Fire expert speaks on history and nature of fire
Steven Pyne has traveled to 15 countries and spent two and one-half decades working in national parks studying and improving fire education and management on a national level.
Pyne spoke to about 100 Utah State University students and faculty Wednesday, Sept. 10, in the Eccles Science Learning Center.
Pyne, a professor of environmental history in the biology and society program at Arizona State University, has worked on voluntary firefighting teams in the Grand Canyon, Rocky Mountains and Yellowstone National Parks. He is a professor of environmental history in the biology and society program at ASU.
He is one of the country’s foremost experts on fire and wildfire management. He has received numerous literary awards and honors, having written 16 books, 11 of which are about fire.
According to “The Seattle Times,” Pyne “writes about fire as if he were on fire, with searing, consuming heat and light. When he looks at fire he sees not biological catastrophe, but social illumination and natural renewal.”
Recently, Pyne was on sabbatical and working with the National Humanities Center. He was introduced to the group as a “scholar on fire.”
Pyne explained to USU students that among the world’s inhabitants, only humans have possessed and controlled fire.
“It is what makes us distinctive,” Pyne said. “It is a means to measure ourselves against whales and wolves, oaks and orchids.”
In recent years, fires have become a problem. They have become a matter of political concern, especially in the West.
To help USU students understand wildfire history, Pyne began with a map of the 1880 census and a map of forest fires in the United States. The heavily fire-prone areas were then in the east. In 1880, fires periodically visited New York and heavily concentrated themselves in the South.
“Even today, as they have almost always been,” Pyne said. “The epicenter of fire in the United States was based in the South.”
The fire problems have not lessened in our nation even with improved firefighting technology.
“Fire simply takes apart what photosynthesis puts together,” Pyne said. “In cells this is called respiration. When it occurs in the wild world it is called fire.”
There is an intricate choreography that determines the actual geography of fire, Pyne said. When people acquired the ability to start fires, the demographics of fire on the planet changed to mainly agricultural uses.
For example, in the year 2000, the United States burned 3 billion hectares. (The equivalent of 7.413 trillion acres.) But there are still limits and one can’t take more fuel out of the fire than is put in, Pyne said. It seemed to be the fire of the millennium.
Even though the fire problem has dropped significantly in the United States’ national forests, fires are fought with vigor so intense, as observed by one student at the seminar, that firefighting has become such an addiction that the United States doesn’t know what else to do, and still runs out to fight fires.
Pyne said as much as we want to fix the fire problem and as much as we want to change it, fire itself does not care.
“It does not feel our pain. It speaks the language of wind, grass, rain and fuel, and unless we speak to it in those terms, it won’t hear us,” Pyne said.
But since humans have harnessed the power of fire, Pyne proposed there is no neutral position. Fire would have just as much an effect if it didn’t exist, he said, as it does when it gets out of control.
“The fire duty remains with us and if we can’t find a way to get that under control, we might as well resign from the great chain of life,” Pyne said.
-kassrobison@cc.usu.edu