Recording Oral History: A Guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences. second Edition. By Valerie Raleigh Yow (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2005. Pp. 416. Index. Cloth, $75.00, paper, $29.95). In this revised edition of her textbook, Recording Oral History, Valerie Yow presents an introduction to oral history that is extremely accessible and useful. The author's aim is larger than simply offering instructions on how to "record" interviews. Instead, Yow presents a cogent and clear synthesis that combines practical advice with consideration of many ethical, methodological, and analytical challenges that researchers may encounter. The book's chapters are divided topically in a manner that makes it easy for readers to find and read relevant information; a detailed table of contents and extensive index aid this effort. Individual chapters offer practical advice on topics such as "Preparation for the Interviewing Project," "Interviewing Techniques," and "Legalities and Ethics." Other chapters are more theoretical or scholarly, summarizing current thinking in the social sciences and humanities on topics such as "Interpersonal Relations in Oral History," "Oral History and Memory," and "Analysis and Interpretation." The remaining chapters are geared toward the researcher who seeks guidance on starting an oral history project focused on a community, an individual, or a family. A series of appendices contain examples of forms one might use in research and professional guidelines for interviewers. Throughout the text, Yow presents an overview that will be helpful to both beginners and experienced oral historians. For the novice, Yow includes detailed and practical information about how to conduct an interview and how to design and start an oral history project. She covers topics such as framing questions, selecting equipment, and creating forms and a format for keeping information and materials well organized. This information is suitable for use within a classroom or to direct independent researchers working outside a scholastic setting. Yow is a confident and accessible guide, drawing on her own extensive experience as an interviewer and researcher, as well as framing her advice within the context of the standards set by relevant historical organizations. Like these organizations, whose oral history guidelines are reprinted in the book's appendices, Yow urges interviewers to conduct broad, life history interviews, rather than those focused more narrowly on a single topic, and that they make arrangements to preserve their interviews in a suitable library or archive. Her instructions are framed with these expectations in mind. …

Recording Oral History: A Guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Abstract In the province of British Columbia, Canada, four of the most severe wildfire seasons of the last century occurred in the past 7 years: 2017, 2018, 2021, and 2023. To investigate trends in wildfire activity and fire-conducive climate, we conducted an analysis of mapped wildfire perimeters and annual climate data for the period of 1919–2021. Results show that after a century-long decline, fire activity increased from 2005 onwards, coinciding with a sharp reversal in the wetting trend of the 20th century. Even as precipitation levels remain high, moisture deficits have increased due to rapid warming and increased evaporative demand. Bottom-up factors further influence fire activity, as the legacy of past wildfires, insect outbreaks, and land-use practices continually influence fire regimes. The compound effects of climate-induced moisture changes and altered fuels now force British Columbians to confront the harsh reality of more frequent years of intense and prolonged wildfire activity. 

Abrupt, climate-induced increase in wildfires in British Columbia since the mid-2000s

rates at which they will be shipped, and how much they will pay for them. American retailing and Chinese manufacturing have formed a symbiotic relationship that has produced an astonishing flow of goods into the U.S., mostly through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach; combined, these ports form the fifth largest port complex in the world. Below the retailers are the lesser—albeit still powerful—players in the transportation world, such as the steamship lines, the landside transportation companies, and the warehouse and distribution companies. Under pressure from the retailers to cut costs, the steamship lines have responded by consolidating via mergers and takeovers and by building massive containerships to realize economies of scale at sea. On land the biggest transportation change has been “intermodalism,” which refers to the ability to ship cargo from door to door on a single bill of lading. It has been of particular benefit to the railroads, which can load containers (double-stacked) in ports like Los Angeles and Long Beach and ship them all across the country. Not all containers leave these ports by train, however. Those that go by truck often end up in the massive new distribution centers of the Inland Empire of San Bernadino and Riverside counties, where goods are rapidly unpacked, sorted, and repacked for their final destinations. Bonacich and Wilson are less convincing in meeting their second goal, an assessment of the impact of the logistics revolution on workers. They argue that most logistics workers—the significant exception are longshore workers—have experienced a deterioration in their working conditions due to an increase in contingent employment, loss of unions, low wages, and the hiring of Latino workers. There are a couple of problems with this argument. First, it is not clear how much of this deterioration is due to the logistics revolution and how much is the consequence of a more general effort to hold down labor costs—contingent employment, for example, is a common feature of employment across the U.S. economy. Second, the evidence they use is often quite limited. The chapter on warehouse and distribution center workers, for instance, contains very little data about the workers in this industry. Interviews with some of these workers would have been of great help in understanding how they have been affected by the logistics revolution—and might possibly have found that they find working in these centers to be an opportunity rather than a dead-end. These concerns notwithstanding, I would strongly recommend the book to anyone interested in understanding the players and processes that are shaping globalization today.

On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters:

Supporting wildfire management activities is frequently identified as a benefit of forest roads. As such, there is a growing body of research into forest road planning, construction, and maintenance to improve fire surveillance, prevention, access, and control operations. Of interest here is how road networks directly support fire control operations, and how managers incorporate that information into pre-season assessment and planning. In this communication we briefly review and illustrate how forest roads relate to recent advances in operationally focused wildfire decision support. We focus on two interrelated products used on the National Forest System and adjacent lands throughout the western USA: potential wildland fire operational delineations (PODs) and potential control locations (PCLs). We use real-world examples from the Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest in Colorado, USA to contextualize these concepts and illustrate how fire analytics and local fire managers both identified roads as primary control features. Specifically, distance to road was identified as the most important predictor variable in the PCL boosted regression model, and 82% of manager-identified POD boundaries aligned with roads. Lastly, we discuss recommendations for future research, emphasizing roles for enhanced decision support and empirical analysis.

https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4907/12/2/110/pdf

Forest Roads and Operational Wildfire Response Planning

Fire and Insect Interactions in North American Forests

The recent mountain pine beetle outbreak affecting lodgepole pine forests in the Rocky Mountains has created a novel fire environment for wildland firefighters. This paper presents results from an examination of firefighters’ observations of fire behavior in post-outbreak lodgepole pine forests, with a focus on what they considered surprising from a fire behavior standpoint and how this in turn affected their suppression tactics. The surprises in fire behavior experienced by firefighters during the red phase of post-outbreak forests included an elevated level of fire spread and intensity under moderate weather and fuel moisture conditions, increased spotting, and faster surface-to-crown fire transitions with limited or no ladder fuels. Unexpectedly, during the gray phase in mountain pine beetle-attacked stands, crown ignition and crown fire propagation was observed for short periods of time. Firefighters are now more likely to expect to see active fire behavior in nearly all fire weather and fuel moisture conditions, not just under critically dry and windy situations, and across all mountain pine beetle attack phases, not just the red phase. Firefighters changed their suppression tactics by adopting indirect methods due to the potential fire behavior and tree-fall hazards associated with mountain pine beetle-attacked lodgepole pine forests.

Firefighter Observations of “Surprising” Fire Behavior in Mountain Pine Beetle-Attacked Lodgepole Pine Forests

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Firefighter Observations of “Surprising” Fire Behavior in Mountain Pine Beetle-Attacked Lodgepole Pine Forests