Stephen Pyne: The Human-Fire Relationship

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I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is remarkable people. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Helping me in this episode is Stephen Pine. He is one of the foremost authorities on the history and management of fire. His career has focused on revealing humanity's intricate relationship with landscape fire. After 15 seasons as a firefighter at the Grand Canyon's North Rim, Stephen pursued graduate studies and then undertook an ambitious project, A Sweeping History of Fire in America. This year, the field defining 1982 work, aptly called Fire in America. This catalyzed Stephen's lifelong mission to chronicle fire's history across cultures worldwide. He advocates for fire's ecological necessity and the need to coexist with its risk. Now retired from a distinguished academic career, Stephen continues writing and reflecting on humanity's bond with fire. From his urban farm in Arizona. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is remarkable people. And now here is the remarkable Stephen Pine.

We almost may have overlapped at Stanford. I was there 72 to 76.

Yeah, I graduated in 71.

I followed in your footsteps. People were still talking about you after you left.

You're kidding.

No, I am kidding.

I had a great education there. I valued it and all of that, but I was working summers on a forest fire crew at the North Rim of Grand Canyon, and that's really where my heart was. And I had some good friends there, but that was not really my community.

You had a much more exciting community every summer, apparently. Right.

It was very engaging. I was just a few days out of high school when I went to the canyon. I had a job as a laborer for the Park Service. And it turns out, just by accident, one of the guys on the fire crew in the North Rim called in and said he couldn't make it. And so there I was, and they wanted to fill it. And they turned around and said, well, do you want to go? And I said, sure, why not? And my adult life dates from that moment.

Really interesting how, like one turn and that sets you on A path, huh?

I was completely enchanted. For me, it was the best of all lives in the best of all places. And it was just a glorious way to live. And I stayed with it for 15 seasons. And by that point I was getting pretty broken down to actually be in the field. And I was married. I had a kid who spent her first two summers on the North Rim. And. And yeah, it was a difficult time to find an academic job and there were a lot of reasons to stay, but that was. So that's how I got interested in fire. Completely serendipitous. And who knew? At the time, fire was nothing of concern. It was not a national media concern. It was just some freak of western violence that happens out there, like a grizzly bear attack or something, a big fire. And fires were not really newsworthy. They weren't slamming into communities. I mean, I was told by people in the park service, look, there's no future in fire. If you want to get on with the Park Service, you've got to get into another job that has a career advancement that's going to let you do something. There were no permanent slots for fire people, fire officers at the time. And the world changed. I thought fire was fun. I thought it was engaging. And when I graduated with my doctorate, 76, I never studied fire. It was never taught at any place I went to. It was almost taught nowhere in the country. And I decided I wanted to write a history of fire, and so I just did it. There were no academic jobs. I got some funding and I spent the next few winters doing that. And then in the summer in the canyon. Anyway, this is rambling, so just tell me. Stop, type out whatever you want.

That's the beauty of a podcast. You can ramble all you want, right? I know people who work in Cal fire and they jump out of helicopters into burning forests. And can you just take me into the mindset? Like, why would you do that 15 summers and dedicate your life to that? It seems like a very dangerous occupation.

Well, it never seemed dangerous to us. And the images and stories you get out of the media, particularly in recent years, are really giant fires, hundreds of feet flame length, immense smoke poles, very dangerous, taking out communities. We were an initial attack crew primarily, and most of our fires were set by lightning. And the first real challenge was finding the fire. That sounds paradoxical, but if you have a lightning struck tree, it's smoking, may still be wet from the thunderstorms, and you have to find it and you're given a compass bearing or you're given Some directions and it may be getting dark. It was a classic, what used to be called smoke chasing. You had to chase down the smoke. We spent a lot of our time just finding the fires and they were mostly small. If we got them. If we had a 10 acre fire, that was a large fire for us. A 300 acre fire was really big. 1000 acre fire just on the other side of the boundary in the national forest. Wow. That would be talked about for 20 years. So the conditions were very different than what we have now. And so we had a lot of fires and it was a lot of fun. You have to make a lot of decisions, a lot of choices. We have to do all of it. We weren't specialized into those who ran engines and those who worked in helicopters and those who had to hike in. We did all of that. So there was a lot of variety. It was interesting. You're outdoors, you're with a company of like minded people and you're engaged in a sort of strenuous activity. That sounds like a formula for a pretty good life to me. The problem is that you get old and knees start giving out and your shoulders were a problem and you've got other obligations. You can't do it. It's really for young people. So I stayed as long as I could. I met my wife there on the rim. We got married on the rim. That was it. So that's the other thing. It wasn't just fire. I mean, we're at Grand Canyon. And so the canyon itself became an object of interest. And so I did a lot of my research, my scholarly career dealt in fire. Sure. But it also asked questions. Why is this place valued? The earliest Europeans to encounter the canyon dismissed. It was just a huge impediment to travel. You couldn't navigate the river, you couldn't do anything with it. There was nothing that they valued there. And so it's rediscovered and forgotten for several hundred years. So why is it that suddenly it became valued? And that gave rise to a whole other sets of interest in the history of exploration, the investment of meaning in places and so forth. So I did a book on Antarctica, maybe my best book, that grew directly out of the canyon. How do you make sense of a place like Antarctica? We have prior example. How did you make sense out of this immense chasm that has no abundant resources of the sorts that were valued? How did art and science and history, national experiences come to converge on that? Can you do something the same with Antarctica? So it was both. So it was always a case of playing if one fires were slow, we always had the canyon. And for me, I was always engaged with it. And now today, fire crews tend to be very specialized, and this is what they do, and they're burned out. There were lots of small fires that come in bunches. We'd be very busy for a while. We'd mop it up, regroup, get ready for the next one. But there was always stuff to do.

And has fire qualitatively changed?

It's hard to know how a fire in a wildland can qualitatively change. At some point, it becomes bigger and bigger, more intense. But can we say that really changes, or is it just a changing quantity? I think perhaps the development of pyrocumulus clouds is a phase change. That is to say, the heating of the fire raises air high enough that it begins evolving into a cumulus cloud and eventually even a thunderhead atop that. So it's taking the place. Just as the right kind of air hits a mountain and it's. It rises up and then develops into a thunderhead or something lifts it. The fire can do that lifting. And up until maybe 25 years ago or so, these were very rare. Now they're becoming quite common. All the factors that feed into fire, that fire integrates, are increasing. I think it is fair to say that the fires are in some ways changing character.

And are you saying that compared to back then, fires are changing because of climate change or because the US has gone on a policy of suppression? All of this stuff is accumulating that at some point it's going to catch up to you? Why has it changed or seems to.

Have changed all of the above. In many ways, a fire is like a driverless car. It's integrating all the information around it that gives it its direction, its speed, its character. And at some points that may be a sharp curve called climate change. Another place, it may be a lot of road debris that you have to dodge. It can be bunches of things and different things at different places. So right now, almost everything is magnifying. It's not just fire suppression, it's the fact that we quit lighting fires, which we had done. It's not just putting out fires that nature starts, it's also land use. How did we log that land? What is the consequence of that? In much of the arid west, or semi arid west, like where I live in the Southwest, fires elimination started 25 or 30 years before the Forest Service was even created. And that was the result of massive overgrazing. Railroads came in that connected land to Markets, huge herds of cattle and flocks of sheep come in, crop off all the grass that had carried the fire in previous times. And that happens 20 to 30 years before the national forests are created. So the Forest Service came into an environment that was already stripped of a lot of its fire character. So there are lots of different things operating here. And it's important to identify the local set of conditions that influence the fires. That seeing otherwise, you create a solution that works in Minnesota, but doesn't make any sense in Florida, or that works in New Mexico, but is meaningless in Alaska or Hawaii. I was just reading about Guam for different reasons. And as much as 10% of the island burns each year. There's no natural basis for fire there. That's all human. So you look at the whole history of it, and it's also useful, looking back at American history, that even a century ago, we were experiencing an era of megafires that really began after the Civil War. 1870. 1871 sort of announces it, and continued into roughly about 1919 or so. And this is at the end of the Little Ice Age. So it is not primarily a result of climate change. It's a result of massive amounts of fuel left over from logging and land clearing. The land is just lathered with all of this fine debris. So they've hauled off the big stuff, which is actually very hard to burn. If you've ever had a fireplace or a campfire, you don't put a big giant log into it, particularly a green log, it'll put the fire out. You put lots of little stuff. So logging and land clearing took the big stuff out, left the little stuff, which is exactly what fire needs. And in those conditions, you don't need three years of drought, three months of unusual dryness, a short winter. So it starts early in the spring, and living vegetation hasn't greened up yet. Well, you've got this window and you could have dry cold fronts coming. Perfect formula for fire. You can do it in the fall. And that's where most of these fires occurred. And they were quite large and in places that we don't think of as fire prone. Now, upstate New York, The Adirondacks in 1903 had 600,000 acres burned and 1908 had another 400,000. These are larger than most of the big fires that we're seeing in California recently. How was that possible? Was possible because the railroads come in, lots of debris lying around. And the railroads were themselves responsible for a great many of the ignitions. They were throwing sparks. There was no Regulation. They were sort of the power lines of the day. And so they were setting fires. And there's one fire I love, I think it was the 1903 fire. And they're trying to bring in some extra laborers from other towns to help fight this fire that's threatening this one town. And the train that's carrying the firefighters set 19 fires on the way. So the conditions were right. And you begin to realize how absurd this is. And we've forgotten all of that. So it isn't just climate change. All these other factors are feeding it as well. There are lots of ways to get really big bad fires. Climate change is certainly a factor now. It's aggravating, it's exacerbating, it's putting energy into the system. And so we're seeing a lot more. And that is a primary cause, but not the only one.

Can I ask a very simplistic question which is, sure, we can't assume that people listening to this episode, especially the host, even know just the basics of fire. So can you give us a quick Fire for Dummies? Pretend you're Talking to your 10 year old grandchild and explaining fire. Can you just do that for a minute or two?

Sure. Well, let's go back to the basics, usually presented as a fire triangle. You need heat, fuel and oxygen. And if you want to look at fire's behavior, you look at how that zone of burning interacts with the surrounding landscape. It's terrain, it's vegetation, it's weather. Let's take a campfire or a fire in a fireplace. What do you need? Well, you need stuff to burn. Okay, fuel. The best stuff to burn is going to be dry and it's going to be small. So you split it up. You do lots of kindling to get it started. If it's dying down and you want to get it going again, you throw lots of small stuff on it, twigs, pine needles, kindling of various kinds. And you need to control the oxygen. So if it's inside and it has a chimney, you need to open the flue so that air can come in, which the hot air will rise so other air, fresh air will come in. And we can see a forest fire is essentially that same thing in a much more complicated environment. So instead of having stuff that you control that burns, it's whatever is out there. And it may be whole trees, grasses, shrubs, it may be mixtures of things. So the fire will take on slightly different personality as it encounters those. You need wind both to drive it, but also as the fire Burned. And perhaps if it's burning hot, really hot, it will form a convective column, the hot air will rise. In effect, it creates a chimney for itself. And that means lots of wind is coming in from below and you need something to start it to spark a match. In nature, lightning is overwhelmingly the dominant source. But people, we carry fire wherever we go, and we're always starting fires deliberately or accidentally. We can't live without it really. Most of our fires in the developed world are hidden from us because they're all in machines. We're burning fossil fuels, we control the combustion chamber. But for most of our existence, we had to interact with nature and we understood how to do that. Prior to planting, we burned grasslands for pasture, we burned for clearing, we burned for cooking, for hunting, for foraging. Everywhere we went, we had fire. Fire has been our species companion. And now for the last 30,000 years or so at least, we have had a species monopoly over fire. Other animals knock over trees or dig holes in the ground. We do fire. That's what we do that no other creature does. So that in many ways is our identity. We are the fire creature, the keeper of the flame, the steward, if you will, on behalf of all the other creatures. And we've not been doing a very good job of that. We just turned to power. Instead of being something we work with, we took our best friend and we've made it our worst enemy. And now fire is working against us. So that's all on us. We had a mutual assistance pact with fire, and we took fire to places it could never have gotten on its own, and times it could never have burned. And fire has allowed us to go everywhere we wanted. We even go off planet plume of flame. But we've turned that into a Faustian bargain in recent decades. And by our over indulgence in fossil fuels and treating it basically as we would a factory farm, without any concern for the effluent or byproducts. Being very efficient at converting fire into power, raw energy, primary energy source. But fire in nature is an all purpose catalyst ecologically. It recycles, it renews, it transforms, it does all kinds of things in ways that are full of checks and balances in living landscapes. But when we turn to primarily to fossil fuels, or what I think of as lithic landscapes, that is once living, now, now fossilized. We took away all those checks and balances and we changed our whole relationship to fire. We treated it just as a tool, something we can use for our ends, instead of something we interact with, that we each have obligations and rights out of it so that you can burn day and night, winter and summer, wet or dry, it doesn't matter. And so all of the old circumstances that allowed us to use fire in the ways we did are now gone. And we're saying it's no longer a quest to find new stuff to burn. We've got more than we can use. It's, what do we do with all the byproducts? What do we do with all the waste? It's overloaded the atmosphere, it's overloaded the oceans, it's unraveling a lot of the land and living landscapes. My sense is that when you add it all up, we're creating the fire equivalent of an ice age. So if you imagine the ice ages, the Pleistocene, which is when we emerged as a species, and take all those properties, giant ice sheets and mountain glaciers, the biogeographic changes and migrating of species, changes in sea level, mass extinctions, all those sort of classic parameters that we use to define an ice age, and you pass it through a kind of pyric looking glass. What do you get on the other side? You get a fire age with mass extinctions, changes in sea level, huge shifts in biogeography. And instead of large blocks of ice, a substance sitting in one place, we get sort of dynamic reactions, we get heat domes, we get smoke palls, all these sort of features we can think of as an ice age. We can find fire equivalents. And that seems to be what our emerging world is. I think we have been changing the Earth and altering the climate since the last ice age. But when we went on fossil fuels, the whole process went on afterburners, and now it's completely out of control. It's not just nudging and tweaking and modifying, it's just overturning the old world. And climate change. It's not just about climate change. It seems to me it is changing everything on the planet. The same way that an ice age was not just about ice, it was about climate change, mass extinctions, changes in sea levels and hydrology, all these other things factor in. So that's my way of imagining the world that we're creating through fire. I call it a piracy. And it doesn't mean that everything burns. It means that fire's relationship to humans, or our relationship to fire, is remaking the world. And fire, directly and indirectly, is an agent and catalyst for that. So there are lots of mythologies. Almost all people have a mythology of a great fire in the past, or a great fire that will come in the future or a cycling of great fires that ends and remakes worlds. And frankly, mythology is becoming ecology. We're seeing it happen right now in front of our eyes.

Are you basically saying we're doomed?

No, I'm saying that we created this and we can start unwinding it if we wish. And in some ways, we're helpless. We were helpless against ice ages. This was all set by large planetary geophysical processes over which we have no control. We can't get rid of ice. We can manipulate fire. So in many ways, a fire age is to our advantage. It's playing to our strength. We're a fire creature, but we've abused it. We don't think about it as a relationship. We've, as I say, made our best friend our worst enemy. We've forgotten all the obligations that come with us. I speak as a pyromantic, not a pyromaniac. Big difference. So I'm prepared to see, how does the world look if you put fire at the core and what kind of world do you get? And I think that is a useful exercise for understanding the world we've created. Yeah, it's a metaphor. But models, scientific models, are really metaphors with numbers. Metaphors are how we understand the world.

To use a metaphor, then, if Joe Biden made you secretary of pyromantics, what would you do?

We have to do a bunch of things, and we need to do them all at the same time. It's ridiculous, for example, that we are losing communities to fire. We solved that problem a long time ago. Our cities quit burning. I think San Francisco was the last 1906. It took an earthquake even to do that. And then it comes back. Oakland, across the bay, starts a sort of new era. Why are these communities burning? We forgot to do all the stuff that took fire out of cities. And we have what's been called, it's an unfortunate term, but wildland urban interface, or wildland urban fire. And that problem got defined by the wildland side, who saw their management of fire on landscapes complicated by communities and houses being pushed into those landscapes. And that turns out to be a very difficult problem to handle. But if you thought of those communities as urban, you picked up the other end of the wildland urban fire stick. Then it's pretty easy what you do. You treat them as you would any other city. You bring in fire codes, building codes. You put in an infrastructure for it. You have zoning that helps to support it. It's pretty clear that we can protect our communities. We can keep them from burning by Simply applying these principles, which are pretty well known. And I would add other critical assets, municipal watersheds, for example, mature sequoia groves. Really, three of our first four national parks were created to preserve sequoia groves. And now we've lost what, 15 to maybe 20% of the world's population over the last, what, five or six years. This is ridiculous. We know how to fix that. That would be my first step. The second step would be to get the rest of our larger countryside, including our wildlands, in better shape to tolerate fire, find ways to restore fire. And we can learn a lot from indigenous people. We can learn a lot actually from settlers from Europe, many of whom were very familiar with fire. We have a map of forest fires for the US that was produced in the 1880 census. And it's quite a stunner to see how much fire there was and where it was very different from what we have now. So that's a longer project, but we know how to do it. It has to be very specific to particular sites. There's no one universal formula that you apply and that can begin getting, recovering some of our ecological goods and services. So instead of having these landscapes now become a hazard, they can become a positive source of goods and services. Now they can do what they're supposed to. And the third thing is we've got to tame climate change. And the only way to do that is to rotate out as quickly as possible out of fossil fuels. If you're going to lose weight, you have to control what you eat. It doesn't matter how much exercise you do or whatever else to mitigate or accompany. We have to do that. And clearly the economics is rolling in our favor and, and so forth. But this would be a longer term project and we need to do all three of these at the same time to really have something that we can leave to our, our children and grandchildren. But I also have a caveat here that fire is, is complicated in many plays. That that's good news because it means there are many points of intervention possible and each place can find its own particular cocktail or combination. But if all we do as a primary source of energy is replace fossil fuels with renewables, but we continue to live on the land the same way we organize our agriculture, the same way we organize our management of wildlands, the same way we build our houses, the same way all of these other factors go in, we still have a major wildfire problem because fossil fuels allowed us to reorganize the landscapes in which we live. But if all we do is substitute a different source of energy for fossil fuels, but we apply it to the same end purpose and we continue to manage that larger landscape in the same way. We're going to have big fires again. In fact, my vision is that we will have a lot more burning as we ratchet down our fossil fuel. Burning will be ratcheting up our burning and living landscapes because there's a huge fire deficit and this is an ecological problem, but also means that there's more stuff to burn in ways that we don't want to burn, and that becomes a fire threat. We have a lot of fire in our future and the choice is which kind we want. I come back to this is our species heritage. This is what we do, and it's time to reclaim that.

Wait, why Is the conversion of renewables or two renewables going to cause more stuff to burn or more.

No, it won't. The conversion by itself won't. But if we apply that energy in the same way that we've applied fossil fuels to organize the landscape, then we are going to have a big fire problem in that landscape. The climate change part of it may go down, but as we can see from the 19th and early 20th century, you don't need huge droughts and climatic heat domes and the rest of it to cause fire. There's plenty of other ways to get big fires, and we've seen them now. It's being overwhelmed by climate change and the rest. But as we wind that down three months in the spring or fall, that's enough to have big fires. If you've got all this stuff out there and it's arranged in a way that threatens communities and communities. These are not designed to accommodate fire's presence and the rest of it. Many of us live in cities now in the developed world, and fire is gone out of our daily lives. We don't have working flames in our houses anymore. We get it with electricity. We have propane, we'll have fossil fuels for gas or heating or whatever else, but we don't have fire. We don't clean up our yards by burning it. In fact, all these things are prohibited. So we found they're still mostly based in fire burning of fossil fuels. But we don't see it anymore and we've forgotten that fire connection. And we've tried to project that into the countryside and the larger landscape. We can apply this firepower from our machines to overwhelm nature's fire. That is a failed formula, because what it does is the fires that survive are the ones we can't control, and they do much more damage than all these little fires. It's deciding. We've got some bad bacteria in our gut, we've got an infection, so we kill everything. And the good and the bad. We needed the good, and we've got to find a way. That requires that you make decisions, you make choices. Those choices are going to be based on social and cultural and economic values. They're going to be political choices, one form or another. So to live with fire means that we have to be able to talk to one another and come to some sort of consensus about what we're going to do, and we accept that as legitimate. Fire is not just a technical problem. It's about how we live on this planet. And right now, we're not doing a very good job of it.

Backing up for a second now. Let's call this firefighting for dummies. So what's the gist of how you put out a forest fire? We see news of planes dumping stuff and people jumping in and cutting back trees and all that, but what's the gist of how you put out a forest fire?

Let's go back to our campfire. How do you put out a campfire? One way you can put water on it or dirt. If you just bury it, then the fire can continue to smolder underneath. So you also have to break up the stuff that's burning, and you have to prevent new stuff from coming in. And that's basically what you do at a much larger scale in a forest fire. So you create a break in the fuels, that is the vegetation. Ideally, you go down to mineral soil, so there's nothing that can burn. Even smoldering can't go across, and the width of that depends on the intensity of the fire. If you've got flame lengths 200ft, you'd have to build a firebreak the size of football fields. And we're not going to do that. We can't stop it that way. Other than that, you can put some kind of retardants or quenching element, water, if you have it, but you don't always have water in wildlands or in the countryside. And if you're in a drought, the water supply may be even less than normal. So water can be limited, retardant can be effective, but both of them are mostly effective against fine fuels, that is the pine needles, the twigs, the small branches, because they can coat it. Fire occurs on the surface of wood, and if you coat that surface, that's all you need. So they're most effective and that can stop it. So if you've got a fire moving fast in grasslands or some shrublands, I think there's a big fire in California now in the Mojave Preserve. These are invasive grasses. It can be very effective at that because it can coat it long enough. The coating doesn't have to go through a canopy of trees which intercepts it. And the coating may not be blown away by the wind. You can get it on that fine stuff and that could be effective. So aerial stuff is most effective right at the start. It can help you control, it can help people on the ground control it. If you've got an engine, you've got roads, access, you've got an engine or something, you may be able to drop water, bring water on, squirt water on it, as in a city, you may be able to use helicopters to do site specific drops in areas that are problematic. Or a fire spotted a spark, went across your fire line, you need to control that. Otherwise the whole thing can start over again. You mop up. It's basically a lot of stirring. It's not very glamorous, it's pretty, pretty much stoop labor over a long time and pretty, pretty grungy. The other way to control fires, particularly larger fires, is to remove their fuel. And in this case, you can't build a fire line. You can't do it fast enough or big enough. You go, you take what's called an indirect attack. So instead of trying to go mano a mano along the fire line, you pull back to some place that's more or less defensible. A well established road with a right of way, a large river, cliffs that are rocky, and you use that as a break. And then you burn out the material between that site and the approaching fire. This also takes time to do. And this can be done well or it can be done badly, like anything. And if it's done badly, you just black line it, you just napalm it, scorched earth, and you maybe stop the fire. But you may have incinerated a lot of things that could have accommodated a fire much better. So in that case, if you're smart, you plan this out and you do it systematically in ways that actually introduce what might actually be good fire into that landscape. And some parts will over burn more severely than you want. But a lot of it may be what you would want it if you did a controlled fire in that environment. These are techniques that are now being used in a lot of areas where you put your firefighting hardware and Strength to protect communities, municipal watersheds, so forth. Other than that, you pull back to a place that makes sense. You can hold and burn out from systematically. A lot less risk to firefighters. You get amount of fire on the land and it could be done more cheaply. So there are lots of ways. What do you do? When I was a smoke chaser, we would get out to the fire. Maybe it'd be a tree or two, a dead snag burning, maybe some surface fire spreading around a bit, whatever. We would contain the surface fire so it didn't spread. Then we would fell the tree. And that was probably the most hazardous thing we did. Because you got a burning tree and you're rattling it with a chainsaw and trying to put it on the ground. You put it on the ground and then you break it up just like you would a giant campfire and you systematically put it out and that's it. On these really large fires, it's much harder. And we still tend to think that all of our mechanical might can overpower these fires. And we've seen some of these large fires, particularly in California, we build these fire lines and it just goes right over them. You can get spot fire sparks, embers can go a couple of miles ahead and if you miss one, it's like starting the fire over again. So that's very difficult and we keep trying, but that's very hard and it really is not effective. We don't have something, the scale of fire that we can match. These large fires, yeah, we can knock down these little fires, these nuisance fires, these medium grade fires, little effort, we can contain it. But the really large ones, the ones that are the most dangerous, the ones that do the most damage, we can't do anything to get out of the way.

And could those large fires have been prevented by prescribed burns?

That's a great question. They can't be prevented, but they can be changed. We can modify what it burns. We really can't control the wind and the humidity. We can't control mountains and canyons. They're what they are, they're not going to change. But we can modify the stuff that burns the vegetation. And the best way to do this is in advance. And you try to get a landscape that can accommodate the sort of fire it grew up with and try to keep fire on the ground to prevent it from getting in the canopies. There are some biotas that simply burn in the canopy. That's how they burn. But we've allowed the patches of that burning to become huge by removing Fire, and in some ways by not just by suppression, but by all the other ways we've done it. And so now they burn much bigger blocks with very different ecological consequences. We have fires that used to burn on the surface and forests that were very well adapted to that. Maybe every year, what did it matter? You're burning off basically grass and a year's needle. Cast pine needles on the ground, easy. We've allowed that to become overgrown with stuff, intermediate fuels that allow fire to get into the canopy. And then that forest is not adapted to that kind of fire. So we could restore that older fire regime, that older pattern of fire. We've experimented with a variety of things. Can you crush and masticate some of those shrubs and lower stuff? Can you thin, which is a kind of weedy wooding? You're taking out the small reproduction that's come in, leaving the older trees behind. Can you do that and alter the pattern of fuels? Yes, you can. But we've also found that those work best if they're also accompanied by burning. So you put a lot of fuels on the ground and you burn them. That is the best outcome. Other than that, burning without all the mechanical treatment is better than just the mechanical treatment by itself. For one thing, you've now put a lot more stuff on the ground where it's accessible to fire.

Up next on Remarkable People.

I can remember when I was in school, the story from climatologists was that we were headed for a new ice age, and there's nothing we can do about it. It's just the arithmetic. It's all the. The various rhythms and the rest of it, and we should be getting ready for it. We're not going to have an ice age now because we've created a fire age.

Become a little more remarkable with each episode of Remarkable People. It's found on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. So if I read there's a forest fire now at Yosemite, am I supposed to think, oh, my God, another big tragedy, or am I supposed to think, oh, this is good. It's getting rid of this material on the ground. So in the long run, this is a good thing.

I'm glad you brought up Yosemite. About 50 years ago, they started a program of systematically restoring fire, and it's had its ups and downs, and they haven't done as much as they wanted or as much as they should have. And they are now recommitting over the past few years, getting fire back in the valley, they're having to remove a lot of trees that weren't there when the park was established that have come in because fire was eliminated. They're having to thin and reintroduce fire in the sequoia groves, the mariposa grove, to prevent them from being overwhelmed by fire. And they've been experimenting with how to reintroduce fire in the backcountry. And the Pika fire that we're seeing is part of that reintroduction program. And They've got about 50 years experience. They've learned a lot. There's still a lot to do. But what they have done is to draw one of these big boxes where there are natural barriers to the fire spread. Or some places they will put in a hand line. So it's not a bulldozer that tears up the landscape, and it may be burning out from that. They will be working with that fire within that box. And the real problem they face is not the fire blowing up so much as smoke, because it's all going to go in the valley. And so you have evening smoke with the normal cool air drainage. And that can be an annoyance. It can be a health hazard at times if it's really thick for people, particularly if they have any kind of lung ailments. And so part of their problem managing fire turns out, how do they keep smoke from the areas where people are densest and where it might be an actual hazard? So it's very difficult. So this fire may be going for a while. And then it turns out California's fire scene changes and the smoke becomes intolerable. They may have to intervene and put that fire out in some way or speed it up. And they're experimenting with lots of things. They've had to put out a lot of natural fires in this one basin, the Illawette Basin, where they've been doing this since the early 70s, and they're experimenting. Well, we had to put it out for other reasons. The timing wasn't right. But maybe in the fall we could go back and relight it right where it left off. And then there's a milder burning period until the rains come. And that might be a way. So there are all kinds of ways to do it. I think people think of, like, it's an urban fire and you just roll up enough hoses and firefighters and you just smother the thing. That's not how it's going to work in nature. And we need those fires. That's part of what made the park what it is. And why we value it. So we have to work with fire. That means we're constantly negotiating with fire. And fire has some say in this. It's not just ours to throw around as we wish. There's some give and take. Fire will do things if we do it its way. But we've, up until a century or so ago, we managed to live with fire pretty well. And now we've got this paradox that we have all of this energy, all of these machines, all of this science, all of this firefighting technology and the rest of it, and we can't control fire. What happened here, maybe it was the nature of how we changed society, how this new power that fossil fuels gave us allowed us to rethink how we are going to live on the land. And we thought we could do this because we didn't see immediate consequences. But then you do start seeing the consequences and now they're on a global scale. I did a short book, it came out this spring called Pyrocene park. And I had a chance to join a backcountry trek. The park had organized a group of fire people and some of the upper administrators of the park. They were going into this basin where they started restoring fire 50 years ago. It was a three day trek and people would talk about it and the scientists would say how much better this landscape is than outside, where it hasn't gone through this process. The water flow is better, biodiversity is better, character of the fire is better, and it was great. But it also occurred to me that Yosemite is in a sense a microcosm of what I'm seeing happening to the earth. This is an area that was shaped by ice. The ice ages created almost all of the great monumental landscapes and the features that we have, even the distribution of waters and forests and the character and so forth, were all shaped by ice. And increasingly now it is being dominated by fire. Both fossil fuel fires that are altering the climate, the atmosphere, but also all of the other fires that we're seeing in those landscapes that have resulted in from our transition. And it turns out here's a park, it's a flagship park for the national park. It's the best endowed fire management park in the country. And it struggles to get the right kind of fire back in, to get the regime. It's a hard task. So many competing interests and values at risk. So fine, they're doing pretty well. What about all the other parks that aren't as well equipped? What about all the surrounding national forests that have very flammable landscapes below? Yosemite's fires ultimately burn out into granite. But what about all those other places that are burning into denser forests? How do you manage them? How do you manage all those competing interests and the rest of it? It's really tough. But if we're serious, that's the task before us. The other thing, a lot of the fire problems are things we need to fix anyway. Why do we have power lines starting fires? This is absurd. We've known for decades we needed to fix the grid anyway. Let fire be a part of that. Do we really want to convert all of our agricultural and open spaces to exurbs and suburbs? Is that a land use that we really want to promote? So maybe that's a fire problem. So maybe fire is solving other kinds of things and so forth. Fire is integrating everything around it, and a lot of those things need to be fixed anyway. So we're fixing fire, and fire can be used to help fix that. So in some ways, it's not that we have one huge problem and we have to mobilize to fix this one huge thing. Fire is all over the place. But that also means there are lots of things we can do. I realize this is kind of a startling vision for someone who's not used to thinking about the world in fire in this way, but this is what you get.

Two weeks ago, I interviewed Ted Scambos, and he's the Mr. Antarctica. Is it Twaty? Twaits.

Twaits Glacier, Yeah.

So he's Mr. Twait's glacier, and he had a similar story about the rising sea level and stuff. And, man, it's gonna be a depressing month on my podcast.

But what's depressing is that even if we change now at speed, so many things are locked in. There's a lot of lag time built into this. So we're going to be dealing with the consequences for a long time. Yeah, I actually see, in my perverse moments, I think the other reason we need to keep all that fossil fuel buried is because we may need it, because the geophysics of the ice ages didn't change at the end of the last glaciation. We've been in an interglacial, and I can remember when I was in school, the story from climatologists was that we were headed for a new ice age, and there's nothing we can do about it. It's just the arithmetic. It's all the various rhythms and the rest of it, and we should be getting ready for it. We're not going to have an ice age now because we've created a fire age to replace it. But there's a lesson. And that now that we've learned we can disrupt the climate, we're in the business of having to manage it. And if we manage it properly, we may be able to forestall the next ice age or nudge it in useful ways. And to do that, we're going to have to burn a hell of a lot of fossil fuel. So why are we doing it now when a future generation may need that for another purpose? But that's really long term. Almost science fiction, fantasy, but I don't know that it's completely out of wait. If we think about fire, fire is our friend. Let me get this, ice is not.

You're saying that we may face another ice age, so we need to save our carbon based fuels for that day when we need to heat ourselves.

Yeah. Some future generation, who knows, several hundred, maybe a few thousand years from now, people pushing it towards the cold, pushing it towards cold. We may need it for another purpose. Why are we wasting it now and multiplying our problem? Wow. But that would be a case of where our ability to manipulate fire may save us a lot of grief. So that's my interest in the story and the speculation.

Can I ask you a real personal question? Because you're scaring the shit. So my house is on a couple of hills that's covered with eucalyptus trees. Is that crazy? I know, eucalyptus burns like a candle, right? Am I asking for it?

It's very likely you're going to have a fire there. It's going to burn hot, but you're not helpless. Cleaning up under the eucalypse so that they don't have fire to carry into the canopy. They have leaves, not needles. The leaves are impregnated with all kinds of oils that easily volatilize and can erupt, inflame. But I think managing the eucalyptus around and especially putting your house in order and what takes out houses are basically embers. You have these blizzards of sparks blowing ahead of the flaming front and those parts like a swarm of locusts coming in. And if there are any points of vulnerability, they're going to find them. That is a place where a fire can get started. So it could get started in cracks. If you have very large grid vent coverings so embers can blow into your attic. If you've got vegetation right up against the house, embers get into the vegetation, start a fire. Then you've got fire burning right next to the house or steps all of those things. And the other part is flame. And this depends how close your neighbors are and whether your neighbors have taken care of their place or not. So in some ways, the fire spreads like a contagion. And in some ways, fire is a virus. It's not alive. But it depends on the living world for oxygen and fuel and to burn. So think about what would you do for Covid. So you wear masks to prevent aerosol spread. That's like hardening your house against embers. You clear out an area right around maybe four feet or so right around the house to prevent surface spread or fire coming in. That's social distancing. And then getting enough of the neighborhood to protect itself. That's herd immunity. And in some ways, it's a very simple way to imagine how to protect your house. But then think about the social context and political context of getting a neighborhood to do it. So you protect your house, but all of your neighbors haven't. And there you go, you're still at risk. But I invite you the next time you see an aerial view of a community that's been burned out, or go back and look at all the classic views over the last, say, 20 years or 30 years. And what you see is that the houses are incinerated, the cars are melted down to pools of aluminum, but the trees came through fine. So it is not the trees that are the hazard. If you've got a tree right next to your house that's going to burn, probably because the house is going to set it on fire and then it feeds back. But even Paradise, California, look at the aerial views and you see the surrounding forest came through pretty well. It's adapted to fire. The city was not.

I might have to take this out of the final episode, but the people around here scared me enough. Where when I moved here, we cut down about 150 eucalyptus trees to get distance from them. So that's.

Well, people like it. I, I was like looking at the, the Oakland tunnel fire in 91, which is the annunciation for this new era of where excerpts and. And cities are burning. And there was one house we saw that burned three times. Now. It's a great view. You're willing to do it, but there are also social costs. People may have to put their lives at risk to protect your house. Your house may be a threat to others at some point. It is not up to you to negotiate on your own with fire. It's a social decision, and that's what makes it very difficult.

Now, okay, I want to switch gears Completely. While you got me all shook up, which is, you know.

Well, the point is that it's, it's fairly. And there are lots of guides out there now in groups to help. The whole Firewise program is, is committed to this and the communities to do it. It just isn't happening at scale.

So when we cut down the eucalyptus trees, we had them chipped. So now the ground is a lot of eucalyptus chips. Was that the wrong thing to do?

It's not necessarily a bad thing to do. There are problems now with large chipping operations where they have mounds of chips and then that is self igniting. In other words, it's like a pile of oily rags. And so we're seeing some episodes of that. In your case, it's spread out, that will burn. It won't necessarily burn with the vigor of shrubs or pine needles and so forth because they're larger chips and they're flat. But it will burn. And if it gets going, it will throw up a lot of heat, which you probably don't want. And it also smothers any kind of native grasses or flowers, so you might consider disposing of those. I don't know. It sounds like you're in an area where you're probably not going to be allowed to burn it. But that would be a great thing to just burn with your neighbors. And they're forming prescribed fire associations now where private lands is becoming a deal. And California has changed its liability statutes regarding prescribed fire to make it more likely. So that would be an option. It probably isn't an option for you. So you will have to haul it out. But I'll use that. Let me just give you a sense of the absurdity of this. I grew up in Phoenix, the outskirts of Phoenix. And you just burn off your lawn in the spring before the rains come in the summer. And it took 5 minutes, 10 minutes and it's gone. Well now you're certainly not going to be allowed to burn off your lawn in a city. I have to rent a dethatcher which scarifies all this stuff up, all the dead stuff up, instead of burning it. So I'm running fossil fuels to run this detacher. Then I have to bag it in plastic bags made from oil and then I put it out where it will be hauled off in a fossil fueled garbage truck to be dumped into a landfill where it decomposes to methane. No flame, no fire, no smoke. That is acceptable. Whereas the old way of just doing it. And you have a neighborhood thing. Okay, everybody, we're going to do it now and it's over with, done. That's where we've gotten to. But that could be corrected. Doesn't that sound absurd?

Yeah.

Okay.

Getting away from fire for a second.

Yeah.

You have written at least 15 nonfiction books that I can figure out. And I want to know how you write. What word processor do you work from? An outline? Do you get a content editor?

Do you turn in the manuscript and run away from it?

What's your writing process?

Writing, for me is a habit, and it's like exercise. And you have a lot of people who run and they'll say they miss the run if they don't get it in, they feel run down, et cetera, et cetera. And that's for me. What riding? You asked not to talk about fire, but there's a saying in fire. It came out of Florida, where they teach prescribed burning. And the saying is, every day is a burn day. And you assume that you are going to do burning unless something stops it, as opposed to saying, get up and let's see if everything's lined up. Wow. Everything's lined up. So let's think about burning. That, for me, is the same mantra for writing. Every day is a writing day unless there's something that intervenes. So I just assume I'm going to be writing. And when I was younger, I wrote at night. As I got older, I write in the morning. I carry around a little notebook for notes and stuff. I spend a lot of time thinking about the organization, how the organization can support what I'm writing. It's not just a bag of data. There should be a narrative in it. There should be an organizing device and so forth. Think about that. I am writing as I go along, researching. I read stuff, and I'm always, how does this get translated into text?

And are you using a word processor?

Yeah. Word processors were a great invention because I had to retype manuscripts, large manuscripts, and you just introduce more errors. It's endless. And that took a huge amount of time. Word processing, all that goes away. It was hard for me to learn to edit on the word processor I wanted to print out. And I still prefer that short stuff I can do on the monitor. But otherwise I want it printed. And I want to be able to move stuff around and not just have it all in my head. I actually taught non fiction for a while in grad school. I taught a course. And my sense is, you need a system, you need a method, but everybody's method is different. It's like exercising or dieting or learning to play a musical instrument, you've got to have some regular way, make it habitual. But you need to find what will work for you. And there must be hundreds of books out about writing, and they're all correct. This is how you can do it. Because it worked for me, this is what I did. But I look at that and I say, this makes no sense to me at all. The lesson is you need a system, but you need a system that plays to your strengths.

Okay, my last question about writing. Do you completely outline your book and then fill in the outline, or are.

You, like, playing it as it goes?

I have never used an outline of the sort. I was trained at elementary school. And the older I get, the more writing experience I have, the more abbreviated the outline becomes. What I want to know is that, what is the overall design here? How do the parts fit? What is the organizing principle? What are the motifs, in a sense, almost like a decorative thing. If there are certain phrases or images that recur, how do they fit in? And then I begin writing. I immerse myself in whatever the data sources are for what I could write for maybe a day or a day and a half. And then I just write that with this larger thing in mind. So I sort of compass bearing, I know where I'm going, but other than that, I'm not going to go through this tree. I'm not going to climb over this boulder. I'm going to go around it, but I'm getting to that direction, that sort of vision. And the other thing I think is really vital is voice. Getting your voice right for whatever the project is and getting your own voice in general. I found a lot of students teaching this thought they had to write in an academic way. And half of the course became a detox program. Getting this, flushing all that out of their system so they could speak in their own voice. And then that freed them to be able to do other things. So I'm a great believer. Voice and vision are the two things. I think you nail that down, they solve a lot of problems for you. But I'm saying that as someone who just previously said, you need a system, but it's got to be your own system. So that's a system I've evolved. You need to find your own.

So as you look back on your career, is the conclusion that you just need to own a niche? You are the MacArthur fellow of fire. You're the mother of fire.

Right?

So is your advice own a niche? It could be Antarctica, it could be fire, it could be rising sea Level, but own something.

I think in a career sense, that's very valuable. But I don't know how to advise someone to find it. This was completely accidental for me. And probably my best single book was the Ice Had Nothing to Do with Fire, but it built on Grand Canyon. It was about Antarctica. And that was just an opportunity. I didn't know what to do with it. There was this Antarctic fellowship, and they're trying to get people in the humanities to go to Antarctica. I went for three months. I spent Christmas at the South Pole. I spent New Year's at Dome Sea, which is probably the end of the world. And it made a profound impression on me. Actually, when I wrote my first fire book, I thought that was the end of it. There were no academic jobs. I couldn't get anything. I wanted to write the book. I was having to give up my life as a North Rim Long Shot, as we called ourselves. And I wanted this as, yeah, this is what I got out of it. And I had no idea that it. And then I just decided I'd keep going. Do I want to drill down more into that topic or go broader? And I thought broader would be more fun. What does Australia look like? And Canada? Europe, including Russia, Lots of smaller. What is India? Very interesting fire story. All over the world, you can go. You can find this stuff. I just kept at it and I kept thinking, for me, it was like being on the American river in California in 1848. You're just walking down, picking up nuggets. Why isn't this place swarming with people? This is great stuff. But there was nobody. And so I wound up creating a field for myself. And you think that's great. Now you're known for that. But how many students do I have studying that? How many students did I have coming in? Nobody was interested in fire. Nobody's hired in history. Study fire. What do I do for Grant, who reviews it? You've done something new, something interdisciplinary. You've invented a field. But if there is no institutional context for that field, you're just this crazy guy out there with a torch and, wow, that's really cool. But the MacArthur Fellowship was really a windfall for me because it allowed me to continue this when I and no other, really support for it. Who's going to do that? Novelty is useful up to a point, but freakishness is not. And it's a narrow line. Okay? It turns out to have been a great career choice. If I had another 20 years in money, I could still do South America's yet to be done. I've got a book on Mexico, but South Africa, most of Asia, nobody's done it. I could continue doing this. So, yeah, I invented a field. But in some ways I. I can feel like maybe it's like a gated community. It's great. But now the world changed. I'm doing all this fire stuff and nobody was particularly interested. And now the world started burning in very visible ways. And so suddenly everybody's doing fire now, when the place is overflowing with all these disciplines that had no interest in fire, now engaged with fire, everybody's studying it. So I don't think I could have done what I did if I were starting now in the sense it was just an empty field and nobody saw it. But if you're trained to be a fire guy and look for smokes out there, difficult landscapes, I was trained to see fire. And I just had to make that an academic pursuit rather than just this long shot at having a great summer out in the woods.

So there you have it. Stephen Pine and his remarkable career with fire. A few days ago, I learned that my insurance company is no longer writing homeowners policies in California. One of the big factors in this decision was the threat of wildfires. That's how big a deal this is. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable people. My thanks to Beth Daly of the Conversation for suggesting and making this episode possible. My thanks to Madison Knysmer, the drop in queen of Santa Cruz. She's on fire at Jack's whenever she's in the water. Tessa Knysmer, researcher. She prepares me for these interviews. And then there's the sound design team, remarkable as they are, Jeff C. And Shannon Hernandez. And finally, the rest of the gang. Oh, my God. Luis Magana, Alexis Nishimura and Fallon Yates. This is the Remarkable People team. Until next time, mahalo and aloha. Oh, wait, I forgot to tell you. In the first week of March, my new book is coming out. I co authored it with Madison Nismer. It's called Think Remarkable. Get it? As opposed to Think Different. So beginning in the first week of March, you can probably order it right now at Amazon in advance. I want you to read Think Remarkable. It explains how to make a difference and how to be a remarkable person, too. Thanks.

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