The University of Arizona Press
August 1, 2023
With many North American cities enveloped by wildfire smoke this summer, Yale Climate Connections has published a round-up of must-read new fire books. Stephen J. Pyne’s newest work, Pyrocene Park, made their list, which features new works that help us better understand the dynamics of fire and our changing climate.
Yale Climate Connections Book Review Editor Michael Svoboda, writes, “Publishers and nongovernmental organizations seem already to have noticed the uptick in the number, intensity, and duration of wildfires in the past several years.”
In Pyrocene Park, Pyne focuses on one of America’s most beloved and iconic national parks, Yosemite. Pyne deftly tells the park’s history through a look at its fire story.
Yale Climate Connections is a nonpartisan, multimedia service providing daily broadcast radio programming and original web-based reporting, commentary, and analysis on the issue of climate change, one of the greatest challenges and stories confronting modern society.
About the Book
The Earth is fast transitioning from a planet shaped by ice to one shaped by fire in all its manifestations. Yosemite National Park offers a microcosm for understanding our current world. Stephen J. Pyne tells the story of how fire got removed from the landscape and the ways, both deliberate and feral, it is returning.
About the Author
Stephen J. Pyne is a fire historian, urban farmer, and emeritus professor at Arizona State University. He spent fifteen seasons with the North Rim Longshots, a fire crew at Grand Canyon National Park. Out of those seasons emerged a scholarly interest in the history and management of fire, with major surveys for America, Australia, Canada, Europe (including Russia), and the Earth, some thirty-three books both large and small. From that career, Pyne has developed the notion of a Pyrocene, a human-driven fire age.
