An interview with renown fire historian Stephen Pyne
May 25th 2020. Melissa Sterry
An emeritus professor at Arizona State University’s School of Life Sciences, Stephen Pyne’s career has taken him from 15 seasons hands-on experience of working on a fire crew to being dubbed ‘the fire laureate’[1], having authored several seminal books on fire and its history. Here he shares insights on fire and its role in humanity’s past, present, and possible future…
MS. As understood by ancient and indigenous peoples of several world cultures, wildfire is integral to the reproductive processes of numerous forest, shrub, and grassland floral and faunal species. Yet, whereas these peoples respect/ed, and in some instances worship/ped wildfire, many others now demonise it. Having interrogated humanity’s complex and changing relationship with wildfire, what insights do you think the latter community might learn from the former?
SP. We are the keystone species for fire on Earth. We understood what this meant when we inhabited and burned living landscapes – our firepower was our unique ecological signature. When we turned to burning lithic landscapes (ie, fossil fuels), we lost that connection. You can see the partition of the planet into two grand realms of combustion by looking at satellite images of Earth at night.
Urbanites in industrialized countries no longer see fire doing its work; don’t recognize our continued reliance on combustion because it is caged in machines or off-site; only view fire as a disaster and threat. Our effort to abolish flame in built landscapes makes sense; a fire put out is a problem solved. It doesn’t make sense in many living landscapes, where fires put out can be problems put off. The crisis has been growing for a long time, and is now exacerbated by climate change.
For the past 50 years the federal land agencies in the U.S. and most environmental NGOs have supported policies to restore good fire. How to do it has been complicated; we could learn a lot from people who retained a vibrant fire culture.
MS. The fuel that catalysed human evolution –fire is a phenomenon so integral to the development of not merely our taxonomic family, Hominidae, but our order, Primates, that in its absence our lineage would be not a part of the Tree of Life. Thinking to all the ways in which fire has shaped our species, which do you find most compelling and why?
SP. I think of two as foundational. The tended fire is a template for domestication. Importantly it is not simply a technology but a relationship. It requires ceaseless care and attention. The other fire, a model for technology, is cooking. We got small guts and big heads because we learned to cook food. We went to the top of the food chain because we learned to cook landscapes. Now we have become a geologic force because we’ve begun to cook the planet.
MS. Be it in its wild or industrial form, fire is also integral to the functioning of innumerable facets of urban life. Thinking to your studies of how use of fire has influenced the development of architecture and urban design – to cities – which urban fire practices and/or schools of thought do you think most interesting and why?
SP. Fire is not binary, either wild or industrial. It assumes endless forms for agriculture, pastoralism, mining, and technology generally. Many wild fires are not wild so much as feral, the product of a once-domesticated fire habitat gone to weed. Built environments were once filled with working fires for lighting, heating, manufacturing, entertaining; the domus was for the fire as much as for people. Houses and towns were made of the same materials as the surrounding countryside and so burned in much the same ways and at the same times. Built landscapes, too, had their fire ecology.
With industrialization those fires have disappeared from sight, and out of sight means out of mind. We have erected structures out of non-combustible materials (or materials that have already passed through the flames). We have designed rooms, buildings, and cities with fire protection in mind. While the fires may no longer race through city blocks, their threat continues to shape design.
The exception is the awkwardly named wildland-urban interface, the result of an urban colonization of formerly rural or wild landscapes. Its fire threat got labelled as ‘wildland,’ which makes response difficult. It should have been defined as urban, which makes the proper treatment clear. We learned long ago how to prevent conflagrations in cities. Watching towns like Santa Rosa and Paradise, California burn is like watching plague return. We thought we had fixed that problem. We forgot to continue the combustion hygiene that had made it seemingly go away.
MS. To cite The Last Lost World, co-authored with you daughter Lydia, “Even today fire continues to stand for what is uniquely human – traits not cached as fossils, a technology of process and behaviour, not one of material artefacts”. As humanity migrates away from an ‘Industrial Age’ that was pre-occupied with mass production, therein fire’s application to the creation of countless material objects, and towards an epoch that is increasingly defined by an emphasis on exchange of information of many variants, how do you see humanity’s relationship with fire changing?
SP. That text you quote was intended to speak to the difficulty of finding material evidence for prehistoric fire. Black carbon may be indestructible, but burning fields is more an ecological catalyst than something like a spear of scraping tool. Even burning fossil fuels, which is powering the Anthropocene, is not recognized as a fire practice with continuities to burning for hunting and foraging. In preindustrial societies fire is everywhere. In industrial societies it is hidden and removed, and we are learning the unintended consequences of its extinction. The phase change from burning living to burning lithic landscapes – what I call the pyric transition - is one of the great moments not only in human history but in Earth history.
MS. As you have conveyed in several talks, books, and other publications, fire is “a reaction”, which synthesises its surroundings”, taking “its character from its context”, hence “shapeshifts” from one setting to another. In this sense, decoding its behaviour requires of understanding of complexity in socio-ecological systems. Which schools of systems theory/thinking do you think are more useful in understanding fire’s behaviour in environmental and social systems, and at the interface between?.
SP. Fire’s integrative character has been both an intellectual strength and a weakness. The study of fire as fire was a casualty of the Enlightenment. It simply disappeared as a subject in itself, broken into parts for engineering, physics, chemistry, and so on, such that the only fire department at a university campus is the one that sends emergency vehicles when an alarm sounds. The reductionist methodology of modern science dispersed what fire had brought together. Understanding the Anthropocene, however, requires an intellectual integration similar to what fire does in nature. I can see fire returning as a vital concept for modelling complexity and as a narrative axis for appreciating how humans have shaped the planet.
MS. Having examined many of the ways in which indigenous and pastoral communities have integrated use of fire into their land management practices, which do you find most interesting and why?
SP. The reductionist approach that is the glory of modern science is marvellous for making tools and constructed environments and for maximizing one feature of a landscape. It has not proved useful for managing the complexity of natural landscapes. With fire, however, you don’t have to know every aspect: it integrates and catalyses and does the work for you. That’s what made fire so useful for pre-modern societies and why their use of fire has proved so much better in landscapes than modern efforts. They worked with fire’s properties rather than try to make it a tool to maximize one property or another. Besides, they had hundreds and often thousands of years of empirical experience to draw from.
I find most curious, however, the frequent reference to ‘cleaning’ the land with fire – a sense of regular, controlled burning as an expression of good husbandry. This is a strong theme in Australian Aboriginal heritage. But you can see it all over the developing world; in rural Brazil the fires are even called quemada para limpeza – fires for cleaning.
MS. Many and varied are the ways in which some flora and fauna have evolved to co-exist with fire regimes of various intensities and frequencies. Do you have any favourites, and if so, what is it about those species that you find to be most curious/inspiring/interesting?
SP. To be clear, flora and fauna don’t adapt to ‘fire.’ They adapt to patterns of fire, or fire regimes. Those adaptations tend to assume two forms. One protects against fire (think of thick bark). The other, counterintuitively, promotes fire, often high-intensity fire. Chamise chaparral actively becomes more fire-prone as it ages; lodgepole pine has cones that open during crown fire. You have to love these phoenix species.
MS. In ‘Panarchistic Architecture’, I built on a possibility which has also been recently explored by David Bowman and peers, that being that some ancient ‘myths’ bare grains of scientific truth, which in the latter’s study (2015) related to the origin of Australia’s only native palm tree. In my study (2018) I posited that Origin for Fire myths spanning several continents and cultures speak to real-world observations by a pre-historic common source far back within the Human lineage. What are your thoughts on the possibility that, though perhaps obscured by copious use of artistic licence on the part of their various authors/editors through the ages, and with that, use of communications methodologies divergent from our own, fire mythologies exhibit understanding of, amongst other things, fire-adapted flora response to fire events, and fire’s role in the regeneration / reproduction of landscapes over time?
SP. I agree with you, and I would expand from myths to include fire rites, which celebrate fire’s capacity to purge the bad and promote the good. Close experience with how fires actually behave in nature underwrite, for example, the great European almanac of fire ceremonies. The Yule log, the Midsummer bonfire, the fires of Halloween and May Day – all have a basis in fire’s ecology. As with most fire lore, we’ve lost that connection because we no longer use fire routinely. Today, fire is typically incidental and dangerous, not integral and benign.
MS. Copious current, recent, and historical data of multiple variants now strongly suggests that we have embarked on a new fire age – to cite your 2015 essay of the same name, ‘The Pyrocene’. With that in mind, which do you think are the most imperative fire-related issues to address and why?
SP. Thanks to fossil fuels, we’re creating the fire equivalent of an ice age. Even climate history has become a subset of fire history. Few people, however, see fire as an informing principle, or appreciate how, through humans, fires in living landscapes and those burning lithic landscapes share a common narrative. Clearly, we have to end our binge-burning of fossil fuels. But we will be living with the consequences of what we’ve already done for decades, probably centuries. Meanwhile, the conditions pushing for bad fire in living landscapes will intensify. We’ll have a lot more fire to deal with and won’t be able to pretend we can control them through suppression, which often makes conditions worse. As we ratchet down our industrial combustion, we’ll have to ratchet up our landscape burning. We can have fires of choice or fires of chance, but we no longer have a choice over whether we will have more fire or not.
MS. Alphabet Inc. CEO Sundar Pichai has stated, several times over, that he thinks that artificial intelligence will have “a more profound” impact on humanity “than fire, and electricity or any of the other things we have worked on” (Thomas and Bodoni, 2020), it being a soundbite that numerous press and media agencies have since widely propagated. When public awareness of fire’s foundational role in human evolution is so poor that barely any have questioned that statement’s viability, what steps do you think we might take to help mitigate the problem?
SP. I would be wary of analogies like these, particularly when they come from people whose experience of fire is virtual. Long ago we made a mutual assistance pact with fire: we would each expand the domain of the other. Increasingly, however, that pact looks more like a Faustian bargain. So, yes, our experience with fire shows us we handle a complicated phenomenon. It also shows we can mess it up. There is an old saying that fire is a good servant but a bad master. I prefer another version, that fire is our best friend and worst enemy. Fire is among our earliest technologies – a prototype for what has followed.
MS. Thinking to the many fire-related books that you have read over the years, which three would you most recommend others, and particularly urbanites, read and why?
SP: Peter Hoffer’s Seven Fires: The Urban Infernos that Reshaped America offers a lively, thoughtful survey of urban fire in America, beginning with Boston in 1760 and ending with New York in 2001. I find Vaclav Smil’s Energy in World History helpful for placing combustion within the grand sweep of humanity’s hunger for power. Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire is a literary meditation on the 1949 Mann Gulch fire that swept over a crew of smokejumpers in Montana. The book connected fire with intellectual culture outside science and practically invented a subfield of wildland fire literature.
For a more specialised audience, I’d recommend Johan Goudsblom’s Fire and Civilization , which is a survey of fire by a sociologist that manages to convey a very European notion of fire. Then, Harley H. Bartlett’s ‘Fire in Relation to Primitive Agriculture and Grazing in the Tropics: Annotated Bibliography’ (1955), which records observations from explorers and peripatetic scientists, and is like reading research note cards, but for the committed, the information is fascinating. And for anyone intrigued by fire behavior, consider Mark Schroeder and Charles Buck’s ‘Fire Weather’, published as a USDA agricultural handbook in 1970 and still unchallenged as an introduction.
MS: One of the things that has most struck me about both your own approach, and that of the wider fire research community, is how very inclusive, pro-active, welcoming, and open-minded you/they are to new and emerging researchers in the field. In particular, the collective’s ongoing efforts to support women researchers and their projects and other endeavours, including science communications, and to encourage more women and other minority groups to enter the field, are notable. With that in mind, how do you see greater diversity impacting on the future of fire research?
SP: I’m pleased to hear that you think this is the case. The real diversity issue is less based on social criteria like gender and race than on disciplinary ones. Each research tradition sees fire only through its own prism, which it of course regards as privileged. It’s hard to merge them in a coherent ways. I suspect we’ll have to rely on artists and maybe humanities scholars to fashion a whole. Which, as it happens, is my niche *smile*.
Pre-order Professor Pyne’s latest book, ‘To the Last Smoke: An Anthology’ here and read more about his work here.
Images of the Rhea Fire, Oklahoma, US in 2018, taken aboard Sentinel and processed by Pierre Markuse.
Footnote [1] Citation from ‘Forest Fires: A Reference Handbook’ by Philip N. Omi (2005).