American Scientist

In fall of 2020, while most of the United States was focused on the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and on preparing for the presidential election, the West faced the additional crisis of a record-breaking wildfire season. Fires stretched along the Pacific Coast, and smoke spread across the entire region, turning the sky an eerie orange. Although the pandemic, the election, and the wildfires might seem to be separate events, Stephen J. Pyne sees connections between them. Pyne, an emeritus professor of environmental history at Arizona State University, researches the history and management of wildland and rural fire. He says that examining how communities and frontline workers respond to contagions such as COVID-19 may offer a new lens through which to tackle the problem of megafires in the West. Pyne discussed the history of fire management in the United States and the possibility of analogous approaches to managing wildfires and pandemics with Scott Knowles, a historian of risk and disaster at Drexel University, on Knowles’s daily podcast, COVIDCalls (episode 144: COVID-19 in the Pyrocene with Stephen Pyne). On the podcast, Knowles speaks with experts about the latest research and the far-reaching effects of the pandemic. Guests include epidemiologists and public health experts as well as social scientists, historians, and artists. This interview is the first in a collaboration between American Scientist and COVIDCalls. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Your work examines American political development through the lens of fire. What are some changes that are well told through the story of fire?

The story begins in 1910 with the Great Fire (centered in Idaho and Montana). The Forest Service was a very young agency composed almost wholly of young men who were influenced in deep and traumatic ways by that fire, and that trauma stayed with the agency and got sort of coded into its DNA. All the chief foresters up through 1939 were personally on the fire line.

Two decades later, the New Deal made the Forest Service project possible, because the Civilian Conservation Corps granted bottomless amounts of labor that had to be put to work. Some of it sort of mindlessly, but a lot of it—we created an infrastructure for fire management almost overnight. After World War II there was all this war surplus equipment. Where does it go? It goes to the Forest Service and to the state cooperators to wage war on fire. We were in a kind of Cold War on fire, and there was military funding behind a lot of our fire behavior research: How do we defend ourselves from large fires, and how do we start large fires?

But at some point, all the fires start looking the same: It’s pictures of big flames. How does this flame have any different meaning from that flame? They all merge together, and there’s no deeper public engagement.

For the next 15 years, the Forest Service did what it was supposed to do: It created a national infrastructure to remove as much fire as possible from the landscape. By the 1960s, however, it was clear that this approach was a mistake. We were taking out good fires as well as bad fires, and we were creating conditions that were getting worse. We wanted to stop all the bad fires, but leave the good fires. This is not a new argument. We spent half of our history trying to take fire out, and the other half trying to put the necessary fires back in. Why don’t we have more to show for it? 

“The fire equivalent of an ice age is an apt analogue for what’s coming. It shows the magnitude of the problem and puts the power source where it should be: fire in the hands of humans.”

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By the 1980s, fire research was practically extinguished. The whole project was about to be eliminated through privatization, and different views of government and land management came into play, which stalled the fire revolution that was in place.

That mindset changed with Norman Maclean’s book, Young Men and Fire (1992). That was a real watershed moment for literature about fire. The 1994 season was our first billion-dollar suppression year, which got a lot of attention because people who previously had no interest in fire had read Maclean’s book, and they saw the South Canyon (Colorado) fire through the prism of that book. It changed the whole discourse.

Now we’re in a position where we’re trying lots of things. There are places where we really need to keep fires out of communities. How do we do that? There are a lot of places that really, really need fire back in because they’re ecologically deteriorating, they’re stockpiling fuels, and they’re becoming uninhabitable. How do we deal with that? And now a larger environmental crisis, the climate emergency, is acting as a performance enhancer and globalizer for all these other trends—and we need to deal with that too.

It’s so dire and so strange that we have no narrative to connect this coming future with our past. We have no analogues. I approach it as a historian, and I see a narrative of humanity and fire. It’s our unique narrative. Earth is a fire planet, and we’re the only creatures that can manipulate it.

You have said that we’re entering the Pyrocene, a period of Earth’s history in which fire is the dominant shaping force. How can that framework help explain what we’re seeing around us?

For me, the transition from burning what I think of as living landscapes—living and dead biomass on the surface—to burning fossil biomass, or what I call lithic landscapes, changed our relationship to the world. Climate is the most obvious expression of that change, and it provides a narrative, identifying us as the prime movers and responsible agents. A fire equivalent of an ice age is an apt analogue for what’s coming. A lot of things seem to crystallize, and it shows the magnitude of the problem. It puts the power source where it should be: fire in the hands of humans.

We often treat disasters as separate events, but bringing different types of disasters into one frame may help us understand them as a compound problem. I feel like that’s happening right now with the COVID-19 pandemic (see COVID-19 Reveals a Path Forward on Climate Change). How can you use this Pyrocenic thinking to crystallize the compound disasters in ways that people can wrap their minds around?

Climate change is acting as a performance enhancer on stuff that’s already out there. Places that already have fire, such as California and Australia, are seeing more savage versions of it, and fire is starting to come to places that haven’t had it, such as the Amazon and Indonesian peatlands that shouldn’t be having it at this scale.

But I also think it points to our interaction with nature—broken biotas, if you will. Don’t emergent diseases typically arise where people are intervening in places unwisely, and then propagate outward? That’s what we’ve done with many landscapes with fire. We’ve broken it, so we’ve made it worse.

There’s an interesting analogue between megafire and emergent disease. Fire is an odd entity. It’s a reaction, and in many ways it’s not unlike a virus. We tend to think of fire as a physical, chemical reaction that has nothing to do with life. But life created oxygen; life created the fuels. Fire depends on that and propagates through biomass. Fire is not alive, but it relies on and propagates through the living world.

Fire spreads as a contagion, and you can model it as a contagion. Maybe we’ve done what we can with the physical model, which only invites physical responses. If we thought of fire as a landscape equivalent to a virus, how would we respond to it? Would we just be dumping retardant on it and scraping away all the living biomass from places? Or would we be thinking, “Hey, how do we work with these landscapes? How do we think ecologically to make things more stable?” It would suggest a different suite of approaches and a different mindset. Maybe we should think of fire as a public health problem, not just as a physical disaster (see Coexisting with Wildfire).

The spread of COVID-19 models the inequalities and vulnerabilities that already exist in American society. Thinking analogically to fire, should we be thinking about fire protection in the same way, and looking for inequalities and weak points rather than developing a national strategy?

Fire acts as a catalyst; it integrates everything. My image of fire is as a driverless car. People always ask me, “What’s driving the megafires?” Well, everything. It’s just barreling down the road, integrating everything around it. At different times and places, different aspects loom larger, and each of those aspects is a possible point of intervention. In other words, there is not one big thing we have to fix before we can deal with it.

But that also means that there are a lot of other problems that we need to fix anyway that would also go toward fixing fire. Why do we have power lines starting fires? That’s a technical fix (see Pulling the Plug on Climate Change Wildfires). Why do we have communities burning? We solved the problem of burning cities a long time ago, but we didn’t keep up the vaccinations and the hygiene and the public health model. We just said, “This doesn’t happen anymore.” It’s like polio coming back, or a massive measles outbreak, or a new epidemic spilling out, such as COVID-19. That analogy gives us a different way of thinking about fire, which suggests that there are other ways of responding.

In some ways, all analogies fail, but consider house protection, for example. Most houses are taken out by embers, not by a tidal wave of flames washing over communities. Well, hardening houses against embers is like wearing a mask against aerosols. It creates what we call defensible space, which looks a lot like social distancing. It’s a social problem. If you take measures but your neighbors don’t, you’re still at risk. We don’t have a vaccine for fire, but maybe it’s like flu shots: It’s not perfect, and they’re always changing, but it gets better.

That approach uses a different set of models than just saying, “We need more fire engines and air tankers.” I’m suggesting some other ways to think about fire because the way we’re doing it—as a war—is failing.

The dominant disaster paradigm of any one time is how we view all the other hazards. As you were saying earlier, when we were fighting the Cold War, the forest looked like another front in the war. Do you see an opening here to view wildfires through the lens of the pandemic?

Firefighting using the current model and the science we have to support it isn’t solving the problem of managing fire on landscapes. We need another way of thinking about it. If we think about fire differently, what other kinds of solutions come up? It’s a way of going at the issue sideways instead of just bashing our head against the wall. We’ve reached a point where the current approach doesn’t work.

California has an implacable nature, which is prone to explosive fires, and the people there are determined to live where and how they choose. They’ve relied on fire agencies to stand as a buffer between nature and society, but we’ve reached the point where that doesn’t work anymore. Even the fire agencies say, “We can’t protect you under extreme conditions.”

We need to think through the problem differently. I’ve been suggesting a contagion model, a public health or emergent disease model. It works out fairly well, and it might propose other ways to go at this.

“Fire is an odd entity. It’s a reaction, and in many ways it’s not unlike a virus. Fire is not alive, but it relies on and propagates through the living world.”

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On COVIDCalls, I spoke with Luke Montrose, a professor of community and environmental health at Boise State (episode 129, September 18, 2020). He talked about the public health realities for the fire crews. Many firefighters already have upper respiratory problems, and then you layer the risk of COVID-19 on top of that. Is their condition a preview of what average people living in fire-prone places could experience from smoke inhalation? 

Smoke is becoming a real trigger point because it extends the range of the fire far beyond the flaming front. The Clean Air Act (1970) was effective in removing a lot of air pollution, but now it’s coming back. Again, we are watching the return of something that had gone away.

We have to recognize that there’s going to be a lot more fire in the future, and a lot more smoke. We’re going to have smoke as a seasonal nuisance in the same way you have seasonal allergies. People might wear masks during part of the season.

The crew situation is interesting. There were a lot of efforts before the fire season started to try to protect crews from COVID-19. We are trying to prevent large, massive fires with huge numbers of fire crews living in camps.

I was struck by the oddity that for the Great Fire of 1910, the Forest Service rallied about 9,500 firefighters to send out in the Northern Rockies, plus they used most of the standing military in the Pacific Northwest. That’s comparable to numbers we’re sending out today. Doesn’t that seem odd? Despite all of our science, all of our technology, all of our communication, and all of our advances, we’re sending out the same numbers of people. Are the fires that much worse? Or is there something about the way we think of fire, and have a culture of fire, that depends on large numbers of people?

The COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportunity to experiment. Why don’t we start substituting equipment? Why don’t we start experimenting with other ways to do the job that don’t require large numbers of people in camps? Why don’t we take COVID-19 as an opportunity to experiment with modern technologies and to think about all the ways we could substitute for people? Maybe that would give us some different insights into managing these fires. We’re presented with an opportunity. Let’s use it.