SEATTLE - The federal government wastes billions of dollars a year fighting some forest fires, Douglas Gantenbein writes in "A Season of Fire: Four Months on the Firelines of America's Forests."

Gantenbein, a journalist who teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Washington, left Seattle for the summer of 2001 to chase wildfires across the West. And there were plenty, including the Thirtymile fire in Washington that killed four firefighters.

The descriptions of the Thirtymile and other fires Gantenbein visits are dramatic - written with the details of someone who has felt the heat, walked through ash and breathed smoke. Then he gets behind the breaking news to look at the economics of firefighting.

"It could be argued that America spends $1 billion or more on fires each year and gets essentially nothing," he writes.

Some fires are beneficial to certain habitats. Forests eventually recover from even damaging fires, as Yellowstone has come back from the 1988 fires. And it is an irony of firefighting that jumping on brush-clearing fires only leads to a buildup of fuel that makes worse fires inevitable.

Yet, Forest Service careers are made managing fires, and firefighting itself has become a growth industry. Thousands of people depend on fires for summer jobs. Gantenbein shows an appreciation for their expertise and effort; it's not their fault they're better at controlling fires than spending.

A big fire creates its own economy, fueled by government managers with blank checks, Gantenbein writes. Private contractors earn their living providing helicopters, tanker planes or food and laundry services. Cities nearing ghost town status revive with the arrival of a small army of firefighters, buying food, personal items and "I was at the big fire" T-shirts.

Gantenbein acknowledges the romance of firefighting: the heroes who protect property and the environment, the fellowship among people who work hard together, the opportunity for women to prove themselves, the Smokey Bear instinct to stomp out all fires, and the slay-the-dragon battle against fire as if at war.

It's an enterprise that burns money.

Gantenbein lists an Oregon blaze as the 2001 poster fire for what he calls the "lunacy" shown at times by fire managers.

"It's the Craggie Fire, started Sept. 17 when lightning hits the dried trunk of a long-dead tree in a remote section of Oregon's Kalmiopsis Wilderness, in the southwest corner of the state. As fires, go it's an innocuous as they get. It burns in a wilderness area, miles from the nearest home, in forest that likely will benefit from a little fire-induced fall cleanup," he writes.

"No matter. The Craggie Fire warrants a full-scale firefighting assault. By Sept. 22, 395 people and an incident command team are assigned to it, along with seven heavy helicopters. The helos do their thing, dropping buckets of water, making a lot of noise, and racking up one hellacious bill. The little Craggie Fire, which never gets beyond 279 acres - it's barely 12 football fields across - nonetheless costs $2.2 million to fight. At $7,899 per acre, the Craggie Fire earns the distinction of being the most expensive fire, on a per-acre basis, of the summer - its per-acre bill totaling seven times the nation average of $1,164 per acre."

Any fire that tops 10,000 acres costs about $1 million a day, he writes.

Some fires, such as the Southern California blazes that consumed homes this year have to be fought aggressively, Gantenbein would agree.

But he argues that for many others, the United States needs a new policy without the idyllic perceptions of forest, heroic conceptions of firefighters, the instinctive aversion to fire, the influence of special interests in Congress, and the inertia of government bureaucracies.

"In some manner, a sense of proportion must be restored to firefighting," he writes. "That can never be accomplished in the heat of the moment. The only way to achieve that goal is to force firefighting agencies to adhere to some semblance of an actual budget."