These vignettes add flavor to the larger presentation. There are no major human characters, no extended narrative lines to give ''Vestal Fire'' shape or momentum. Fire itself is presented as the protagonist. And fire proves to be, even in Pyne's learned treatment, as intangible and uncompanionable as a distant, cold god. It's a word repeated endlessly throughout the book, fire fire fire, but that doesn't make it a character we come to know.
Several themes emerge from the welter of facts, places, trends and arcane terminology.
A third theme is the rise of forestry as a profession and, related to that, the presumption that harvested timber is the ultimate product, the ultimate purpose, of forests. It wasn't always so, and it needn't be, as Pyne explains. From the Amazon to the Russian steppes, from Tasmania to the Yukon, humanity has been an integral member of richly diverse ecosystems for a long time. Mostly that membership occurred before the one-species juggernaut known as civilization. The best thing about ''Vestal Fire'' is that it adds clarity to this discussion.