From the text...'An awareness and understanding of plant succession of a region is one of the most important assets a land manager can possess (Tansley 1926). A great share of timber, livestock, watershed, wildlife, and recreation management is effectively executed by the manipulation of the vegetation. This involves advancing, retrogressing, or checking plant succession at the stage or stages most suited to specific management objectives. An important and sometimes controlling factor affecting plant succession in much of the western United States has been fire. As a result, controlled fire could be sometimes used as a natural and often potent management tool. But it has yet to be tried in many areas and reach its maximum potential use in others because of recently developed fear, emotionalism, misunderstanding, and bias toward fire, as well as a general lack of knowledge of the effects of fire on the vegetation and the animal life supported by it. Ignorance of the uses of fire is often so complete, prejudice toward it so all-embracing, and fear of it so intensive, that fire is not even considered as an alternate management tool in many regions or in many projects. The minimal amount of scientific, empirical and imaginative research and experimentation in fire management has done little to help rectify this situation.'