Stephen J. Pyne: The pyrocene and humanity's historical relationship with fire (ep281)
Green Dreamer with Kamea Chayne is a podcast exploring our paths to holistic healing, ecological regeneration, and true abundance and wellness for all. Subscribe to our show in any podcast app!
Fire historian Stephen Pyne joins us in this episode to discuss:
what the Pyrocene is and a brief history of fire ecology in the Americas;
why we need to tell a new narrative around fire;
how colonial conservation disrupted the regenerative cultural burning practices of Native Americans; and more.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Johanna Warren (IG: @johahahanna, Spotify: Johanna Warren)
“All of the earlier fires in living landscapes came with ecological checks and balances... but when you burn fossil fuels, it’s unbounded... now we have too much bad fire and not enough good fire.”
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Here’s Stephen on our evolving relationship with fire:
“Much of the language, at least in English, that we have for talking about fire is similar to taking care of children: we tend, birth, feed, train it… Fire requires constant attention, so there is a relationship and it’s something you have to take care of.
We made a mutual assistance pact. We gave fire much wider range to operate in—lots of places that would never burn now burn with our assistance…
At the same time, fire has made us powerful—in some ways, too powerful.
All of the earlier fires in living landscapes came with ecological boundaries: You have to burn by season, time of day, kinds of vegetation present and available to burn. There are checks and balances. If you exceed it, then the system degrades and you have to leave.
But when you burn fossil fuels, it's basically unbounded. You can burn day and night, winter and summer, wet and dry. The ecological borders and constraints are gone. The problem is there’s no place to put all the effluent—it’s going into the atmosphere, changing climate, going into the oceans, acidifying, changing our relationship with vegetation, etc.
We have altogether too much bad fire and not enough good fire.”
About Stephen Pyne
Stephen Pyne (Twitter @StephenJPyne) is an emeritus professor at Arizona State University and mostly a fire historian, who has written fire histories for America, Australia, Canada, and Europe (including Russia). The recently published Still-Burning Bush updates his fire survey of Australia.
