America is not simply a federation of states but a confederation of regions. Some have always held national attention, some just for a time. Slopovers examines three regions that once dominated the national narrative and may now be returning to prominence. The Mid-American oak woodlands were the scene of vigorous settlement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and thus the scene of changing fire practices. The debate over the origin of the prairies—by climate or fire—foreshadowed the more recent debate about fire in oak and hickory hardwoods. In both cases, today’s thinking points to the critical role of fire. The Pacific Northwest was the great pivot between laissez-faire logging and state-sponsored conservation and the fires that would accompany each. Then fire faded as an environmental issue. But it has returned over the past decade like an avenging angel, forcing the region to again consider the defining dialectic between axe and flame. And Alaska—Alaska is different, as everyone says. It came late to wildland fire protection, then managed an extraordinary transfiguration into the most successful American region to restore something like the historic fire regime. But Alaska is also a petrostate, and climate change may be making it the vanguard of what the Anthropocene will mean for American fire overall. Slopovers collates surveys of these three regions into the national narrative. With a unique mixture of journalism, history, and literary imagination, renowned fire expert Stephen J. Pyne shows how culture and nature, fire from nature and fire from people, interact to shape our world with three case studies in public policy and the challenging questions they pose about the future we will share with fire.

Storage Tank Emergencies, Second Edition is designed to provide public safety and industry emergency response personnel with the background information, general procedures and response guidelines to be followed when operating at incident involving bulk storage tanks and facilities.

The five-volume set LNCS 14073-14077 constitutes the proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2023, held in Prague, Czech Republic, during July 3-5, 2023. The total of 188 full papers and 94 short papers presented in this book set were carefully reviewed and selected from 530 submissions. 54 full and 37 short papers were accepted to the main track; 134 full and 57 short papers were accepted to the workshops/thematic tracks. The theme for 2023, "Computation at the Cutting Edge of Science", highlights the role of Computational Science in assisting multidisciplinary research. This conference was a unique event focusing on recent developments in scalable scientific algorithms, advanced software tools; computational grids; advanced numerical methods; and novel application areas. These innovative novel models, algorithms, and tools drive new science through efficient application in physical systems, computational and systems biology, environmental systems, finance, and others.