SOLS Podcasts

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[intro music]

Peggy Coulombe: Hi. This is Peggy Coulombe and welcome to Science Studio. We're going to talk to Regents' professor and MacArthur fellow Stephen Pyne, who's been, at different times in his life a firefighter, a professor, and an author. Stephen is the world's expert on flames and an environmental historian. He's written more than 20 books. His latest is called "Awful Splendour: The Fire History of Canada," a comprehensive fire history of Canada. Welcome, Stephen.

Stephen Pyne: Well, thank you.

Peggy: Now, you have this new book out. Could you read us something from it?

Stephen: Sure. This book is called "Awful Splendour." It will be published in October. But let me read a couple of sections. Let me try one that introduces one of the great fires of Canada. This occurred in 1825, and this is sort of the introduction for it.

"There were big fires and great fires, benign fires and malignant fires, founding fires, defining fires, memorable fires; fires that announce eras, fires that symbolize eras, fires that end eras. The Miramichi Fire of 1825, the great fire of New Brunswick, was all of the above. Canada had long abounded in giant fires, but not until the Miramichi had it spawned a monster, one capable of savaging whole settlements and worthy of written records by eye witnesses."

"So, too, Europeans had, from their earliest encounters, experienced threatening fires most from their own slovenly habits and ignorance. And they had chronicled a long litany of fiery portents, of dark days, and the rumble of distant flames. But not until the autumn of 1825 did that seasonal roll call of slash fires and smoke palls suddenly reach a critical mass and explode with almost apocalyptic violence."

"The Miramichi fires did more than torch wild forest, rude farms, logging camps, and ruffian towns; they announced a new regimen of fire in Canada, and they inscribed, literally, a new set piece of Canadiana. If the clearing fire was a celebratory bonfire of colonization, the conflagration was its evil twin. And the Miramichi fire, like a dark enunciation, first showed the face of that horror."

And then, let me read a section where I try to explain something of the context of fire within Canadian culture not simply within its environment, but within the larger setting.

"There are many ways in which societies may connect to fire the fires they use, the fires they wish to remove, the fires from which they seek to protect themselves. Some, in ancient times, made fire a god and worshiped it. Some made it a philosophical principle. The Accadians had a fire deity in marsh reeds. The Zoroastrians had temples of pure fire. The Greeks and Romans had prytaniums where Hestia and Vesta nurtured the hearth fire into a symbol of the state."

"Some let fire symbolism saturate the culture as its use did daily life. Some, in more secular times, put fire at the core of alchemy, and later natural philosophy and especially chemistry. Some expressed their fire power through military might, some through factories, some, even in modern times, through arts and literature. There were societies rich in fire paintings, fire poetry, fire as a theme and symbol in literature."

"There are peoples who have debated the place of fire in landscapes close to their national identities; Canada is not among them. Canadians have instead expressed their connection with fire through machines and institutions. Their fire culture has been instrumental and commercial. Fire lore is applied knowledge, directed largely through organs of government and the devices of internal combustion. This has become the fundamental dialectic of Canadian fire: the rhythms of the boreal environment against the dynamics of political confederation."

"The first assured that averages meant little, that the big fire and the big fire year would do most of the ecological work, account for most of the damages and cost and define the character of fire's administration by people. The second assured that institutions would struggle to become large enough to cope with these outbreaks. Even the Dominion government could, for decades, make little more than token gestures. And then, in 1930, it removed itself from the arena."

"The provinces, even the largest, lack the power to counter the exceptional, which were really the defining years. The institutions that sought to mediate between Canadians and Canadian fires would thus prove unstable, the grip of society over geography tentative, if tenacious."

"The story of Canadian fire is a story of that dialectic, which is another variant of Canada's Ur story, the quarrel between its history and its geography. While the history is there, it does not emerge organically so much as it is held together by the presence or the perceived threat of outside pressures. The master narrative is, in reality, a confederation of narratives, each centered on a geographic matrix."

Peggy: Thank you, Stephen, for reading this to us. [laughs]

Stephen: For story hour. [laughs]

Peggy: For story hour. [laughs] No, it's adult story hour. It's important. Why were you interested in writing this history?

Stephen: Well, Canada is a large and combustible part of the earth. And at some point, if I was serious about a global fire history through a composite of studies, I needed to deal with Canada. But Canadians, for years, have been after me to do something.

And last time I had a sabbatical year available, as that was approaching, I told them, they were hitting me up again, and I said, "OK, if you guys can come up with money to get me around to the archives to do the research, then I'll commit my sabbatical year to do it. So they agreed, I agreed, and it's been a long slog. In some ways, it's almost a rhythm of boreal burning, where you have periods of intense work, and then long periods with very little.

So the book has been with the University of British Columbia Press since February, 2006 and it's only coming out in October. I'll be glad to see it out, finally.

[laughter]

Peggy: So, fire has fascinated people since the dawn of mankind. What was it that captured your attention? I mean, you used words like "explosive" and "apocalyptic" and language that shows that you have passion for your subject. So, what got you hooked?

Stephen: There's a very simple explanation. When I was 18, a few days after I graduated from a high school, I got a job at Grand Canyon. And while I was signing my papers on the south rim to work as a laborer, they had an opening on the north end, on the fire crew, suddenly, and wanted to fill it. And I said, "Sure, I'll go." I stayed for 15 summers. So I had a very intimate view of fire and how it can structure the life of the summer fire crew, and in many ways, all of my writing comes from the experience of being up there.

So I've written about the history of science and exploration, which is coming out of the exploration of Grand Canyon and the understanding of that, and then, of course, lots of stuff on fire. The trick was to take the training I'd been given in my education and apply it to a subject, to look at that in a different way. I mean, there were lots of people...

I mean, there were lots of people doing fire chemistry, fire behavior, fire ecology, and fire history in the sense of looking at fire scarred trees or charcoal in soils and lakes and that kind of thing. But nobody had thought about the cultural history of fire. How does all of that stuff merge with what people are doing?

In many ways, we are a unique fire creature. We have a species monopoly over fire. I can't imagine us ever willingly allowing any other creature to have control over it. So it's very much a study of who we are. We're the key. And for many of those doing fire science, they don't want to put people in the system. It complicates it. It messes it up. It doesn't look like real science. They want to get people out of the system and see how it behaves. But for me, it's always been the two interacting is what's fundamental.

My training was not in science specifically; it was in the humanities. So my interest in language and expression, culture, how people see fire, relies on that. And it's been the attempted hybridization, if you will, of those two cultures on the subject of fire is what I contribute to the subject.

Peggy: What made you sit down to write your first novel?

Stephen: I was contacted somewhat out of the blue by an old professor I had known from a freshman seminar of all things. We had maintained contact during the time. He had an interesting experience. He trained as a mule packer for years. He had a very odd career before he ended up at the university. And we recognized some sort of kindred spirit, that here I was firefighting out at Grand Canyon, and there ought to be something in common. We got to like each other.

Anyway he had written a novel, sort of out of the blue, and was asking for help editing it and then maybe getting it placed. So we began doing that and reviving interest in literature. He was mostly interested in fiction and sort of prodding me, so I said, "Well, if you're going to do it, I'm going to do it. And you're going to comment on mine." So I began putting together stories and other things and eventually organized it into a work of fiction.

It wasn't commercially viable, so I wound up just self publishing it. And it was a lot of fun. So it was just a project, the two of us working on this. He eventually published the book. It's a very, very nice book: a novel called "High Country," the University of Oklahoma Press.

Peggy: But that's the moment where you started turning toward capturing your experiences…

Stephen: Part of the attraction for me was to keep my voice fresh. It's very easy, particularly if you're doing a lot of writing on a subject or you're doing similar kinds of books, even if they change places, to fall into ruts, to fall into cliches, to keep saying the same thing, basically. And I would become bored, as well as potential readers, so I saw this as a way of sort of changing it cross training, if you will.

I now teach a graduate course on writing nonfiction and actually have a manuscript. That evolved into a little book, which is now in search of a publisher.

Peggy: You've written most of your books about fire. But there's also, as you say these ones about history and the Antarctic and exploration.

You said, about your breadth of interest in literary approaches to subjects, in an essay that's on your website, called "Explaining Myself, "that you were rejected by a number of graduate schools, never properly socialized, and you behaved not as a historian who can successfully write up his data but as a writer who finds in history a wonderful trove of characters and plots." Tell me something about the creative process for you and how it connects with your interests.

Stephen: I think the challenge is always to find expression. Partly, it's to find data. It's to find stuff to write about. It's to have ideas to organize it. But ultimately it's only as good as your ability to express it, whether that be in an experimental design, whether it be a work of art, whether it be in words in some form or another. Otherwise you really don't have anything.

So for me the challenge has been to find ways to convey it. That at some point becomes a literary exercise. Since I'm dealing with words, my medium is primarily books. To understand how that works and to be able to do it is fundamental for me.

The Antarctic book, I might say, is probably my best single book. Oddly enough I'm generally known for the fire stuff. But "The Ice" has been republished seven times and I think is certainly a very difficult book. It’s tough sledding, but I think it has made more of an impression.

Peggy: Why do you think it's made more of an impression?

Stephen: I think it's a more original book, in that it's really my encounter with the Antarctic but without me as a character in it. I don't care to put myself in. That's where I'm really at odds with contemporary stuff. I don't write memoirs. Well, I sort of did working with the fire crew. But I'm not really interested in memoir. I'm not interested in me being a character in what I'm writing about and having everything refract through me.

You can be there as a voice. You can be there as a kind of vision. You can be there as a presence in your prose. That's fine. That's great. But I don't want to be there as a character and structure the story.

It's a very abstract story beginning at the outside of Antarctica with icebergs and then ending with the so called source regions deep in the east Antarctic plateau. It's a very hostile landscape. It's abiotic landscape. Basically, you've reduced the landscape to a single mineral, an ice cube the size of Australia as high as Mt. Whitney. And that's [laughs] pretty close to nihilism. [laughs] You're really at the end of the world at that point.

So that's where the journey begins with plenitude and ends with a kind of nothingness that the ice eventually bequeaths, if you follow that in. So it's a study of ice. It's a meditation on what it means to different institutions as they encounter it. As they fall apart basically, trying to penetrate through it. It defies the normal kind of medium that we have.

Peggy: When did you go to Antarctica?

Stephen: Let's see. I was there 80, 81.

Peggy: And what brought you there?

Stephen: The National Endowment for the Humanities had an Antarctic fellowship. This was something they had cooked up with the National Science Foundation which oversees all the US presence in Antarctica, as a result of the bicentennial. They ran this for five years and the idea was to get people trained in the humanities or other than the natural sciences, to go to Antarctica and begin bringing that into scholarship. And I was the only one who took it.

It required that you spend one to three months. So I took all three months, spent a very white Christmas at the South Pole, [laughs] spent a very forlorn New Year's at a place called Dome C, which is really the end of the world, came back on an icebreaker through the Strait of Magellan. It was an interesting experience.

I was there long enough that I began to appreciate something of the character, I think, of the place and that you have to deal with ice. People go there and they want to talk about all the other things, anything but the ice because the ice removes everything else.

And so you're always at the margins of Antarctica. That's where the tours go. That's where most people do their work. Because otherwise, you're dealing with this enormous ice cube. [laughs] And people don't know what kind of art works on that. What kind of literature can you invent for that? How do you cope with that? So I think in the sense that it was an original encounter with that place has given the book more stamina. It's a small audience, but a persistent one. I think that's probably the one book that will survive.

Peggy: What did you learn about yourself in Antarctica?

Stephen: I learned that I shouldn't spend a winter in Antarctica.

[laughter]

Stephen: I learned that I'm too restless, that I need to be moving around, that I need more variety.

Peggy: Do you miss anything about that time when you were in the fire crews in the Grand Canyon on the rim?

Stephen: Well, sure. I miss being 20, 25...

[laughter]

Stephen: I mean, you're young. You're immortal. You're on the rim of the Grand Canyon for heaven's sake. You're fighting fires. It's exciting work. It's interesting, great camaraderie. I mean, it was a wonderful time. I enjoyed every minute of it.

Peggy: What thing would you like to explore next?

Stephen: Well, I have several projects underway: some fun, some small, and some big duty. I'm working on a book on exploration. This is in some ways a successor to the Antarctic and Grand Canyon books. In this case, we'll go into space, follow the Voyager mission and talk about what I like to call the third great age of discovery. So I'm working on that now, also a kind of change of pace.

But then go back to fire. There's one book I would like to finish out my survey. I've thought of it from the beginning having three parts in effect the sort of historical equivalents of novellas. I don't mean by that they're fiction; I mean that size but completeness. It would look at South America, sub Sahara Africa, and Southeast Asia. And that would finish up my survey. I can see now how to do this. I need a few years to bring it about but I think I understand how to do it. I would like to.

But I would also like to do one final book on fire as a kind of philosophy and I use it with a small “p” and lightly. I think there's a great uncertainty now about where fire fits into science, where it fits into scholarship, where it fits in our relationship with the world. Again, we've changed things so profoundly we don't know how to think about fire.

Traditionally, fire has been studied by forestry or range land management because it was something done on government land. It was done on the public domain. The governments would sponsor research. That would be done under the aegis of state sponsored forestry which administered these lands.

And fire is far, far beyond that subject now. It's dealing with all kinds of issues of biodiversity and ecological integrity, questions of sustainability, fire. Our burning of fossil fuel; how does that affect fire ecology? On sites, what do people do? We've hardly begun to think about that.

The atmospheric chemistry of combustion now is a major topic. We're not sure how to manage fire on nature preserves or other sites. There is enormous confusion and a lot of it is because this fairly simple physical model we've had of fire doesn't work anymore. It's not adequate to the task. That is that the traditional view is that fire is a physical chemical reaction and it's shaped by its physical surroundings, its weather, its terrain, the fuels.

But as I've suggested those fuels are really biologically constructed. The active agent in the atmosphere, oxygen, chemically active, is also of life and people are a part of this story very much. So that old model really doesn't make sense. It really doesn't answer the questions we need to know about the biology of fire and how that fits. Adding up every fuel particle even with supercomputers doesn't give us how fire behaves or what its effects are.

Again, we have to begin thinking more about biological models. And we need a cultural model to think about ourselves, of how we function, how much of this we really shape. So, even though we can find areas that are natural that are wilderness sites and we let fire kindled by lightning give it room to roam. Well, that's a decision we've made. That is not historically [laughs] how those lands...

They were occupied by people. And people's fires typically overwhelmed lightning fire or created a matrix within lightning fire would have to operate. Well, we've removed that. So of course lightning dominates the system now because we've taken away all the primary competitors. So we really need models to think about that.

I'm thinking that a book that would try to bring those perspectives together would be useful. Right now everything seems to be dominated by this physical model. All we can do is change ignition and fuels, just treating the landscape as a bunch of hydrocarbon blocks to move around. That's really not answering any of the questions we need.

It's the old joke of the drunk who's looking for his keys under the street light, not because he lost them there, but that's where the light is. That's where the funded science is. So that's where everybody keeps working. It has less and less to do with what we really need to know to manage fire and it's really not getting at the place of fire on the planet.

I have to say that the biologists are the ones who are really missing in action on this. They have not traditionally seen fire as an interesting scientific question and have not, I think, recognized the biological character of fire, the way in which this really can say interesting things about the living world and have not taken up that challenge. By default it has gone to people who are interested in controlling fire and reducing it to a simple, physical mechanism which does not, as I say, address almost any of the questions that really matter.

Peggy: Stephen, I want to thank you so much for sitting down with us and sharing your thoughts about exploration. You're an explorer yourself, I'd like to add. [laughs] I haven't been to the Antarctic.

[laughter]

Peggy: And I've certainly never been on a fire line on the Grand Canyon. But you can get a sense of what those things are through Stephen's books.

Stephen: You're welcome. Always happy to talk about fire.

[laughter]

Peggy: This is Peggy Coulombe and you've been listening to School of Life Sciences' podcast, Science Studio. Our theme music is by Yongen, from the collection Moonrise, and provided by Magnatunes. School of Life Sciences is in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences on the Tempe campus of Arizona State University.

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Prometheus Bound: On Books and Exploration

Transcript - [Printable PDF format]

SOLS Podcasts 2007