"Fire can be a destructive, deadly element of nature, capable of obliterating forests, destroying homes, and taking lives. Den Latham's Painting the Landscape with Fire describes this phenomenon but also tells a different story, one that reveals the role of fire ecology in healthy, dynamic forests. Fire is a beneficial element which allows the longleaf forests of America's Southeast to survive. In recent decades, foresters and landowners have become...

Explains the beneficial effects of periodic fires to forests and their wildlife.

Twelve-year-old Maggie receives European fire bugs for her birthday, but when they fail to metamorphose and grow grossly large and explode instead, she uses scientific reasoning to determine the cause of their strange death.