Stephen Pyne

Educator/Teacher, World traveler, Writer/Editor

Born in San Francisco, CA, 1949. Grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. A few days after graduating from high school, I took a job at Grand Canyon National Park, which serendipitously had an opening on the fire crew on the North Rim and asked if I wanted the job. I did. I returned for 15 seasons (and one winter) - the best of all possible lives in the best of all possible places. Meanwhile I went to Stanford University (1967-71), then the Univ. of Texas-Austin (1972-76), graduating with a PhD. I then decided I should reconcile my scholarly training, mostly in history, with my summer life on the North Rim. Everything I've done since then comes out of those years on the Rim. The Canyon - outside our back door - inspired interest in how we see the place and how it became valued. That led to curiosity about exploration by the West generally and how other comparable landscapes came to be imagined. That led to one series of books - about exploring geologist G.K. Gilbert; Antarctica; the Voyager mission through the solar system; and of course how the Canyon became grand. The other theme was fire. It was why a fire crew existed at all. It shaped our lives, on the job and off. I projected that personal sense into a national one, and then went global, seeking to place fire at the center of larger narratives. I've written or co-authored three college-level textbooks on fire. Throughout, I have queried fire not as a scientist but as a broad-canvas scholar of culture, though one animated by that personal sense of fire I acquired on the Rim. So I have written about the life of a fire crew at the Rim, about American history told through fire, and then about Australia, Canada, Europe (including Russia), and the Earth overall. Over the past few years I have returned to the U.S. to carry the story forward from the late 1970s with two books. One, a narrative history, will serve as the play by play. The other, a multi-volume series of 8 regional surveys, will be the color commentary. When this project is complete, I hope to work on a fire history of Mexico. Both are currently in various stages of publication. My last season at the North Rim was 1981. I then went to Antarctica for a field season in 1981-82. I was hired in the History Department at the University of Iowa for a few years. I spent the summer of 1983 and 1984 writing a fire plan for Rocky Mountain National Park, and 1985 doing the same for Yellowstone (my last active fire call). By then I had returned to Arizona. I spent the 1985-86 academic year as a visitor at Arizona State University, after which I was hired as part of the charter faculty at ASU's new West Campus. In 1988 I received a MacArthur Fellowship, which I used to add a library/study to our house and to finance the international travel I needed for my global survey of fire. I transferred to History at ASU's main campus in Tempe in 1996. Since 1999 I've been in the School of Life Sciences. I met my wife, Sonja, on the North Rim, and we were married there in 1977. With one daughter, Lydia, I've co-authored a book - The Last Lost World (2012). With my other, Molly (and her six kids), we run a small hobby farm in Queen Creek, AZ.

Fire on Earth - its history, ecology, and management.

Antarctica, Fire history and management, Grand Canyon, History of Exploration

Earth is a uniquely fire planet, and humanity a uniquely fire creature. My story is how Earth, fire, and people have co-evolved and what it means today. Fire appeared around 420 million years ago. A phase change occurred when hominins learned to manipulate it. We complete the cycle of fire for the circle of life. Today, we hold a species monopoly: it's the signature of our ecological agency and perhaps our first Faustian bargain. From cooking food we moved to cooking landscapes and recently the planet overall. We expanded our control from ignition to fuels by reshaping landscapes into more combustible forms. When we ran out of surface biomass, we took it from the geologic past. When Earth's keystone species so changed its combustion habits, it has rewired the planet. Burning lost its ecological bounds. Today, we have too much of the wrong kind of fire, too little of the right, and too much combustion overall. We've replaced the Ice Age with a Fire Age.