Steve Pyne
Writer, fire guy (aka pyromantic), exploration historian, urban farmer. Recent books include "Pyrocene Park" and "Five Suns: A Fire History of Mexico."
Website: www.stephenpyne.com
- Before GIS there were fire atlases - all analogue, with printed topo maps, data entered with heavy colored pencils, hard bound in canvas. Here's one from the Kaibab National Forest that was rescued, scorched, from a fire in the supervisor's officer. A fire(d) atlas?
- O'Connor is among the best journalists writing about fire. And the New Yorker? Who would have predicted it would regularly publish pieces on fire? Amazing fire, insightful essay. www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...
- As reports tally up the 2025 fires, here's a long view back. I've updated and abridged Vestal Fire - now 40% as long, with half the new text completely rewritten, reorganized, and reconceptualized. The narrative still includes Russia. Should be published in spring, 2026.
- Reposted by Steve PyneNew paper: The role of fire on Earth doi.org/10.1093/bios... BioScience @aibsbiology.bsky.social Fire affects all major components of the Earth system: atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, anthroposphere, & biosphere. Fire is an intrinsic factor on our planet. 🧪🌍🔥🌳🌿🌐 wildfire
- Thread: August 20, the anniversary of the Big Blowup, a catalyst for the American way of wildland fire. (top) Post-season map of the 1910 season, with the Blowup circled in red. (bottom) Photo of the mine adit where ranger Ed Pulaski held his crew at gunpoint.
- Shouldn't be a surprise - the fire practices of indigenous peoples in the highly fire-prone SW could locally override even climate signals. But that is what received understanding claimed. Here's the data to bring the Ndee into alignment with other premodern peoples. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
- Thread. Yet another avatar for Dragon Bravo - burning an isolated mesa in the Canyon, this time The Dragon itself (one of the Canyon's most apt placenames).
- In 1968 lightning started a fire on the Dragon's Head. The park let it burn. The FS said if the park didn't suppress the fire, it would. A B17 dropped retardant. Now a fire is allowed to spread from the Rim to the Dragon. How the meaning of full suppression has changed.This fire remains a cypher.
- Dragon Bravo keeps reincarnating - now it's a Canyon fire, sending a giant talon eastward from the Walhalla Plateau across the Canyon at its widest. Always had a Canyon fire or two each season, but - really?
- In grad school I studied history of science, geomorphology, American West, and intellectual-cultural history, all aligning with the history of exploration, of which Great Ages makes a conceptual capstone. When I decided to write fire, my exploration stuff was my quasi-model. Just released in pb
- Quite a summer for European fire. I'm reminded of a passage from A.C.Clarke's 2001: "Beyond the reaches of sea and land and air and space lay the realms of fire.." Not a bad account of the maturing Pyrocene. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...
- Thread on Dragon Bravo, which continues its serial reincarnations. Began as lightning fire in confine and contain mode (escaped). Morphed into urban fire (incinerated park's developed area). Swelled into proto-megafire (blew over major containment line). Now a free-burning megafire.
- It looks like it will link with the burn footprint of the 2006 Warm fire (an escaped WFU; blue arrow). If so it will be bracketed on the north by an escaped WFU and on the south by an escaped Rx fire (the 2000 Outlet fire). If it reaches the White Sage fire, by the entire plateau.
- Dragon Bravo fire - blowing, going, gone. The Kaibab Plateau as microcosm of Earth, consumed in a slow-motion Ragnarok. This is where my life as a scholar on fire began. There is no way I cannot not take on this fire as a project and try to give it context - would be professional malfeasance.
- A fire that seemed to begin as a demo of how not to do confine-and-contain, complete with urban conflagration, is evolving into a master class on big-box-and-burn. Interesting cameo of the American wildland fire scene. inciweb.wildfire.gov/incident-inf...
- Reposted by Steve PyneThe Turkeyfeather Fire in the Gila Wilderness, NM has burned as a low-severity fire over about 24,000 acres (so far). This is a continuation of a fire regime that existed for millennia before the 20th century. This 🧵reviews the fire history of the Gila, as my colleagues and I have studied it. 1/18
- Wondering what I might say about the WU scene now that it has gotten so technical (a good development, actually). Maybe contribute to its redefinition? How about - Owning the WUI: HIZ, HERZ, ITZ [https://www.stephenpyne.com/blog]
- Another round with poop in the coop - another free-associating parody....
- Amazing how the mind free associates when cleaning up chicken and sheep poop ...
- Amid wildfires and political arson - a memento from a gentler fire era. A smokechaser lamp (yes, it works). What happens when a crew sits around the fire cache during a season-ending storm.
- For those who would prefer to hear rather than read the fire history of Mexico, Five Suns audio is 50% off. Same great narrative. www.audiobooks.com/promotions/p...
- Fennimore Cooper's 1830s social novels center on Aristabulus Bragg, who thinks everything can be bought and sold and he should have most of it, and Steadfast Dodge, who does "not know his own meaning, except as he felt envy of all above him.” Brag and Doge - with us still.
- On rebuilding after urban fires - here's Baudette MN , before and after the fire of Oct 7, 1910 (the other Great Fire of that year). Reconstruction was rapid for both humanitarian and economic reasons - winter was imminent and property values were threatened.
- This bears an uncanny likeness to the story of Little Smokey climbing a tree to escape a forest fire. Hmm. Barry the Bruin - Smokey the Bear for the WU? (Can figurines and comic books be far behind? Maybe an AI-generated Eddy Arnold singing a revised ballad?) www.cnn.com/2025/02/10/u...
- The Conversation asked for an update of my 2019 article on the Pyrocene. As the saying goes, all models are wrong but some are useful. Here's a thumbnail of my understanding of this metaphor-model. (I had no hand in the title.) theconversation.com/human-use-of...
- The Hollywood Reporter asked for 700 words for a special section on the fires they have just published. Something looking at the fire itself.So I repurposed some sentences on 'fire as biology' and gave the notion a long leash. Alas, the title is *not* mine. www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/local-n...
- Disaster fires invite photo ops from politicians. One of my favorites: Richard Nixon, then between jobs, in shirt and tie, standing on a shake-shingle roof, holding a garden hose, staring vapidly - somewhere, while smoke rises in the background from the Bel Air-Brentwood conflagration in 1961.
- A thoughtful meditation and reminder of the scale of the reforms needed.It's not just that people are moving into fire-prone lands; in Mediterranean Europe the problem is people moving out of fire-prone lands.It's not where you live but how you live on the land. www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/o...
- Ok, an anecdotal image - but this is what structure protection looked like in the 1935 Malibu fires. What a change in scale and character - of fire, of the built environment, of firefighting capacity (CCC boys then). Only the inevitability of fire in some form is constant.
