Factually! with Adam Conover - How We Created an Age of Fire with Stephen Pyne

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

Our species didn't just stumble upon fire during our evolution; we evolved because of our unique relationship with it. From cooking food to burning fossil fuels to climate change, the entire history of humanity is intertwined with fire. This week's guest is Stephen Pyne, a world-renowned fire historian and author of The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next. Adam and Stephen discuss the changes in our relationship with fire and how repairing that relationship will be integral to the survival of our species. Find Stephen's book at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. You know, if you've smelled a certain aroma of burning in the air, if the sun has started to look a little more orangy pink than usual,

well, you might've noticed it's fire season in America. Of course, it feels like it's been fire season for a couple of solid years now. And there's truth to that. Extreme wildfires have doubled in just the last 20 years. And these fires are not only a product of global warming, they're a product of humans directly. In California, where I live,

95% of all wildfires are caused by people. They are not natural disasters, they are human disasters. But you know what? That shouldn't actually be surprising to us because the history of humanity is in fact the history of fire itself. In billions of years of life on earth, we are the only species that has managed

to control and start fire. We have fire to thank for our big brains, which we were able to evolve because we were able to cook food using fire. We have fire to thank for the fossil fuel economy that gave us everything from cars to chat GPT, and for the ongoing threat of catastrophic climate change. So when you look at it that way, it looks like our entire world is dominated and defined

by the ever-increasing number of fires that we start. There's a name for this new world that we live in. A world of increasing and ever threatening fire caused by humanity. Maybe you've heard it. The word is the pyro scene. Well, our guest today is a groundbreaking historian of fire who coined that very term. But before we get into that interview, I just want to remind you that if you want to support this show, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every one of the incredible

interviews we do ad free. And of course, if you love standup comedy, come see me on the road. Head to adamconover.net for my tickets and tour dates. Coming up soon, I'm headed to Phoenix, Arizona, Toronto, Canada, many more tour dates on the way. Head to adamconover.net for those tickets. So what is the human relationship to fire fundamentally?

And how can we adapt to a world where fire, once our tool, seems to have the upper hand over us? Well, to talk fire and everything pyro scene, our guest today is Stephen Pine, a world renowned historian of fire and the author most recently of the pyro scene, how we created an age of fire and what happens next Please welcome Steve pine

Steve thank you so much for being on the show. Oh my pleasure. Thanks for the invitation always happy to talk about fire Yeah, I'm always happy to talk about fire. I mean, it's you know, one of my favorite elements it's right about there I think it's really earth I, earth is the last, I think, obviously, uh, your work has led to the popularization of this new term to describe our era, the pyro scene. What does this mean? Well, the pyro scene is my response to colleagues and, and other commentators who think that the future is not only dire but strange. And we have no analog for it. We're headed into a no analog future. And it seemed to me that we

have both a narrative and an analog. And the narrative is humanity's unbroken relationship with fire, a kind of mutual assistance pact. And the analogy is that we're creating the fire equivalent of an ice age. So just as the Pleistocene was characterized by two and a half million years of serial ice ages, you know, with ice as an informing present, climate change, sea level change, mass extinctions, biogeographic shifts, all this stuff going on. Just imagine that instead of ice, we had fire as the kind of informing presence. And what would it look like? It would look pretty much like an ice age informed by fire.

And that's really the world I see maturing. That is... No, it's just, it actually works. I mean, all analogies break down. As scientists say, all models fail at some point, but some are useful. And all metaphors are the same. Metaphor is just, for me, is a model with figures of speech. And it helps to crystallize a lot of stuff. So we think of all the fires going on, but people using fire to clear land and misusing it. We think of all the fossil fuel combustion that's going on. And the rest of when you add

all of that up, in effect, we've broken the sequence of ice ages and we have replaced it. We have countered that with a fire age of our own making. And there may be in a kind of macabre way a useful outcome to this, namely that I can still remember climatologists were telling us we're headed for a new ice age. It's inevitable. Nothing has changed in the earth. The Milankovitch cycles are still going, all the rhythms are on, everything's the same. We've just been in this interglacial era. Well, it turns out that we broke that and we have replaced it thanks to our power with fire. So we're a fire creature. I mean,

fire is what we do. That's what we are in the great chain of being. We have a species monopoly over it. So I would rather have a fire age than an ice age. There's not much you can do about ice, but fire run away. You're not down on the, you're not down on the fire age. You're like, fire is maybe not so bad. Fire age could be, could be good. We, we have shown that we can manipulate fire to disrupt the climate on a planetary scale. And not just the climate, but the oceans, the land,

everything, just like an ice age. We now have to show we can manage that because if all we do is disrupt it and we create an uninhabitable world, we're still in bad shape. But fire is something we can manipulate in ways that we can't really manipulate ice. Well, what makes fire so important?

Because there's another term I've heard, the Anthropocene, the idea that we're in an era that is dominated by humanities, manipulation of geology, of the globe itself in so many ways, microplastics in the ocean, it'll show up in the fossil record a few million years from now, all that sort of thing. But when you say pyro scene,

you are putting fire in our relationship with it. You're saying that is the primary thing that we are doing is unleashing the power of fire. So why is it that humans you feel have a special connection with fire? Why is fire so dominant in this story? Well, it goes back to our origin, actually, the genus, the hominins had fire.

Neanderthals had fire. Homo erectus could cook food and probably other, yeah. And there's a lot of evidence that that was critical in shrinking guts and expanding heads, that you get a lot more nutrition out of food if you cook it. And I think that makes a lot of sense. So I mean, in shorthand, here's the story is that we got big heads and small guts because we learned to cook food. And then we went to the top of the food chain. Because is that because cooking makes food more nutrient dense?

Is that what it is? Yeah, it releases calories. It also detoxifies. I mean, there's a lot of food. You don't want to eat raw, but if you cook it, uh, you can perch it, um, of, uh, parasites and worms and other kinds of stuff. Right. So there's a lot. You get more calories. Apparently experiments, I haven't done them, but those who have been making this case for cooking as a pivot point in human history have. Can we live off just raw food? And probably not. We need that edge, the cooking, that extra processing.

I mean, now, as in so many things, we overdo it. We've supersized it to the point where over-processed food is now toxic. We've gone too far. It's funny because there are people out there who are raw food evangelists and believe we should be eating all of our food raw like they claim ancient humans were, but you actually say the opposite,

that humanity's diet was defined by our mastery of fire and that is why we are the species that we are. You think these people are fundamentally wrong. Well, I think they're wrong. I think raw food is a great way to lose weight. But it hasn't been demonstrated that we could reproduce and survive on just raw food. Yeah, you could lose weight and then eventually die

and never have children and then your line dies out. Yeah, that's, yeah, if you wanna not exist, it's a great thing to do. But we've had that and there was a time when there were lots of hominids out there who could manipulate fire. But after the Neanderthals, we're in. So since the end of the last glaciation, say the last 11,000 years or so, what geologists call the Holocene, what I'm happy to call it Anthropocene if you want to.

I think it's a human dominated era. But I like to call it a Pyrocene because I'm a fire guy. I'm a pyromanic, not a pyromaniac, important distinction. And I like- Pyromanic, oh, that's beautiful. You love fire. Yeah, you're not a maniac for it. You wanna romance the fire. You wanna take the fire out to dinner and make it on're not a maniac for it. You want to romance the fire.

You want to take the fire out to dinner and make an honest fire out of it. Well, it's a relationship. Yeah, it's an awkward relationship. You have to work at it. You have to work at it. Yeah. If it becomes abusive.

You get too close and you get burned. You're in big trouble. You're in big trouble. If you think too close you get burned. You're in big trouble. So you're in big trouble. You think it's exclusive. Yeah, well, continue on that thought. What is the romance between you and fire? Well, I don't know. I don't want to overdo it.

It's, I mean, I learned about fire by accident. So a few days after graduating from high school, I found myself on a forest fire crew at the North Ramagran Canyon National Park. I was supposed to be a laborer in the South Rim, but they had an opening on the crew. They asked me if you want to go. I'd never been there. I had no idea what I was saying yesterday. I was 18. What did I know? I said, sure. And it was an extraordinary initiation into a totally different world. You're out there and fire is what defines your life. I never studied fire in school. It was never taught back then. Who would teach it? In the late 70s, about the time after I got my doctorate, which was

basically a biography of an American geologist and explorer. That's really what I was interested in and still am. But I then realized, you know, I'm kind of fascinated by fire. And what's the story here? I mean, I'm trained as a historian. How could I think about fire? Is anybody thinking about fire in that way? As far as I could tell, no. I mean, there were people doing science fire behavior. There was some fire ecology emerging

Yeah, bits and pieces here and there was writing the story from no one's writing the story from fires perspective That's right saying what does this look like to fire? Right? What's the what's the what's the whole story from the fire from FOV? Fire point of view. That's right. So I mean we were really isolated We're at Grand Canyon one of the seven wonders of the world. The North Rim has about 10% of the visitation of the South Rim or less. It's at the end of a one-way road. I mean, we were really isolated. This is in 1967. We have no internet, obviously. We have no personal phones. We have no television. We can get, when the ionosphere is right, we could get a radio station, a trucker station, KOMA out of Oklahoma City and listen to radio. But that's it. We're

out there, you know? And so your life is organized around fire. And then in a way, you begin thinking, abstracting, which is sort of what academics do, sometimes well, sometimes not so well. And I was thinking, you know, is this true for humanity as well? Is humanity's life, can that be organized around fire in the same way that it was for the North Rim Long Shots, as we call it ourselves, on a fire crew? And so that was sort of the essential insight and I got some support. The Forest Service was changing its fire policy at the time. The Park Service had changed its policy the year after I started. They never managed to implement it, but the policy was changed. I knew as a historian,

okay, there's a big change, big reformation underway in how the federal agencies are thinking about fire. That's where the, you know, that's where the story goes. So how did we get to this point? And so I wrote a book and then I decided I'd keep going, you know, and I could continue to drill down in the American story more. I mean, I mean, it was like being on the American river in California in 1848. I mean, you're just walking down, picking up nuggets off the sandbars. I'm looking around, look at all this fire stuff. This is great stuff. Why aren't there 200 people fighting each other over these sandbars? I mean, the stuff is just out there. Well, nobody's trained to look at it that way. You see what you're

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when you go to joindeleteme.com slash Adam and use promo code Adam at checkout. That's joined delete me.com slash Adam promo code Adam. Your writing on fire is so revelatory. There's this idea in, I read your recent piece in scientific American. There's this idea in, I read your recent piece in Scientific American. You write about how fire is a chemical process that is dependent on life. This is the only planet where we have fire.

Earth is the only planet where there is fire. And that's because fire as a chemical process only happens on things that are alive or were once alive. Therefore, fire is intimately connected with life itself. And I just found that to be such a mind blowing idea. Tell me a little bit more about that. Sure.

Well, we've defined fire for a long time as a physical chemistry. It's a combustion reaction with hydrocarbons, et cetera. It's oxygen and the rest of it. Yeah. That you can do a lot with that. You can make a lot of tools. You can predict how things burn and so forth. But if you look at it, why is there fire?

Fire exists because life exists on Earth. Life created the oxygen that fire requires. Life on land created and organized the fuel. The only thing life didn't control was ignition. That is until a couple million years ago when hominids acquired that. And so suddenly, the great majority of fires in the world now are the result of humans directly and indirectly. So again, life has sort of continued to absorb fire and fire depends on it. So, fire in some ways, interesting question is fire alive. And lots of people think it is or might like to think it is. My sense has always been

it's like a virus. It's not alive, but it takes on the properties of life because it requires the living world to propagate. And it takes its character from that. Now, some people will say, well, viruses are actually alive. So at that point, fine. We're arguing about definitions of whether fire is alive or not. This is scholasticism. At this point, I'm not concerned. What I am concerned is that life is fundamental.

And it spreads like a virus. A virus is a chemical reaction that happens to living cells, right? Where it's just a reaction that happens, cells bumping around into each other. This particular reaction has taken advantage of the machinery of cells to propagate itself. You can look at fire the same way,

that fire operates on the molecular remnants of life to propagate itself. And I mean, there's so many themes in there I wanna pick up. I mean, one of them is that, I've used this metaphor on the show before. Often, when I think about what it is to be a human alive on Earth, vis-a-vis the rest of the Earth

on which I live, I sometimes feel like to be human is to be part of a fire, that we are growing and expanding across the earth. We take resources and we release energy from them, we use it for our own ends, and it's entropic in a way, we are using up what is there, and the question is, are we ever gonna become a sustaining campfire or are we gonna burn down

the entire forest? And that, but that to me was just a metaphor. When you describe it, I'm like, oh wait, in a sense it is literally true that all this energy was stored up from the rest of life around the globe and we are releasing that energy in the form of all the fires that we unleash. And we use those fires to power our cars

and our vehicles, our homes, et cetera, et cetera, is all done through the power of fire. Our cooking is done through fire. Everything we do is derived from fire in a way. And even the chemistry of fire is a biochemistry. I mean, when it occurs in our cells, we call it respiration. derived from fire in a way. And even the chemistry of fire is a biochemistry. I mean, when it occurs in our cells, we call it respiration,

but the same reaction in the wide world we call fire. So if you think about it, then how do you respond to fire? Fire, we may, we have a problem with fire now. Okay, well, what does that mean? Yeah. If you define fire as a physical chemical process shaped by its physical surroundings, then you have physical countermeasures. You treat it like a tsunami or you treat it as

some kind of physical event that's a disturbance and a threat, and you remove the fuels away from it. Well, if you think about fire as part of the living world, then maybe we ought to be thinking about biological controls as well. Ecological engineering, rather than just saying, okay, this is so much fuel, we've got to bulldoze it out of the way to protect ourselves. Well, maybe there are more sophisticated ways to do this. Fire and the living landscape have been together for 420 plus million years. We've got fossil charcoal.

As soon as plants are on continents, they start burning. So there's a lot of give and take in all of that. And that also recognition then gives other insight into what it means to burn fossil fuels or what I think of as lithic landscapes, once living now fossilized because they have no checks and balances. It's so funny that, you know, we call them fossil fuels. We know they're called fossil fuels. We so rarely think about the fact that it's the remnants of living organisms,

that it is the, it is sort of the final stage of life on Earth, is oil that we burn. And you know, sometimes people say, oh yeah, I'm putting dinosaur bones in my car or whatever. People sort of know that. But the fact that it is, it's life. Like we, like we, I'm sorry, I just cannot, I cannot think about this enough, that, you know,

the sun's rays came and hit the Earth, Life evolved to turn that sunshine into energy, right? For the plant, and then later the animals that ate it. Then all those plants and animals, you know, they die, they get crushed down into little fossils, they get squished and squished and squished, that gets turned into oil. So all of that stored sunlight, that life turned into energy is in the earth,

and now we come along and we're taking that out and we're burning it again and releasing all that energy back into the atmosphere. And the fact is, it's a life all the way down. We are burning up life to create our, create the world in which we live and we're heating the planet doing it. I mean, it's like, it, it sounds like science fiction when you describe it that way,

but that is what is literally happening. And you get the value of this. Well, you think about it differently. So maybe instead of trying to do the same stuff over and over again, we've got to respond. Maybe there's another way to think about it. So how does fire spread? It spreads by continued. It's essentially the same model. So we're back to a virus model. What are, how might we think of mega fires? Is this just a physical event, a tsunami or an earthquake or a big ice storm or something, a hurricane? Or is it more like an emergent plague? Here we've got a broken biota, we're walking around

with it, and now we've released it, we've created conditions. If you think about that, then how do you respond to it? Well, how do you define it? So I think that, you know, there's no one way to think about it. Fire is a shapeshifter. It takes its form from its context. You know, if we're back, fire and ice. Ice is a shape-shifter. It takes its form from its context. You know, for backfire and ice, ice is a modernist, nature is modernist, fire is nature is postmodernist. It's all about settings and context. So it's always shifting. And I'm fine with that.

That's a very literary mode of analysis. Ice is modernist and fire is postmodernist. Yeah. I spent a season in Antarctica. I spent a season in Antarctica. You spent a season in Antarctica? Yeah, after my fire crew ended, I learned about this Antarctic fellowship. I spent Christmas at the South Pole and New Year's at a place called Dome Sea, East Antarctica, which is pretty much the end of the world.

So I got a full immersion baptism in ice and what a world shaped by ice would look like. I live here in California, in Southern California, where every single year there's a fire. I'm sure there's one right now in LA County that people don't even, they don't even show it on the news anymore. It's so calm and you just see the sun looks weird

and you're like, oh, there must be a fire somewhere That's why we have a pretty sunset today And we have this sense that those fires are not being managed. Well, it's a fire zero percent contained and it's threatening homes and da da da And so you were saying there must be a better way to do it I'm curious are there examples of a mayor of human civilizations that have Managed fire better than we do here in the United States right now? Well, the divide seems to be whether you develop or not. If you're in the developed world, if you've modernized,

which is to say you've converted to fossil fuel, fossil biomass civilization, you have mega fires. If you don't, I mean, why is it that all the mega fires are in developed countries? I mean, the countries that have the most science, the heaviest technology, the greatest wealth, why are these places the ones being pounded? And why has that, why did that happen over the last half century, century? I mean, what is going on here? Well, obviously, it's a part of that process. Here's the historian speaking. We've created a world in which fire, our relationship with fire fundamentally changed. And our overcommitment, our obsession with fossil fuels and the power

it made possible. As I said, fire had always been a kind of relationship. We help fire, fire helps us. But we turned it into a kind of factory farm for combustion and we get a lot of power out of it, but we don't, where does all the waste go? It's just pollutant on a planetary scale now. So we've taken it out of its old setting so it no longer behaves as it should. And it's not just climate change,

it's also how we structure our life on the landscape. How do we build our homes and cities? What do we do for agriculture? What about nature preserves? How do all these things go together? The developed world has one pattern and fire does what fire does. It integrates its surroundings and this is what you get. And other, other countries, in fact, California pre-settlement, I mean, burned several million acres a year without, without destroying themselves or the planet. Tell me about that. What made those fires different in California?

I assume you mean pre-European colonization. Well, there was a long experience with people. Climate change coming out of the last ice age, people on the scene, people using fire. There's a lot of interaction and you can't do whatever you decide you want. I mean, now some of our power concentrated in machines and so forth, we think we can just do this

and we're more powerful than the consequences. Well, we aren't, but that wasn't true. There was a give and take. And in many of the landscapes, particularly maintained forests, lower elevation, grassy areas and so forth, fairly easy to burn, were routinely burned. They were burned, many of them every year, others on say a three to five year cycle, maybe 10 years, mostly burning.

Once you begin developing this pattern, then you don't have these huge monocultures of fuel waiting to burn. So you've broken the landscape down and you're substituting your fires for wildfires. And so in some ways, the argument can be made that these really aren't wildfires, they're feral fires. They're fires that were once quasi domesticated. They were part of a tamed of relationship. No, it's not perfect. It's not mechanically exact and predictable, but essentially working out a kind of rough equilibrium

that everything's accommodated. And now we have broken that. So the fires that are there are no longer feeding on that previously burned and managed landscape. They are just encountering this onslaught of fuels. Yeah. This is the argument that, you know, the indigenous folks who lived in California before European colonization, like had a fundamentally different relationship, right. To, to, to fire. And that it was being used in a more sustainable way,

but that once those like traditional practices were ended, then we had a much more destructive form of fire. Is that right? Yeah, that's in a nutshell. Yeah. And you know, we shouldn't, I think overemphasize the degree of control people had. I mean, fire is fire.

Yeah. It's responsive to winds and mountains and all kinds of things over which we have no control. But people were able to accommodate it without being destroyed by it or destroying the landscape, the habitability. There were always checks and balances. If you overdid it, then nature shut you off. And so you had to rebuild from that. And now we've simply overloaded everything. I mean, not just the climate, the oceans, the land, everything's, I mean, everything's on a whack. And it's not, I would say it's not even just fossil fuels. It's the fossil biomass.

Think of all the plastics. Think of all the other tar and asphalt and everything. The other matter that we've taken out of the geologic past, and we plunked it down here now. I was watching Jurassic Park the other day, which I haven't seen for a long time. And the comment was, well, people and dinosaurs haven't been together for, you know, 65 million years, separate them. And, you know, you've got to expect some unexpected if you put them together. And that's sort of what we've done. We've taken this stuff out of the geologic past. We burned it and processed it, plucked it down in the present, and we released all the consequences to the future. And that in a

sense is no wonder it's out of control. But it also makes you wonder, you know, were there any dinosaurs that could control fire? I mean, it doesn't have to be a velociraptor with a torch. Now that is a scary thought. Well, you really did just watch Jurassic Park. You're like one of a velociraptor. Like got a whole like a torch. I would be fucking crazy, dude.

I love where your mind is going. But that is a geologically massive change, that there was all of this energy trapped underground in the form of old biomass, and we take it out, and we burn it. We burn it, we turn it into plastic, we release it into the atmosphere, we do all this, and we literally just physically have taken it

out of the ground, and that is a, that's a massive change for earth. Um, and that is when people start talking about the Anthropocene and the pyro scene, that's what they mean, right? That the change is that massive. It is. We could discuss about when that starts. Uh, and a lot of people would say it only begins with a wholesale burning of fossil fuels. I think it begins at the end of the last glaciation. The ice is melting, the earth is warming, the earth is becoming more fire receptive, and a creature, a fire-wielding creature who can go everywhere is now spreading across that planet and we're interacting. And it is an interaction. There are limits. We can't just do whatever we want. But within that, we have a lot of, we can push the plastic

around. It's elastic to a certain extent and we really change things and we've been changing it and I think we have been changing it. It all goes on afterburners when we go to fossil fuels, but I don't think it begins there. It begins with the whole the same. And I think we've, we have been in cumulative effect enough to break the ice ages. In your work, you divide earth's fire history into three fires, you call them. Can you go through those and explain what you mean by that? Yeah, the fire community is obsessed over triangles, fire triangles. So this is one

for history. What I call first fire is the fire that existed for 420 plus million years without people. You know, as soon as fire was possible on land, it starts burning. Not every place burns the same way or every year or whatever, but fire is always there. It's part of the system. And then, hominids come along and begin taming it. They begin cooking for food, but then they begin cooking landscapes. And that sort of takes us to the top of the food chain. I mean, and now we began cooking the planet, but that's a different stage.

But I consider that sort of tamed human interacting with fire, that mutual assistance pact that was created as a second fire. There's an old notion of a second nature. Cicero talks about it in one of his essays. It's as though humans had taken raw nature and with hand and wit had remade it. And that's what we did. And fire would be a part of that in a sense. And then third fires only exist because of people and that's the combustion of fossil fuels, which is outside the old ecological checks and balances, the whole system.

And that is competing and disrupting the other patterns of fires, which is part of what's giving us our problems. Now, I'm happy, I mean, I like having a fireplace. We've got a cabin in the mountains, not in Phoenix. You're not gonna burn fires here, certainly not this time of year. But go up where it's nice, sit around a campfire. It's a very mellowing experience. People tell stories. It's very natural. I'm happy that my house

is no longer filled with smoke, which houses where I'm pleased that it's not under threat from fire the way it was a century ago, or cities are burning routinely, etc., etc. That's all to the good. But when we try to extend that conversion, that transformation to a fossil fuels surrogate for fire to the countryside. Then we get into deep problems because fire had an ecological role there and we can't find a surrogate for it and we can't take it out without upending,

delaminating whole systems, which is what's going on. So I think there are ways in which, you know, I'm happy for it. I'll be happier when we have renewables so we don't have all the bad consequences of it. But one of the things that happens here we're back to the developed world is that very few people have any relationship to fire anymore. They don't see it. They don't know it. They only see it as a disaster. You hear a lot of people saying,

well, now we need to learn to live with fire. And that's true. But I would say it's a case of fire as a part of living was how humanity used to do it. Fire was just there. It was a companion. And there are different visions of that relationship. Nietzsche imagines himself as a flame destroying, transmuting, demolishing the world. St. Francis includes fire in his song of the creatures, brother fire, very welcome and inviting. And so, you know, fire is always our best friend. And now we've turned it into our worst enemy. Well, how can we get back to fire being our good friend?

I mean, what would be a healthier version of a relationship to fire, or you call it good fire? How do we restore good fire? Yeah, well, that's the big challenge. I mean, part of it is getting rid of bad fire. We don't want cities burning. We don't want more paradise Californians incinerated. We don't want people killed. We don't want municipal watersheds trashed. Okay, but part of that is remaking the landscape, thinking of the landscape as a habitat for fire, for fire and people. And that's where good fire comes in, because fire is going to happen, and it's always needs

to happen. How do we make that? How can we put fire back in and reorganize the landscape in ways that are ecologically beneficial, but also reduce the possibility of these explosive fires? And at some point, we have to shut down fossil fuel combustion. I mean, we can fuss around and finagle and argue and this and that. But as long as that continues, it will eventually override any mitigation we can make. There will be a change of state. Fire will go on. I mean, fire will make a

world friendlier to fire, but it'll be a change of state. Fire will go on. I mean, fire will make a world friendlier to fire, but it'll be a world without us. Fire will make a world friendlier to fire. How do you mean? Well, what's going to come back from these places that are being burned in the context of climate change? There's no reason to think they're going to come back to what they were.

Even if we allow a century or two, so much is going to change. And fire is going to come back to what they were. Even if we allow a century or two, so much is going to change. And fire is going to come back in at each burning, depending on the severity, etc., etc., and what happens afterwards. What will come back will very likely be more adapted to the fires that made it possible. And so you're going to transition. So a phrase I used in that article is that mythology is becoming ecology. I mean, there are all these ancient stories about worlds destroyed in fire or destroyed and remade in fire. And one way of thinking about what's going on now is that we have a slow motion Ragnarok going on. It's not happening instantaneously in a great twilight of the gods. It's happening over decades. It may happen over several centuries, but we interacting with fire are remaking

that world. Wow. I mean, it's amazing to me how epic the way that you frame these things are. I've talked to a lot of historians. I've talked to a lot of people who study things. Few people bring up so much, uh, so many literary sources, so much epic poetry, you know, uh, there were many ice ages and now we're in the age of fire. The, the three, uh, forms of fire, the Ragnarok, it's, it's, uh, it's a very powerful way to put it.

And, but it seems very fitting with this topic because fire is something that's so like deep within our psyche that we're, and it, it's destroying, but it's also remaking it's, uh, renewing it is, it's a really primal force. And I, my career in a sense, I have come to recognize is based on a paradox in that I came up with some of these original ideas in the sense that fire is a great story.

Fire is an epic story that we've forgotten about because we've taken it out of our lives. And I've been able to carry that and I made a career out of that. And what I did in Scientific American is in a sense, a kind of, I hope accessible version of that. And you've picked up on it. But you asked me, where do we need to go? We need to go to normalize fire. And in a sense, normalize fire, it's not, it shouldn't be an epic, it shouldn't be something outside that we have to live with and incorporate with.

It should be just, it's just a part. We burn the countryside, we burn the forest the same way that we would paint our house, repave the road. It's just a part of general maintenance. In effect, it becomes an ordinary process. At that point, what I have brought to the subject is out of step. I mean, I still think it's epic, but we won't be living in an epic age. We'll be living in an age where fire is once again our companion, and it will be more ordinary. I don't know if I'm making

myself clear on this, but it occurs to me that I've created an odd set of circumstances personally for myself. So. In that you are obsessed with fire, but you hope that fire becomes less important and less present in our world today. No, I think I want it to be more important, but I simply want it to be a part of our lives. It's a part of living.

Not a case that we have to live with this outside force, this constant threat, and we have to deal with it and negotiate with it. No, it should be a part of what we are doing on this planet. This is our role. This is what we do in the great chain of being, and we need to reclaim that. But if we reclaim it, then the kind of epic claim that I've made for it is no longer in step. So maybe I have a historical moment. No, that is a very beautiful way to put it.

And it connects me to the fact that I think the oddest thing about fire is that it is literally a part of us. It's a chemical reaction that has its potential in organic molecules and hydrocarbons, right? That is what, those are things that catch on fire. One of the things that is unique about us as living things, we are things that can catch on fire.

Fire is part of being alive, and you know, each of us probably will be on fire one day after we're dead, right? And so, just thinking about it as this innate capacity of life, and us as living things being things that us as humans unleashing fire is such a, that being something that we fundamentally do,

is such a powerful idea and something that we should come to terms with. Yes, it's our nature, so why not understand it and use it positively? Yeah, it's a restoration program, yeah. So what is your, do you have any like near term hopes or ways that you hope we can think about fire more positively or fire management practices that'll,

you know, in the near term can help us, you know, turn fire for something that is so destructive, especially here where I am in California and does something more positive. Yeah, well, part of it, I think is a problem of definition. What is the nature of the fire problem? In fact, we have a lot of fire problems. So there's not one. So we need lots and lots of solutions. Fire is all over the place. It's a shapeshifter. It will take its character from its context. So part of it, we have this problem with cities burning. Urban fire, we

thought had gone away. We fixed that problem. Now it's coming back, not just exurbs, but modest sized towns. And now, you know, Santa Rosa, fires burning into it and so forth. Well, is this a wildland fire problem complicated by houses? Or is this really an urban fire problem complicated by trees? And if you define it as a wildland fire problem, it's very difficult. It's what scientists call a wicked problem, and you can just go around and around. If you define it as an urban fire problem with peculiar landscaping, it's very clear what you have to do. We have to do what we did to take fire out of our cities, which used to burn as often as the surrounding countryside. They were made of the same materials. So that's a matter of definition. That's fairly simple.

Some other things should be... But in general, there was just a national commission on wildfire issued its report, I think, last fall. And they had something like 148 recommendations. And you think they're all over the place. Yeah, that's because fire is all over the place. And you think, well, that's too complicated. We can't come out with a solution. There is no a solution. There are lots of solutions. And it means there are lots of points of entry to deal with fire problems. We can certainly, let's isolate the problem caused by power lines starting fires and high winds, a source of major fire disasters throughout the country. Well, this is a fixable problem.

We know the grid is needed to be rebuilt for decades. We've known that. So fire now becomes a part of that. We've got a problem with biodiversity, ecological goods and services, municipal watershed problems. Well, we've known that those issues stand on their own. Let's make fire a part of that as well. So again, instead of having fire as something outside there that we live with, it is now a part of all the things we do in living in how we live on the land. We include fire within that and then you start chipping away at these things and you begin mitigating. We can remove the worst problems in five years if we wanted to, if we really chose to.

And then, you know, another 10 or 20, even with climate change for some, but it's a case of doing all these little things, putting fire back in with all of these other issues that we had taken fire out of. And then it adds up. We're framing the problem. We're framing the problem wrong. We shouldn't be fighting fire. We shouldn't have firefighters.

We should have fire coexistence. We should fire acceptors, fire, fire, mitig. From firefighters to fire lighters. That's how to put it. To fire lighters, to fire, we should be lighting fires, but the right kind of fires in the right places. Not the destructive ones. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, Steve, this has been so fascinating. I can't thank you enough for being here to talk to us about this. Where can people find your work? Oh, wherever good books are sold or stored on library shelves, obviously. I'll just suggest, it depends what you want. I'll suggest two recent books.

One is The Fire History of Mexico, which might be interesting because I was able to use this three fires frame as a way of making sense of Mexico. That just came out. The other for California, I did a study, I had a chance to go into the back country to look at an area where Yosemite National Park for 50 years had tried to restore natural fire. And so this was a three-day trek, lots of the best minds in fire research,

park people, all going out, discuss what's going on. And then I used that and it occurred to me that I could use Yosemite to frame the larger pyroxene context that this is a place famous for its ice sculpting. It's a legacy of the ice ages, which shape everything there. And now it's being remade by fire, whether in climate change or large fires, fires burning into Sequoia groves and the rest of it. So, Pyrocyn Park, this became a kind of cameo for the story of the earth. And it was revealing how difficult it was there. And my favorite episode, we were camped at one area, I think it was about 7,000 feet, but the park is now in stage two fire restrictions. And so here we have some of the best fire scientists, wilderness thinkers, fire managers

in California. They're sitting around what they had hoped to be a campfire, but they can't light a fire because of the restrictions. So they've got an LED light, and we're sitting around trying to talk about fire. And that for me was, there it was, the visual. We can't even talk about it here without tripping over our own creations. We're not really thinking about this in a suitable way. So that didn't mean they didn't go on. They're trying to do things, but Yosemite's got a lot going for it. The one thing that's against it is the valley, which collects the smoke, and that's a public health issue, et cetera. But other than that, they've got all these things in their favor and they're still struggling.

So what about all the other places? And that book is called? Pyrozee and Park. Well, and if you want to pick up a copy, you can do so at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. Steve, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for being on the show. Oh, thank you for inviting me.

You got me fired up once more. And don't even, don't even resist it. It's impossible not to use fire metaphors. Believe me. I have a lifetime experience. Well, we really sparked something. I think we burned every tree. That is not even a metaphor.

I'm running out of gas. Ah, there we go. We burned up all the dead wood. Steve, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you so much. Thank you. Well, thank you once again to Steve Pine for coming on the show. If you wanna pick up a copy of his book,

Pyro Scene, you can do so at factuallypod.com slash books. And just a reminder, when you purchase there, you'll be supporting not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. If you want to support the show directly, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gives you every episode of this show and every one of my video monologues ad free. Fifteen bucks a month, I will read your name in the credits of this very podcast

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