself in the building. The fellow who beat him couldnt get in. Hunt set i am still governor, go away and they had be governor of arizona and the supreme court, vacate the building so he did that, next year 1917 kept challenging the results and got it reversed so he came back in august but after that he wasnt going to run for governor in 1918 so had an appointment to siam, president wilson to be ambassador. That was done largely because he threatened to run for the u. S. Senate against conservative democrat who was close to wilson and smart as smith, do you think we can yet another job for george hunt and make ambassadorship and somewhere far away . Where hunt went for two years largely spending time planning to come back and run for reelection, he bought a lot of antiques and trinkets and the correspondence at the library, he was applauding and trying to figure out who would go for him, whether he should run or not it decided to run against 22, he ran in 22, 24, 26, lost in 28, came back in 30. By that time the issues changed. Not so much progressive issues, organized labor had weakened, the driving us. This issue was saving a river in arizona. A proper proprietary interest, the water came through arizona, why cant we use it . Didnt think about the downstream people. He didnt think of the Interest Rate stream at all, they will need it for day and need to protect yourselves from california. They were trying to get it in southern california. Hunt spent a good deal of the 20s not so much on progressive issues but saving arizonas water going being diverted from the Colorado River and southern california. That was his cause and because of the state. And went to that period. He died in 1934 and lost in 32 and he died on christmas eve. Much of the establishment democratic party, 32, 34, his career and influence was pretty low. He was very relevant to the minds of contemporary progressives. He was saying what Bernie Sanders is saying and a lot of progressives are saying today. There are spokesman there. He left that legacy. Overlooking downtown arizona, cspan learning more about the literary scene. Up next we speak with Arthur Stephen pyne about his book between 2 fires, a fire history of contemporary america. For 50 years this country after the great fires of 1910 the traumatized u. S. Forest service tried to take fire out of the landscape. The problem was we took good fires as well as bad fires. The last 50 years, which was rather a long time, half the history of our engagement, we tried to put good fires back in. That is very difficult but that is the thing to do. Not generally communicated because what we see in the news media are the bad fires. That is the conflict. That is what stimulates character and choices. The sort of deep, patient cultivation of good fires is much trickier. It is difficult to tell. We dont have a strong narrative. We have a powerful narrative, taking out hundreds of people, destroying communities well into the 20th century. We have Great Stories of firefights, the crew tagging in, hiding out, trying to find some refuge, often when people write about it, and default to a platoon and you follow that through the campaign and the personality, can be adapted to fire but it is not what the story is about. It is hard to tell the story of how to put good fire back in. Really horrific a catastrophic fire genuinely disastrous fires in the 19th and 20th century, the 1910 blowup in the Northern Rockies traumatized the Forest Service, going to handle the fire menace and they decided the way to handle it was take every fire because every fire cannot become large, you can never have the potential fullscale resistance model, any potential threat before it has a chance, this took a lot of effort. Not until the 1930s with the new deal in civilian conservation that had the wherewithal to begin tackling this in the back country and at that point the Forest Service adopted the 10 am policy, universal standard across the country. All environments all settings, control of every fire by 10 00 the next morning and if you fail, by 10 00 the following morning and so on, a sense that we could once and for all by putting enough political capital, putting enough resources and people into it which we now have available we can solve the fire menace and this lasted until the 1960s and then you started getting real pushback, institutional pushback, people didnt want the Forest Service to set national policy, surprising landowners who wanted access to fire because they traditionally used it. A Civil Society emerges to challenge what was becoming a government monopoly, a research station in florida, Nature Conservancy becomes involved and what they saw was a series of problems. Part of it was the sense of monopoly and monolithic narrative that evolved as the vocal institution which part of it was the landscape consequences so grasslands and shrub lands were becoming overrun with trees, force that had been used to frequent fire, every two or three years, Longleaf Pine in the southeast, santa rosa pine in the southwest, environments like that were not getting frequent fires so 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 the continuity of fuel on the surface of to the canopy so you are getting different kinds of fires resulting, fires to which these particular forests are no longer adapted. They are adapted to a particular pattern of fire, not just fire in general. And areas that simply have evolved with large replacing fires but seemed to incinerate large chunks through the canopy and then received. This is the kind of fire they need so all these fire regimes are sort of out of whack. We need to get fire back and partly because if we dont we have diseased, unhealthy environment. We also have fuel building up to the point, really disastrous fires we can no longer control. Even from a fire control standpoint, Fire Protection perspective you are losing the game. The more you keep doing that. Most live in urban settings so they see fire in that context and understand it and that doesnt apply to wildfires. They are different entities. For every fire you put out in the city is a problem solved. Most fires you put out a wildland are simply problems put off and they become worse. The catalytic year is 1994, the first billiondollar suppression budget, 34 firefighters were killed including 14, in colorado. And why that particularly mattered when Norman Mclean published the bestselling book, young men and fire and the cultural context it had not had that proves is that did make intent if we think so what, people this book really did matter. This changed how the Fire Community thought about fatality fires resolved they would not let this happen again. It took a long time to work the mechanics out and that is pretty well embedded in the culture of firefighting and fire management. And in the 70s there were divisions of fire management, find ways to work with fire and put fire back in where we can. And have some room, what does that actually mean. And they are working in the west with the concept of a managed wildfire, and try to control it in its tracks. They are going to contain it or work with it, pooling it here, pushing it there, protecting critical assets, keeping fire out of communities, protect municipal watersheds and so forth. And get good fire back on the ground in the process. Part of that unhinged, the fire revolution, this awkward stupid geeky term, in southern california. The consequences of urban sprawl moving into areas that are the fires that results, really unhealthy and lethal consequences mingling two things that should be separated and the ball is continued, we were recolonizing a lot of rural landscapes but not in the west. That has restricted a lot of room for maneuvering partly because the public doesnt want wildfire in their backyard, they dont want smoke fingering for weeks wildfires burn themselves out, they have by forcing the protectorate around these areas they really shrunk the area and the large landscape space that had been there that you could play with, and efficient, safe and ecologically useful way, and one quarantine and the narrative, and california misbehaving. They are in the southeast, and particularly want to hear. People moved to qualify rule setting, and some kind of nature, they want peace, privacy, they dont want to be burdened with all kinds of regulations and taxes and the rest of it but if they do that, and they dont want to fire service to fall back on. And there is an effort to build volunteer Fire Departments and federal programs through the Forest Service to help build up capacity, efforts to reintroduce controlled burning in many of these areas, in a relatively benign way of keeping the problem under wraps. Even legislation to speak to landowners right to burn. There are certain rules but if you follow those rules you are fine. Florida even changed liability considerations to support a bias in favor of burning because the alternatives are so awful so theres a lot of movement going around but we had a lot of experience with our cities. We fix that by political decisions, wont have towns and cities burn like this anymore. We are going to put in codes and enforce the code, the Protection System and despite all this voluntary effort going on, many communities are responding, that is what it is going to take. Unlikely that will happen on a National Level but states are making those choices. Doesnt help with the backlog of bad sprawl but may help in the future and the Fire Agencies are refusing to defend, they wont put peoples lives at risk to save the structure. That has impact. A lot of talk about letting the markets come in but Fire Insurance hasnt worked very well. These fires are not big. One category 4 hurricane, these fires are the same level as tornadoes. Very graphic, capture the imagination but in terms of numbers they are just not fair a political decision will establish the base level for the market. That is how we did it with cities and how to deal with these, the interface which is most divine in some ways. Houses around us, we could invert that and say this is an urban fire problem with funny landscaping. If you read the fine it the solution is obvious what you have to do. People may not like it but that is what it takes. This is not a technically solveable problem. It is more or less under our control but the larger issue is not a problem we fix but the relationship. We have had a relationship with fire all our existence, the monopolist for the planet, fire to find who we are. That is not a problem you fix. It changes. We are always going to be between fires because fires are always changing. We are changing in ways that change fires so you have a mobius strip going on and i think that is important, is not something to enact legislation before tens of billions into this, fix the problem, it goes away. It is never going away. It is part of how nature works, part of how the face nature and that is a lesson we need to hear. At Sun Devil Stadium on the campus of Arizona State university in tempe, arizona, booktv is here to learn more about the rich literary scene, we learn about inventions that were discovered by accident in the book accidental genius. Be change i had known before i started writing this book i had known about many of these accidental scientific discoveries and i learned about them in some degree of detail but i had not really looked at them analytically. What makes this possible . Once i was writing it and begin to collect more anecdotes and look at them in more detail and scatter peoples papers that were published, reminiscences that happened after the fact, when i put those together i realized there were three elements that had to be part of every accidental scientific discovery. The first is preparation. Many people have seen evidence that scientists later on said this is something cool but because we were not prepared to recognize something unusual in what they had seen, they didnt pay any attention to it. The other is the actual circumstance itself, whatever the accident is. I call that opportunity. The opportunity needs to be there to create or make an observation, create something you observe or just observe something in nature and the third element is once you see, you know what you are doing, you know what you expect, something unusual happens, you are in the circumstance and something unusual happens, now it is very easy in many environments to toss is that aside scientists are like everybody else, got a job to do, investigating how to create a new die for clothes and that not necessarily occur to them to look at that die and see if it could be used to cure disease so when you see an effect like that you cant just say that is not my job. Im working on making a die, you have to have the desire to follow up the accidental observation you have made. Just about everyone heard of larry Louis Pasteur. Hes interesting because he is in one major sense the father of vaccination. He did not do the first vaccine but he was the first who created a vaccine where they had an idea how things might be working so he creates a scenario which ends up being the framework for all modern medicine really. Louis pasteur had a very controversial theory, that diseases were caused by microorganisms. Cholera was and still is when it occurs a very debilitating and dangerous disease and also very economically important for agriculture, killing a significant percentage of poultry in france. Louis pasteur said i believe this is due to this infectious agent so he pulled this infection agent out and put it in broth, would make a soup and would grow the microorganisms by feeding them like soup. And he would take the broth and injected into the chicken but when he took the broth and injected it into the chicken they died. This was kind of proof that this organism was causing the disease but people were not that easily convinced of the strength of his argument at the time so he had to do this over and over again. Hes doing this for a long time and time for summer vacation. He says i got infectious agents here three days from now, inject the chicken so pasteur is on vacation and like a lot of employees do when the boss is gone they put their feet up and say time for my vacation too. His assistants took off without injecting this broth. Two weeks later the broth is there, pasteur says what did you do this for . You know how hard it is to get these things . I wish you had injected these chickens ahead of time. The guy says sorry but i can do it now. Do it now so he injected the chickens with the broth that was now two weeks old and none of them died. They got sick but none them died. Pastures is you ruined broth. Make a new batch and this time make twice as much because we are behind sched